Jason M. Lemkin
SaaStr founder & investor (SaaStr Fund); shares SaaS fundraising, valuation, term sheet and portfolio‑building insights.
AI SDRs Amplify, Not Invent, Proven Playbooks
The #1 Thing to Understand About AI SDRs: They Can't Figure It Out For You. I.e., 10x times zero is still ... zero. That is the single most important thing to understand about AI SDRs, AI agents, AI GTM tools. All of them. Every vendor will tell you to "just turn it on." It does not work that way. Not yet. At SaaStr, we run 20+ AI agents. They generate over $1M in revenue. We went from 20+ employees to 3 humans plus AI agents. Revenue growth flipped from -19% to +47% year over year. But every one of those agents is running a playbook we already knew worked. At least that we'd proven with humans a little bit. The AI SDR that booked a six-figure sponsorship meeting at 6:02 PM on a Saturday? It was running sequences we had tested and refined with humans first. The $70,000 deal closed with zero human involvement? It followed a qualification and pricing framework we built over years. 👉 The AI made it 10x faster and 10x more consistent. But it did not invent the playbook. If your human SDRs do not know your ICP, your AI SDR will not either. If your sequences do not convert with humans sending them, they will not convert with AI sending them. If you do not have a clear pricing and qualification framework, the AI will just be confidently wrong at scale. Step 1: Get the playbook working with humans Step 2: Document every step Step 3: Feed it to the AI Step 4: Let the AI run it 24/7 at 10x volume Skip steps 1 and 2, and you get 10x times zero
AI Spam Drowns Quality PR, Blocking Risks Missed Gems
For the past 12 months or so, SaaStr has been getting 100x more PR pitches than before. All AI-generated. Always decent. Never great. Good enough to get opened, completely useless once opened. I used to reply to mediocre human pitches...
Domain‑Specific AI Beats ChatGPT on SaaS Expertise
One of the most surprising results from building the SaaStr AI website / platform: our specialized "Digital Jason" trained on 13 years of SaaStr content dramatically outperforms ChatGPT and Claude when asked the same B2B questions. Even though both those...
AI Replaces Marketo with Fully Autonomous 1:1 Campaigns
We're Replacing Marketo. The Choice of What To Replace It With? It's Up To Our AI Agent. At SaaStr AI this week: our AI VP of Marketing, 10K, sent its first fully autonomous, fully customized campaigns. Not drafts. Not "human...
Manually Review the First 1,000 AI SDR Emails
Never let your AI SDR send its first 1,000 emails without manually reviewing every single one. Not spot-checking. Every one. You'll catch the pricing aggression. The weird tone shift. The hallucinated feature claim. The email that almost went to the...
Rate Your APIs by Agent Usability, Not Human Preference
Ok we're shipping something this weekend that we've REALLY needed An Agentic API Grader. An objective view of APIs from an agent perspective. For builders of B2B apps especially. 👉 Which APIs are easiest to use for your AI Agents?...
Winning with AI Requires Dozens of Iterations, Not Few
It took us 47 iterations to stop one of our AI SDRs from being too aggressive on pricing. Not 3. Not 10. Forty-seven. Each iteration required reviewing outputs, adjusting prompt instructions, testing again. That's not a bug in AI GTM....
Become an AI Deployment Expert at SaaStr AI 2026
It's Time. Learn to Be An Agentic Deployment Expert. Learn to Deploy AI Agents. Learn to get AI SDRs to Work. Learn what it takes to Win in B2B + AI. Get the top AI GTM Playbooks. Walk in to...
AI Agents Need Daily Oversight Despite Idle Time
We spend 15-20 hours per week actively managing five core AI agents. That's 3-4 hours per agent per week — roughly the same as managing a human. What nobody tells you about AI agents: the work doesn't go away. The...
AI Finance Agent Will Dictate Future Vendor Choices
So after SaaStr AI Annual in May, we are going to build an AI VP Finance agent And with that, for the first real time in 8+ years, we’ll review if we continue with Brex It’s nothing against Brex. It’s...
