Want to Get In Front of 3,500 B2B + AI Buyers a Week? Submit Your AI Agent to SaaStr
SaaStr quietly launched an AI Agents Directory that now draws about 3,500 weekly visitors—primarily B2B founders, CTOs, and RevOps leaders actively seeking AI agents to integrate. The platform is free to submit, curated, and up‑voted by the community, giving listed agents exposure to SaaStr’s 350,000‑plus subscriber base. Early participants include Dust, HappyFox AI, Mixmax, Clay, Fin, and Agentforce. The directory promises immediate visibility to qualified buyers without traditional marketing spend.
Dries OSS
The post clarifies that DHH’s Fizzy is source‑available, not open source, because the company retains SaaS rights to sustain its business model. Dries Buytaert expands on this distinction, arguing that source‑available licensing is acceptable even if it falls short of...
The Two Context Databases Powering Enterprise AI
Enterprises are adopting two distinct context databases—operational and analytical—to serve as the new system of record for AI agents. Operational databases capture procedural knowledge and trade secrets, while analytical databases encode metric definitions and reasoning logic. The article emphasizes that...
DHH & Open Source
Basecamp’s new product Fizzy is marketed as open source, but it is released under the O’Saasy license, which prohibits downstream users from offering the software as a SaaS product. The license’s SaaS‑restriction violates OSI’s rule that open‑source licenses must not...
The AI Value Gap : Where Does the $7,000 Per Seat Go?
A new OpenAI study finds AI saves white‑collar workers 54 minutes daily, translating to roughly $7,282 of recovered productivity per seat each year. Current SaaS pricing—ChatGPT Plus, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Google Workspace AI, and Gamma—captures only 3‑5% of that value,...
This Week on How I AI: Which AI Model Is the Best Designer? And ChatGPT Agent Mode, the “Little Helper”...
In this episode, Michal Peled demonstrates how ChatGPT's agent mode can act as a "little helper" for real‑world tasks—automating LinkedIn recruiting, creating interactive AI personas, and building a parking‑avoidance app—by first interviewing humans to capture exact workflows and then refining...
Why Your Startup Will Fail, If It Does Fail: The Drama Inside, Not Outside
Jason Lemkin argues that internal dysfunction, not competition, is the primary cause of startup failure. He identifies unforced errors such as co‑founder rifts, loss of key executives, and a culture of blame as fatal. The article prescribes concrete actions—regular appreciation,...
Streaming Comes Into the Fold
IBM announced an $11.1 billion acquisition of Confluent, valuing the streaming‑platform provider at 10 × its last‑twelve‑month revenue. Confluent, the commercial arm behind Apache Kafka, serves more than 40 % of Fortune 500 firms and posted Q3 revenue of $298.5 million, up 19.3 % YoY, with...
🧠 Community Wisdom: Combating Ageism, Facilitating Roadmap Discussions, 90-Day Onboarding Plan, Staying Stealth Pre-Launch, and More
The episode covers practical community‑building tactics, including how to confront ageism, run effective roadmap discussions, and design a 90‑day onboarding plan for new members. It also shares strategies for keeping a product stealthy before launch and balancing transparency with secrecy....
4 Reasons to Send Investor Updates Even When Times Are Tough
Founder communication falters when startups hit rough patches, but Jason Lemkin argues that regular investor updates are essential even in downturns. Updates break isolation by connecting founders with experienced backers who can offer advice or introductions. Writing hard‑line metrics forces...
The Top 10 “Hidden Gem” SaaStr Posts You May Have Missed — Per SaaStr’s Own AI
SaaStr.ai scanned the platform’s massive archive and surfaced ten under‑read articles that deliver high‑impact SaaS guidance. The list spans sales playbook design, quota cadence, founder dilution, hiring stretch VPs, and financing pitfalls. Each post offers concrete tactics for founders looking...
From 10 to 31 Tasks Daily : The Agent Inflection Point
An author integrated Google Gemini CLI with Asana, linking AI agents to email, calendar, and CRM, enabling them to execute tasks directly within his workflow. By delegating to agents, he increased his daily output from 10 to 31 tasks, handling...
