Headless or SaaSless? ☠️🪑

👀 TLDR

In this week’s What’s Appening, we cover the massively ambitious AI agentic transformation at Salesforce, and how it speaks to the traditional SaaS model. We also have news on Tim Cook’s successor at Apple, how a shoe company pivoted to AI, the new video app promising trustworthy news, and a potential rival to Figma and Canva in the shape of Claude Design.

🎬 Our Top Take

🤝🥷 Salesforce Takes a Bow and Goes “Headless”

The world’s leading CRM, Salesforce is the epitome of SaaS, having built its massive business on a model that charges “per seat” for access to its tools. Love it or hate it, Salesforce is at the heart of so many businesses, big and small. Here at 3Advance, we know all about using Salesforce as a “headless” datastore — in essence, replacing the Salesforce interface with a custom-designed more human friendly interface. Here’s the thing though: This new Salesforce shift suggests there’s a future with no interface at all. In the agentic era that’s unfolding, it’s expected that agents will be deployed to complete the same work, without an interface, without a browser, and without a human. This means that Salesforce will sell less seats, and need a new approach for maintaining revenue. Enter “Headless 360” with 100 new tools that are firmly developer-focused, putting every capability of its platform more easily accessible via API and MCP (well, we did say “developer-focused”). Salesforce has been working on this initiative for the past 2.5 years, and they’re meeting the pending storm head-on. It remains to be seen how future revenue will match what was possible up till now, and what seats those human workers will find elsewhere. #NoSeats Read more here.

📲 App of the Week: SaySo

SaySo has the tagline “Be Confident in Your Content”. That “content” is news and views, and the reason it wants you to be confident is that it is vetted and sourced from reputable reporters and content creators. In essence, it’s a short-form video platform – a bit like TikTok and YouTube – but it’s also positioned as anti-social media, aiming to eliminate doomscrolling, spam, AI slop, clickbait, ragebait, and misinformation. A big ask, yes, but everything posted on SaySo goes through a moderation process (both AI and human). SaySo is now available in the US after a long period of private testing. They are being careful with this because they have big hopes. Check it out here.

🧐 Stat of the Week: 44%

📈📉 44% of New Music On Deezer is AI

🎸Music platform Deezer says that 44% of all new uploads are now AI-generated songs. That’s a whole lotta bot. Around 2M tracks per month, in fact. We expect the other music streaming platforms are similar, and it’s only going to increase. Right now, though, AI only represents about 1-3% of total music streams and is demonetized. Find out more here.

🗞️ Other Stories

📍 Meanwhile at 3Advance

Despite predictions of doom, AI isn't killing apps. For now, at least, it’s the opposite. A report on app store activity shows that new app releases are up 60% year-over-year – and up 104% so far this month alone. AI, notably vibe coding, has lowered the barrier to entry and set off a wave of first-time builders shipping their ideas. It’s unlocking creativity at a record pace, and allowing founders to validate (or invalidate) their ideas in record time. It’s a timely reminder after our announcement last week of relaunching 30 for 30 – 30 days, $30K, one shippable V1 product, and a plan for growth and scalability. Yes, AI’s made it easier to build apps, but we’re still in the business of building businesses.

More people than ever are turning their ideas into reality, so get in touch for a free consultation on how to take yours from 0 → 1, and then make it profitable.