Specialized AI Agents Outperform All‑In‑One Platforms
We'll take four A+ specialized AI agents over one B+ all-in-one platform every time. At least for now. The all-in-one AI agent builders promise simplicity. What they deliver is mediocrity across every function. For us, for now, it's Artisan for...
AI Marketing VP Generates and Ships Campaigns Autonomously
At 12:41pm on a Saturday, my inbox pinged. Not from a human. From 10K, our AI VP of Marketing. Subject: "Marketing Plan v2 — 24 days to SaaStr Annual 2026." Body: Three campaigns, sized, drafted, and ready to ship. Replaces...
Pick One AI Platform Fast, Train Deeply
The most common AI agent mistake: spending 3 months evaluating platforms instead of picking one and training it. Here's what we've learned: training matters more than the vendor. A great training job on a B+ platform beats a lazy deployment...
AI Agents Turn Sales Accountability Into Competitive Edge
One of our 20+ AI agents is Momentum, which Salesforce just bought (not a coincidence). It auto-transcribes every sales call, syncs to Salesforce, tracks deal progress, automatically. The side effect nobody expected: reps can't sugarcoat calls or forget to log...
AI Agents Thrive on Shared CRM, Not Raw Databases
3 humans. 20+ AI agents. Revenue up 47% YoY. And we still run on Salesforce . Not Postgres. Here's why "just give the agents a database" is the wrong take ... if not in theory, then at least for 99%...
Budget‑Holding Leaders Drive SaaStr AI Attendance
50% of SaaStr AI Annual 2026 (May 12-14) attendees are Founder, CEO, or C-Suite. Who's showing up: ↳ Founder: 16.8% ↳ CEO/President: 16.7% ↳ C-Suite: 16.0% ↳ VP+: 63.1% of the room ↳ Director+: 72.8% This isn't a room of...
AI Handles Discovery, Sales Teams Jump Directly to Solutions
Before our AI inbound agent, the first 10 minutes of every sponsorship call was discovery. Now it doesn't happen. The AI already ran discovery — complete conversation history, every page they visited, how many times they've engaged, who else from...
Personal Visits Beat Remote Demos in SaaS Sales
Recently the founder of a leading AI Agent company asked if SaaStr would try them. The thing is, we’ve been using their competitor 8+ months. And honestly we’re not sure why they are better. They may be, it’s just not...
Segmented Outbound Agents Boost Response Rates
We don't run one outbound agent. We run five. - Lapsed sponsors get one message. - Current sponsors expanding get another. - Past attendees get a third. - Engaged non-converters get a fourth. - Pure cold gets a fifth. Each...
Sponsor SaaStr AI 2026 for 500+ Qualified Leads
Want 500+ qualified leads? Do you sell to B2B / AI buyers? It's almost too late, but it's not TOO late to sponsor 2026 SaaStr AI Annual May 12-14 We Ship Leads
AI Sales Agents Close Six-Figure Deals Anytime, Covering Costs
Our AI SDR booked a six-figure sponsorship deal on a Saturday at 6:02 PM. Nobody was working. No human would have done that. That one meeting alone covered months of the AI's cost. The best thing about AI GTM agents...
AI Leaders Flip SaaS Spend: Prioritize Engineering Over Marketing
The average public SaaS company spends about 50% of its revenue on sales and marketing and 20% on engineering and product Many AI leaders have flipped this around As long as your market demand is strong, you just might be...
Untested AI Agents Can Misprice Customers, Test Rigorously
Your AI Agent Just Gave Your Customers the Wrong Price. Now What? A true story from last week. One of our vendors rolled out new pricing. Our team asked their internal AI support agent about our existing plan. The agent...
Founders Can Earn Similar Returns Despite Later Exits
An early investment I made, I met with the CEO of a public company that wanted to buy them for $50m The startup hadn’t raised much, they said No Years later, they sold for almost $1B The founders made about...
