2025 Predictions

In our first episode of The Panel podcast, we're tackling our 2025 predictions.

These are mine...

Spoiler alert: They're all about AI.

AI moves from "wow" to "disruption"

The 2022-2024 era of AI was about its "wow"-factor. We collectively became amazed, intrigued, impressed and curious about what this new tech can (and will) do.

We saw the beginnings of interesting use cases. Coding mostly, but also writing and silly image generation. But despite a lot of hemming and hawing, I think we can agree that AI hasn't actually replaced or transformed society, let alone our individual jobs.

I predict that we're entering AI's next phase: Its' "disruption" era. It'll start slowly and then really fast. I think this shift begins this year.

AI's "disruption" era will feel different than what we've seen so far. How work gets done. How customers buy. How businesses are created. How we consume content. How we educate ourselves. How we build.

The internet started as a clunky and slow luxury item in some homes. Then it transformed the global economy. The smartphone started as a geeky novelty. Then nobody leaves home without one.

Disruption happens whether we want it to or not. AI's is on its way in...

Human content is king

"Content is king" dominated online marketing in the past decade or so. Mostly because generating more content led to more traffic from search engines like Google.

"Fluff"—over-optimized for SEO—written content dominated the top pages in Google for years, even before AI-generated content came along. Now that AI is writing the articles, the tweets, the ads, the emails, and even videos... This hurricane of "fluff" content is mightier than ever.

But we're getting better at spotting it and ducking out of the way. Fluff (spam) is annoying, yes. But we're better at not giving it our attention—and that's what marketers really want.

What wins our attention when AI, fluff and spam are dominating content? Humans.

We want human connection more than ever. We seek it out. Our attention is drawn to honest, interesting, and real humans sharing real ideas and opinions. Because the best stuff is rare!

This is why YouTube's growing influence has stronger than ever. Yes, it's very algorithm driven and yes, there's plenty of automated/robotic video content these days, but there are also people creating and gaining exposure to huge audiences on YouTube, now more than ever.

Reddit is seeing a resurgence because clickers from Google know that that's where the real human answers to their questions are.

Podcasts are where deeper—albeit one-way—relationships are happening between audiences and hosts. You can make an argument that the 2024 US election outcome was influenced by podcasts more than any other media.

In 2025, content isn't king. Human content is king.

Bootstrapped SaaS is past its prime

No, I'm not saying SaaS is dead. No, I'm not saying you can't build (or bootstrap) a great business with a SaaS in 2025.

But I do think the SaaS opportunity is past its prime. The 2010-2020 was probably the golden decade for bootstrapping a SaaS business. The opportunities to replace a spreadsheet with a simple CRUD software tool and sell subscriptions to business were endless and wide open for anyone to do.

That pathway to SaaS success has been getting narrower and steeper in the 2020s. Competition is insane. Businesses are savvier (and choosier) when it comes to buying and adopting tools in their business. Businesses often can't make a good case for choosing "the small guy" over the big name brand in any given SaaS category.

The answer for bootstrappers used to be "niche down!". Solve problems so niche that the big players can't and won't. But now the niches have been filled with competitors too. Yes, there world is a big enough place that you can carve your tiny slice and still make a great bootstrapped business.

But now there's pressure coming from the customers themselves, which wasn't there a few years ago. Customers are savvier and have higher expectations of the software they buy. Just a few papercuts can send a customer running for the cancellation form. They have too many better options to switch to today.

The Bootstrapped SaaS in 2025 is Lebron James and Steph Currey. Still got game. Still in the arena. But past their prime.

And the game itself is about to change...

Age of self-built tools

When a business needs to solve a technical problem, their solution has been to search the market for the right software product to buy.

Now there's a new question they must consider: "Buy software or build our own tool?"

The math behind the "buy or build?" question used to be easy: It's way too expensive to hire a firm to build custom software for your business when you can simply buy a popular SaaS product instead.

But we're entering a time where anyone can use AI to build the perfect solution for their perfect use case, tailor-made for their own business.

Think about all the papercuts we put up with with the SaaS tools we use. Even our favorite tools are 80% perfect, 20% annoying or clunky.

We're entering a time when anyone—programming experience or not—can use chatGPT or Claude or Cursor to assemble an exact clone of a software tool they used, but tweak that last 20% to their liking.

This idea of any business owner building their own software might seem far fetched, particularly for the older generation.

That's why it's a prediction. Tomorrow will come faster than you think.