The Most Powerful Growth Engine in AI: Freemium Fueled Word of Mouth
Sean Ellis explains that AI product growth hinges on a freemium model that creates an instant "wow" moment, enabling frictionless first use and sparking word‑of‑mouth referrals. He argues AI lacks latent demand, so viral adoption depends on users experiencing powerful...
The 2026 Sales Reckoning: Why Your Traditional Sales Team Is About To Look Very Different
The blog argues that by 2026 B2B software sales will be dominated by AI‑driven prospecting and technical specialists rather than traditional account executives. Real‑world examples include a $4 million deal closed solely by a sales engineer, Vercel’s outbound motion run by...
An Outbound Playbook for 2025
In this episode, Kyle talks with Fivos Aresti, co‑founder of Workflows.io, about the four‑pillar outbound playbook that drove their growth to $2M ARR in 2025. They stress a hybrid approach that blends manual cold outreach for Tier 1 accounts with AI‑enhanced,...
Top 10 Posts of 2025
The 2025 "Top 10 Posts" roundup highlights a paradox in AI: OpenAI pledged $1.15 trillion in compute contracts through 2035 while DeepSeek demonstrated a 90%+ drop in training costs with its V3 and R1 models. Nvidia’s $110 billion vendor‑financing scheme dwarfs the...
The 2025 State of Digital Agencies: It’s Still Rough Out There, but Slowly Improving; and Is AI Really a Threat?
The 2025 State of Digital Agencies survey shows a mixed but improving picture. Half of agencies reported revenue growth, while net margins rose for roughly a third. Concerns about AI as a business threat increased to 53%, and two‑thirds worry...
A Year Free of PostHog ($16,500 Value): The All-in-One Analytics, Experimentation, Feature Flag, Surveys, Session Replay, Error Tracking, Data Warehouse,...
In this episode, Lenny Rachitsky introduces PostHog’s all‑in‑one product analytics platform and announces a free year of PostHog Scale (a $16,500 value) for annual newsletter subscribers. He highlights how PostHog combines analytics, experimentation, feature flags, session replay, error tracking, data...
This Week on How I AI: “PMs Who Use AI Will Replace Those Who Don’t” With Marily Nika
In this episode, Google AI product lead Marily Nika walks through an end‑to‑end AI workflow that turns a product idea into a full vision in minutes, using tools like Perplexity for research, custom GPTs for PRDs, v0 for prototyping, and...
The 8 Things No One Tells You About ‘Prosumer’ Vibe Coding (That You Need To Learn To Build a Real...
Jason Lemkin outlines the hidden challenges of AI‑assisted ‘vibe coding’ for B2B SaaS products. While AI agents can generate functional code quickly, they also hallucinate, require rigorous verification, and lack built‑in quality controls. Lemkin stresses that non‑technical founders must adopt...
Two Billion+ B2B Companies Lost Salesforce Access Indefinitely. This Is Your Security Wake-Up Call.
Two high‑profile SaaS vendors, Gainsight and Drift, were forced off the Salesforce AppExchange after a sophisticated threat actor stole OAuth tokens and exfiltrated data from hundreds of customers. Salesforce revoked the compromised tokens, pulling both companies' integrations offline indefinitely. The...
Six Billion Reasons to Cheer for Shopify
Shopify merchants generated $6.2 billion in sales on Black Friday, a 25 % increase over the previous year. The platform’s infrastructure endured extreme load, peaking at 31 million API requests per minute and handling 53 million reads and 2 million writes per second. This scale...
PagerDuty Falls to ~$1B Market Cap on $500M ARR. Just 2x ARR. Profitable Isn’t Enough. You Have to Grow.
PagerDuty reported $497 million ARR, up only 3% YoY, and became GAAP profitable, yet its market cap slipped to about $1.1 billion—roughly two times ARR. Growth has stalled at 4‑5% and net‑revenue retention fell to 100%, meaning existing customers no longer expand....
A Beta Is Like Inviting Guests Over
Jason Fried argues that the most effective beta occurs just one to two weeks before a product’s official launch, essentially at version 0.99. At this stage the goal isn’t deep feature validation but a final house‑cleaning sprint to eliminate obvious flaws....
