Based on a true story:
For me, the hour I truly believed in the SAASpocalypse was when I accomplished the meme in a couple of prompts, then found myself asking: “umm.. remind me again, why should Garmin Connect be the hub for all my fitness data?”
The plumbing is a tiny webhook service. The code’s here.
Two colleagues and an Iron Man friend are also baking health-related home-baked solutions that scratch different itches. There’s something happening here.
(Sept update: for the record, Garmin still is the hub of my fitness data, and I’ve softened on this Saaspocalypse stance quite a bit. It’s more Saas-transformation, which doesn’t have the same ring. A few thoughts briefly: I don’t want to be responsible for the ‘care and feeding’ of all these Garmin-like platforms that do the heavy lifting, fix all the edge cases, and provide the analysis. And obviously the network effects of a platform like Strava are key. But the ease of building point integrations like the ones I was reacting to, between existing systems and the home-brewed systems I am providing “care and feeding” for – like my character agents – are huge wins in my daily life. For our SaaS clients, it’s an exciting and intense time, with opportunities to get out front of new uses like this. Keenly aware that this is in progress.)