AI and the Death of the 2021 Sales Playbook with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin

Welcome to the official SaaStr podcast where you can hear some of the best SaaStr speakers. This is where the cloud meets. Up today on the SaaStr podcast. But the biggest real difference with a lot of AI leaders is there's just so much demand, right? Because what's happening in a lot of AI tools is everyone is in market simultaneously. The, the tools are either so disruptive like a Cursor or Replit or Lovable or 11Labs will go from like almost nothing to $300 million this year. And so of course, if you have insane demand, sometimes with virality is going to change the playbook because you're going to be servicing it, right? And I know, you know, at Bolt, which is one of the leaders in vibe coding, the head of sales there was, was one of our old sales team, like the old is new. And even there, and I know it's true at Lovable and Replit, just as 3 examples, they have so much inbound. Can't service it. They have insane demand and servicing, but it's the same playbook, it's the same demos, it's the same everything.

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Hey everybody, SaaS Annual will be back May 2026, the world's largest SaaS and AI gathering for executives. Just this last May, we hosted 10,000 attendees with 68 VP-level and above attendees, 36% CEOs and founders, and 25% were AI-first professionals. It's the very best of S-tier attendees and decision makers that come to SaaStr Annual and AI Summit each and every year. But here's the reality, folks. The longer you wait, the higher ticket prices get. They're cheap now. They're cheap. So just get them early. Lock in your spot today. Use my code JASON100 for exclusive savings. Get your tickets at podcast.saastrannual.com or just use code JASON100 when you check out. See you there. SaaStr Annual and AI Summit 2026. It will rock. All right, everybody, welcome back to London. Thanks for coming out. Appreciate everybody. If you've got— who's been to a SaaStr event before? Anybody here? All right, thank you. We have a tradition. We're usually at the end of these events. In case anybody wants to hear from me, we do an AMA until we— till I pass out. But it's inverted this year because of the timing. We want everyone— I don't know if you've noticed on your teams, people have shorter attention spans these days. Have you noticed? It's like, keeps getting shorter and shorter. So tried to compress everything this year. We, this is just an AMA. We can talk about anything. We'll take questions in a moment. Just for fun, if on the general topic of like software change and vibe coding, Let's see. If you're curious, I built a game for this event. It's vaporsell.ai. You can play it now. The year is 2049. You're an account executive attending SaaStr AI London. The product doesn't exist, but the quota is real. You gotta play this game. It'll only take a few minutes. If you play it, it's just for fun because it, we can, it's kind of a prop for vibe coding, but actually if you play it and you win, you get an extra 50% off coming to SaaStr Annual in May. So it's 50% off, 50% off. It's the cheapest tickets we've ever had. You just have to win. You just have to win this game. And it's actually, you could try it. If the fact that I was able to build it in like an hour and a half on Replit is pretty telling. It only goes so far. It only does so much. Other things wouldn't work, but it's kind of a reminder that if you, if you want to rebuild something, revive with yourself and your team, and it's been built before, It, it, it does get easier. So that's just for fun. But, but if you, if you're bored, you can do it here and you'll get an extra 50% off annual. Or if you win, one person, or maybe it's 3, 3 people that win it. Not that it's such a great prize, but I think either 1 or 3 people get a one-on-one with me afterwards too. So all you have to do is win the game, trick this, trick 5 prospects into buying from you with some jargon, AI jargon, and then it'll tell you you won and there's a leaderboard. So it's vapercell.ai. So that's the agenda for today. I got, I got nothing for now other than general AMA, but if anybody wants to kick it off with a general question, therapy, whatever you need, let me know if anyone's got, got something or I can make something up, but anyone got a burning question wants to kick us off? Go ahead. So the question is, is inbound dead? Your traffic's down 50% in the last 12 months. It's a good question. Let me step back. For what it's worth, I really think this is a part of a woe is me narrative that I think began toward the end of '23 and has accelerated. Woe is you, your SEO is harder. Woe is you, you don't have as many leads as you had during a lockdown, during a global pandemic, poor you. And it leads to a narrative, and then I'll be more specific with the answer. It leads to a narrative, which I think is quite dangerous. Which is that the go-to-market playbook is broken. It doesn't work anymore. You hear this. It's just not true. Now, all the— here's how I think about it. The playbook that some folks are running from 2021, of course, does not work today or does not work as well. But here's what I say. The plays all work. Webinars, inbound, outbound, left-bound, right-bound. It all still works. And the interesting thing is, if you look at a lot of the hottest AI companies, like look at Vercel, they just raised $10 billion. Who's this CEO? She was the chief business officer at Stripe. Okay, look at Replit, where we just did a whole SKO with them. They're $0 to $250 million already this year. VibeCoding, who's their CRO? ZoomInfo. Okay, if you go through all of the hot AI companies