7+ years in B2B SaaS, 1000+ discovery calls, here's what I learnt!
7+ years, and somewhere north of a 1000 discovery calls later, the thing that surprised me most is how little of a buying decision is actually about the product.
A few patterns that held up almost everywhere:
Nobody buys a feature list. People buy relief from a specific, recurring irritation they can describe in one sentence. If a founder can't say the problem in one sentence, they're not buying, yet they're browsing.
The real competitor is a spreadsheet. Not the other vendor. It's the manual process someone on the team has already half-automated and is quietly proud of. You're asking them to abandon a thing they built.
Budget isn't a number, it's a threshold. Below a certain price, nobody asks for a business case. Above it, everything needs a justification and a champion and a procurement cycle. The gap between $49 and $200 a month is not 4x, it's a completely different sale.
Founders forgive missing features. They don't forgive not being able to see their own numbers.
Recently I moved onto an AI product line, and I started running the same discovery I always have. When I brought up profitability per customer, bread-and-butter stuff in traditional SaaS, I got blank faces. Not pushback. Genuine confusion, over and over.
So I started digging. When I asked founders how they actually track AI cost and margin, the answer was almost always the same two names: Helicone and Langfuse. Both good tools. But most of the companies I speak to aren't big companies; they are early SaaS, and a $100–200/mo observability line item is a hard sell. So they skip it, and run blind on their single most variable cost.
And the gap isn't total spend; everyone can see their OpenAI/Claude/Gemini bill. It's attribution. Three questions kept coming up that nobody could answer:
- Which of my users are unprofitable?
- Which feature is eating my margin?
- Is my $29/mo plan actually losing money on the top 5% of usage?
Last week I had the same conversation with a PM at a company several stages ahead of the startups I usually speak to. Same 3 questions. Same blank face.
So, genuinely asking the people building this stuff:
How are you handling it today? Token counts logged to your own DB? A monthly spreadsheet someone maintains by hand? Or is it on the "we'll deal with it when it hurts" pile?
And if you did pay for a tool: which was it and what finally made it worth the line item?