HubSpot's AEO Tool Falls Short, DIY Wins
Ok HubSpot has many great products I'm not sure the new AEO tool that just dropped is one of them yet. I think it's like many AI tools that is ... maybe 60% as good as top AI point solutions....
Team Success Comes From Aligned Vectors, Not Just Talent
"Every person on a team is a vector. They have magnitude (their talent and energy) and direction (what they're actually focused on). Progress isn't the sum of talent. It's the sum of aligned vectors. Misaligned vectors don't just slow you...
Follow‑up Speed Reveals a Sales Rep’s Typical Pace
When a sales candidate sends a follow-up email 2-3 days later, I just assume that’s about as quickly as they follow up with most leads
Lead with Presence and Honesty to Accelerate Growth
What I see CEOs at struggling start-ups do: - Go dark - Hide - Lash out - Tweet about lots of things non-work - Invest time on tiny expenses - Argue internally What should do: - Be Present - Be...
AI Arms Race Demands Billion‑Dollar Funding, Not Cost Cuts
Dario Amodei said it plainly: if your spend is off by a year, you go bankrupt. Anthropic burns $800M-$1B monthly. You cannot undercapitalize your way through an AI arms race. This market has a buy-in requirement. Either you can afford...
AI VP Delivers Daily, Drama‑free Forecast Updates
One really nice thing about 10K, our AI VP of Marketing: - It objectively updates projections and forecasts every single day No drama, no games, no pretending It pulls all our historical data, all our current Salesforce data, all deals...
Markets Favor Accelerating Growth Over Raw Rate
AppLovin grew 70% and the stock crashed. Shopify grew 30% and got no love. The market isn't rewarding growth anymore — it's rewarding acceleration. Growing 70% when you were growing 80% is a deceleration story. The bar has moved from...
Replit AI Agent Reuses Past Code to Build Instantly
So Replit added something incredibly cool in v4 that most folks might miss: 🔮 AI Agent Omniscience Now it can go back through older threads, older builds, other projects you've built, and can pull from all of them to help...
AI Agents Drive Revenue—Only When Properly Managed
We’ve deployed 20+ AI agents at SaaStr. Revenue went from -19% to +47% YoY. $4M+ in closed-won deals attributed directly to agents. But we made every mistake on this list before we got there. The 10 reasons your AI agent...
Real AI Agents Deliver Wins—And Hallucinations—At Scale
You asked. You're gonna get. The Agents Episode #001 is coming soon. Not another AI hype show. We actually run 20+ AI agents at SaaStr. This is what Amelia Lerutte our Chief AI Officer and I are learning truly in...
Founders' Struggles Remain Unseen by Their Families
Your family will never really understand what you go through as a founder And what it really takes Not really
Salesforce Returns as Diamond Partner at SaaStr AI 2026
We're thrilled Salesforce is back as a Diamond Partner at SaaStr AI Annual 2026! 🚀 The world's #1 CRM, now supercharged with AI agents to drive revenue at every stage of the funnel. Come find them May 12–14 at SaaStr...
Old SaaS Is Dying; Modern Tools Are Thriving
SaaS isn’t dead. But Old SaaS clearly is dying. No doubts about it now. 90% of public SaaS companies continue to decelerate. For many, customer counts are essentially flat. No one wants to buy that stuff anymore unless they have...
AI Agents Boost NRR Above 130%, Outpacing Peers
Net dollar retention has settled into 110-120% across most B2B companies — stabilizing after years of decline from pandemic highs. Gross retention is holding at 94-97%. The churn isn't the problem. Expansion is. Companies that own the AI agent layer...
Custom AI Replaces Vendors, Cuts $20k ARR Each
We vibe coded our own AI VP of Marketing and own Customer Success / Customer Project Management platform. Why? We just couldn’t find the former at all (AI VP Marketing), and all the Customer Success platforms are all way too...
Own AI Agents or Become Just a Data Warehouse
If AI agents do the work new hires used to do, where does that expansion revenue go? If the agents live on your platform — it's yours. If a third-party AI layer sits on top of your data and delivers...