right now that are vaguely in B2B, you will see a cast of characters from the— is it the aughts? Is that what we say? No, no, from the '10s. You will see B2B leaders that you all know from SaaStr 2018 and 2017 running the AI companies. That wouldn't be possible if the plays don't work. Work. Now, are they using different tools? Are they using more AI? Ask us, things we can chat about for sure, right? But the biggest real difference with a lot of AI leaders is there's just so much demand, right? Because what's happening in a lot of AI tools is everyone is in market simultaneously. The tools are either so disruptive, like a Cursor or Replit or Lovable, or ElevenLabs will go from like almost nothing to $300 million this year. We just, I mean, Amelia just literally pulled up ElevenLabs to do all the intros for all our speakers. Okay. We did it in like, she did it in 10 minutes. We used to have to pay an agency that would take weeks and complain about it and they'd be terrible. And they'd argue over the pronunciation of people's names. No, it's Lemkin. It's Jason M. Lemkin. We'd have to argue and they get angry. We literally did it today in the green room in like 20 minutes, right? That is so disruptive that this demand. And so of course, if you have insane in demand, sometimes with virality, is going to change the playbook because you're going to be servicing it. Right. And I know, you know, at Bolt, which is one of the leaders in vibe coding, the head of sales there was, was one of our old sales team, like the old is new. And even there, and I know it's true at Lovable and Replit, just as three examples, they have so much inbound, they can't service it. They have to look at the list each day. And I mean, I think Brian, who runs it at Bolt, is 60 million. I think he has 3 people on the sales team or something like that. 4. Okay. So how many leads can they follow up? Of thousands, right? So that is different, but they're all classic B2B sales reps. Just instead of calling every lead and trying to convince them their fungible product is the exact same as another product, they have insane demand and servicing, but it's the same playbook. It's the same demos. It's the same everything. So. I know that's not quite the question you're asking, but I do think it's important to understand that the playbooks may not work as well, but the plays are the same, and in many cases it's the same players. So it's just, it's just a lot of folks in market looking for radically better solutions. And at the same time, CIOs and others are cutting budgets for old solutions. There is this— it's not a paradox, but it can feel like it. If you— I've written a lot about it on SaaStr. I just wrote it up with a bunch of Gartner data this year. Gartner said overall enterprise software is going to grow the fastest it ever has at 15% a year at this scale, right? I mean, at $400 billion, it hasn't grown this fast ever. But of that 15%, almost half is taken up by price increases from existing investors. Everyone's raising prices, and about half of the remaining half is new AI budget. So that means if you're not one of the ones that they're focused on for price increases or buying more, if you're not adding agent force or you're not an AI tool they want to add to, everyone else has to get cut. So vendor, the vendor count is getting stable or shrunk to make room for new offerings and price increases from the select vendors and the new AI guys. So it can feel like there's forces that are either that are punishing you in a way they didn't used to, or, or they're tailwinds. They're tailwinds. And the reality is, if you talk to any vendor that's here, that's a sponsor, the reason they're a sponsor is because they got tailwinds. The headwinds ones aren't sponsoring anymore. It probably should be the opposite. The ones that have headwinds should probably be here hustling for customers, and the ones that are tailwinds should be just back in the office wondering what to do with the surplus of leads. But this is the, this is the odd, odd, odd thing about marketing. So that's the world we're in. And we can chat more about it, folks have follow-up questions. Specifically on, is inbound dead? So no, inbound isn't dead. The, the, the artisan, like artisans that's here on Qualified, we know them pretty well. We were just talking with the head of SMB at Salesforce, Asian force. All of them have more demand than they can service. All of them. It's actually interesting. They all have the same kind of issue is there's just not enough forward deployed engineers, not enough solution art, not enough folks to get the agents going. They are all turning away customers because they have too much demand for an agent that can do everything for them. So inbound isn't dead. Is SEO dead? If you're running the classic playbook, right? I'll tell you, our SEO at Saastr, here's a— now look, we— Saastr's a lot of things. We do events, we do a podcast, we do multiple podcasts. We got a podcast with Harry, we got two YouTubes, we got tweets. But our blog, if you've been with us for a while, our blog is like our core. It's like home base. Okay. And our blog traffic, was fairly flat for about 4 years. Going into this year, our SEO is down 8%. Not, not 50, but 8 for real. We can track it, but our traffic's up 50. Traffic is up 50 and going up. Our viewership, we will end this year at SaaS.com twice as many readers as last year, even though our SEO is down. Now our SEO is down 8%. And I think folks like G2 have said theirs is down like 30 or 40% or more. So If that's your only play and you got no ideas and you haven't changed your product or your GTM since 2021, you're, it's probably going to feel at least 8 to 50% harder. But