The “Buy Your Own Product” Test: Why Every B2B Founder Should Be Their Own Customer (At Least For A Day)
Jason Lemkin urges B2B SaaS founders to purchase their own product using the public buying flow, not internal shortcuts. By submitting contact forms, calling support lines, and attempting in‑app upgrades, founders expose friction points that often go unnoticed. The exercise...
The First $100,000,000 ARR at UiPath: How Founder CEO Daniel Dines Went From 10 Years of Struggle to Hypergrowth
UiPath, founded by Daniel Dines, hit its first $175 million ARR after a four‑year sprint from a modest $1 million base, illustrating a textbook hypergrowth trajectory in B2B SaaS. The company’s breakthrough came from a $10,000 pivot that turned a niche screen‑reading...
How to Make $100K in 6 Weeks With a Productized Service
Dan Martell outlines a six‑step framework to generate $100K in six weeks by productizing a service. He emphasizes pricing for outcomes, targeting affluent clients, and using a single‑page offer delivered via chat‑based selling. The method relies on a repeatable delivery...
How the New SaaStr AI Benchmarking Tool Can Build Your 2026 C60 Plan in Seconds
Jason Lemkin introduces SaaStr.ai’s new AI‑powered benchmarking tool that generates a data‑driven C60 financial plan for 2026 in roughly a minute. The C60 model, based on the Last‑4‑Months (L4M) growth rates, provides realistic revenue, burn‑rate, and runway projections, replacing the...
Gartner: Enterprise Software Spend Will Grow a Stunning 15.2% Next Year. But Most Of That Will Go to Price Increases...
Gartner forecasts enterprise software spending to jump 15.2% in 2026, but roughly 9% of that growth will simply offset price hikes on existing products. The remaining expansion is concentrated in AI‑driven applications and infrastructure, with AI software spending expected to...
Is AI Support Perfect? No. But It’s A Lot Better Than No Support at All
Jason Lemkin argues that companies should deploy AI‑powered customer support now rather than wait for perfection. Well‑trained AI can resolve 60‑70% of tier‑1 queries instantly, delivering 24/7 coverage and cutting response times from hours to seconds. A hybrid model that...
The First 30 Seconds Matter More Than You Think
The episode explores how the first 30 seconds of a product experience can determine its success, illustrated by the host’s journey from a frustrating start with Beautiful.ai to the instant wow factor of Gamma. It highlights Gamma co‑founder Grant Lee’s...
Our 20+ AI Agents and Their Moats: Real But Weak
Jason Lemkin explains that while his company runs 20+ AI agents across its GTM stack, the core AI capabilities are largely interchangeable—prompts can be copy‑pasted between platforms with minimal tweaks and achieve comparable results. He argues that true moats lie...
The 8 Things No One Tells You About 'Prosumer' Vibe Coding (That You Need To Learn To Build a Real...
"The AI does the coding. You still do a lot of the engineering, though."
Local LLMs Are How Nerds Now Justify a Big Computer They Don't Need
The author argues that while running local LLMs on personal hardware is technically impressive, current models are far behind the performance of rented frontier models, making them impractical for everyday development work. Consequently, investing in high‑end, expensive machines with massive...
The Pinball Customer Journey Has Replaced the Marketing Funnel
The author argues that the classic marketing funnel no longer reflects how modern consumers navigate a fragmented, multi‑channel landscape, likening today's journey to a pinball machine where prospects bounce between apps, newsletters, social feeds, AI tools, and peer recommendations before...
Private Equity : The New Distribution Channel for AI Startups
The post argues that private equity (PE) firms have become the primary distribution channel for AI startups, thanks to the rapid growth of PE‑owned companies—now outnumbering public firms 4:1 in the US. Because PE portfolios consist mainly of mid‑market firms...
Figma Is at $20B. Right Where Adobe Offered to Buy It. When Is Saying ‘No’ Worth It in A Strong...
Jason Lemkin examines Figma’s decision to reject Adobe’s $20 B acquisition offer, showing that while the headline numbers look similar, the time‑value‑adjusted cash and stock from the deal would have been worth roughly $22‑23 B today versus the post‑IPO market cap of...
No Backup, No Cry
The author argues that full-system backups are unnecessary when you treat devices as disposable and rely on encrypted local copies synced to services like Dropbox and GitHub. By keeping all important files in Dropbox and using version‑controlled repositories, any lost...
