During lunch at a developer conference, I saw a clear respect from software engineers towards SaaS, and lack of respect for other software. For example:

- When they talked someone who had a successful AI headshot app - they scoffed and said it was just a distribution game.

- When they talked about someone who made a really popular learning platform for web developers, they acted like that was not interesting.

- When someone talked about a B2B SaaS idea, they would suddenly get interested and start asking questions and give respect.

I have seen this with developers in daily life too. Am I missing something?

As a dev it doesn’t matter to me but as a person who also thinks about business I think a B2B with a recurring business is a good business in terms of making money. It is easy to go to a VC and say this business will have such and such an ARR and can be valued at so much. And even if you are just treading water and not moving forward customers will still be writing checks.

For many other kind of products you can’t get a break. Say you make a great game, you will sell a certain number of copies and then you have to make another game. There are live service games of various sorts, like, I am playing Arknights now, but that kind of game requires continually putting development effort in to keep players busy.

Something like Basecamp can keep cashing checks and all you have to do is pay the AWS bills and occasionally do some maintainance.

I think you're hanging around with the wrong group of peers. I don't know anyone who would disparage other software unless they were immature and/or arrogant and/or jealous.

What was the SaaS idea was it interesting or do you feel that it was SaaS that was interesting over the idea itself.

Quite often developers don't care about the monetisation method with a product as much as the product itself. It's hard to see why a headshot app/tool or a learning platform is useful to developers.

Maybe something about the B2B SaaS product was difficult to make compared to a headshot or video/learning tool

I think you're seeing the attitudes of a particular subculture of devs. That's absolutely not representative of all of them. I don't personally know any who hold SaaS in any greater regard than any other approach.