What if users start cloning SaaS using AI

You could clone easily before AI. When learning a language, "Build a twitter clone" is a tutorial project.

That doesn't give you the business. It give you no users, no market, no branding. You don't have the operations set up to run at scale, nor the customer base to even need it. Not to mention the leadership to build out a vision. "Clone someone else" is actually a bit of a red flag in terms of vision.

If anything, the ease of launching an MVP should prove what many folks already know - coding is not the bottleneck that prevents business success. It is the tool that allows you to step up to the starting line.

Those aren't serious users anyway, business users who are focusing on their business don't have the time to clone and maintain their own software. People who claim to successfully clone and replace SaaS are never good customers anyway, they will either churn after free trial has ended, or post on reddit searching for free alternative

This doesn’t work now unfortunately as described. Cloning is multi-months effort and it’s hard even when you know what you’re doing. If you want to have a sellable clone, it’s even harder challenge as users wouldn’t tolerate sloppy work when better alternatives exist.

Start? We're well past that. If your SaaS is just a fancy wrapper on some CRUD it's already been cloned by AI a dozen times. Even if it has some level of sophistication, unless there is a trove of data that only you have access to, it's already been cloned.

This is why investors ask what your moat is