How Our AI BDR Drove Inbound From 30% to 71% of Revenue From Inbound — By Letting AI Qualify 24/7
Jason Lemkin explains how deploying an AI Business Development Representative on their website, fully integrated with Salesforce, boosted inbound‑generated revenue from a historic 30% to 71% in just a few months. By qualifying visitors 24/7, instantly booking meetings, and feeding...
🧠 Community Wisdom: Resurrecting Churned Users, Doing Performance Reviews for 50 People, Getting Users to Give You Product Feedback, Managing...
In this episode of Community Wisdom, the host curates top discussions from the members‑only Slack, covering tactics for re‑engaging churned users, scaling performance reviews for teams of 50, and strategies to encourage meaningful product feedback. Listeners also learn practical methods...
Gemini 3 Solves One of the Biggest Headaches With Vibe Coding: Now Your Site Doesn’t Have to Look Like It...
Jason Lemkin explains how Gemini 3, especially when used in design‑first tools like Replit’s new design mode, breaks the uniform look of AI‑generated “vibe‑coded” sites that have been dominated by Claude’s default aesthetics. By letting developers define their own design system...
AI App of the Week: Aurasell – The AI-Native CRM That’s Actually Replacing 15 Tools
Aurasell, launched in August 2025, is positioned as the first AI‑native CRM that consolidates 15+ sales tools into a single platform, promising to cut GTM tech‑stack costs by half and reduce reps' admin time by 30‑40%. Built from the ground...
Dear SaaStr: What Types of Customers Should Be Avoided and How Do I Recognize Them?
The post challenges the common SaaS advice to weed out “bad” or overly demanding customers, arguing that these clients often serve as the most valuable teachers for product improvement and growth. It outlines how to differentiate truly problematic customers—those who...
The First $100,000,000 ARR at Ramp: How CEO Eric Glyman and CTO Karim Atiyah Built a $30B+ Finance Platform Through...
Jason Lemkin’s post breaks down how Ramp’s founders used asymmetric risk thinking—backed by a large seed fund—to chase high‑barrier, high‑upside problems in business spend management, leading to $100M ARR and a $32B valuation. Key takeaways include hiring for spiky, high‑growth...
Crunchbase: We’re At The Highest Level of Unicorn Production in 3+ Years
Jason Lemkin reports that October 2025 saw the highest influx of unicorns in over three years, with 20 new companies adding $44.5 billion in valuation, signaling a resurgence driven by AI‑native startups. He explains that while overall funding is normalizing to...
NEW: Upload Your Agency’s Logo and Customize Your Audience Research Graphs
SparkToro’s new feature lets Agency and Enterprise users upload their own logo and generate white‑labeled, high‑resolution PNG graphs for audience research reports, which can be exported directly from the browser. This upgrade streamlines branding for consultants, agencies, and in‑house marketers...
The #1 Clear Sign a VP Will Fail. Be Honest With Yourself When You See It
Jason Lemkin argues that the single best predictor of a VP or C‑level executive's failure is whether they have stopped doing the core work of their function—selling, coding, marketing, or meeting customers. He illustrates how hands‑on involvement preserves market insight,...
5 Interesting Learnings From Valve at $17 Billion in ARR
Jason Lemkin highlights Valve’s Steam platform as a model of ultra‑lean, high‑margin profitability, generating over $17 B in revenue with just 330‑360 employees and $50 M+ per Steam staffer. He extracts five lessons: charge premium commissions when you deliver outsized value; automate...
The New UX Era
In this episode, Yaakov Carno examines the rise of the prompt‑bar as the new front‑door UX for AI‑enabled SaaS products, mapping over 40 real‑world examples from Canva to Notion. He explains how the traditional onboarding flow has shifted into a...
Cursor Hit $1B ARR in 24 Months: The Fastest Scaling SaaS Ever?
Jason Lemkin highlights Cursor’s unprecedented growth, reaching over $1 B ARR in just 24 months and a $29.3 B valuation after a $2.3 B Series D—making it the fastest‑scaling B2B SaaS ever. The post attributes this speed to a product‑led strategy with zero marketing...
