But when you look at AI SaaS companies that quietly reach meaningful scale, the pattern is much less exciting — and much more repeatable.
They don’t invent new behaviour. They replace old, manual workflows that people already complain about. Reporting. Ops. Support. Compliance. Sales admin. Boring work that happens every day and costs real money.
AI changes the economics. Tasks that once required teams, process, and time can now be handled by small systems built by very few people. That’s where many of the real opportunities live, not in “breakthrough intelligence,” but in obvious pain that finally became cheap enough to solve.
What surprised me while researching this was how often the same problems showed up across different communities and industries.
Different words, same frustration. That research eventually turned into startupideasdb,com a way to spot AI-friendly SaaS opportunities grounded in repeated, public pain rather than trend-driven ideas.
Curious how others here approach this. When you think about AI SaaS, do you start with the tech, or with the most boring problem you can find?