for us, like, I actually don't, I mean, most of our team is AI agents now, so we don't really have anyone to tell me why our viewership is up, but I can tell you when I look at the content, it's because people all want to read about AI GTM content. Okay. They don't want to read about classic SaaS or themes about CS teams and CROs. It turns out unless there's an AI thing, they don't want to read it. But because we have some of the best AI GTM agent content out there, people are just devouring it. Okay. And if we could sell that content, I mean, Amelia and I would buy islands. Okay. If we could sell, because the demand for that content is so high. So my point to everything is you got to find that this is like my other talk tomorrow. You got to find the tailwinds and lean into it. There is AI budget. There is AI budget for new vendors at the CIO level. And if you're an existing Cus— if you have existing customers and you have something that truly changes the game for efficiency, it truly changes. You can replace lots of humans for your agent. Your customers are going to want to meet with you and they're going to want to buy it, right? Salesforce is at $42 billion growing like 9%. And I know they're a public company, but I'm pretty convinced if they could deploy AgentForce overnight for every customer, they could grow twice as fast, right? So find that tailwind. That's your job right now. For your teams, figure out what— it's not building a copilot or putting AI on your homepage. It doesn't create budget and it doesn't change. It doesn't change how your customers do business, right? What can you do with AI to make your product 10 times better? And it's probably replacing humans for many of you, even though people think that's a tough topic. That's the reality. It's, it's replacing humans in some fashion. That's why customer success took off. I mean, support took off so quickly because if you train a support AI pretty well, you— a lot of folks really have replaced 20 to 50% of their support team. Even Marc Benioff, I think, redeployed 3,000 or 5,000 folks in support even there at Salesforce. We all know tons of folks that have done it. Sierra just said they went from 1 to 100 million in a year. Bret Taylor, ex, you know, ex-CTO of Facebook, co-CEO of Salesforce, just going out to people and saying you can replace a lot of your support teams with AI. So you got to find your version of that, your, your tailwind to grow. But if you're running the exact same playbook as 2022, nothing's changed. Yeah, that inbound's going to be harder. SEO's down and vendor consolidate— the odd thing, and I will take another question. It's just such an odd thing when overall B2B software budgets are at a record size and accelerating, plus 15% at hundreds of billions are according to Gartner. And folks that have product-market fit with AI B2B are growing like crazy. But at the same time, it's not free. People think that CIOs have infinite budget. They don't. There's a little bit of elasticity, but at the end of the day, companies only have so much revenue and they only have so much profits and they can only apportion so much of that to software and IT. And so it's not all free. And when they're giving this money to these hot AI companies, they're cutting it from everybody else. They're cutting it from everybody else. And if they're not, and if they're not arguing with you on renewals, and a lot of folks have felt it, it's worse. They're calling up vendors and saying, we're just cutting back this year. We're just, and if you guys haven't ever been at it, I, in my brief tenure as a VP at Adobe, it was pre-AI, but I lived it as a VP at Adobe. And you'd go around the room and you'd say, there were human layoffs and there were app layoffs. Okay. And everyone at the boom of cloud wanted more apps and they'd say, fine, but everyone go, every single VP in the room, give me 1 or 2 to cut. You'd have to cut 1 or 2. And it's still happening. It's just done more from the top down at the CIO level. So if you're on the bubble, if you're an attachment to a CRM that you don't quite need, right? This is where, you know, so many folks, you know, Outreach and SalesOps struggled and Gong took a lot of this market because Gong built everything. And, but one of the things Gong did is they stole budget. From Salesloft and Outreach and other folks, right? They stole it and see it going. It's already happened for this calendar year, but CIOs and others have gone around the room and said, give me an app, give up an app, or give me two if you want to add one extra. You want to add a couple AI apps? I'll find you a budget. You got to give up two. You got to give up two. You have 100 like marketing tools. You need 100? Maybe 96 is enough. And, and, and I, I find even in my own investing portfolio, I just got an investor update yesterday of a pretty successful company that's partly through its AI transition. They're at mid-eight figures in revenue. They had $1.5 million of churn last month, $1.5 million of churn last month from happy customers that, you know, no CSAT issues, no other issues. They literally said just we're cut. They're cutting apps next year. We're an attachment. We're an attachment to CRM. We got cut. And the CEO, who I love to death, failed. They failed as a team because they didn't get above the cut line. They, now they didn't lose all their customers, but they lost two. That's a $1.5 million last month. Not because it didn't work or wasn't great and not because they didn't have AI in it, but because the two CIOs just went around the room and that was the one that got cut. It was great to have, but not mission critical, and it got cut to make room for another AI app. In fact, one that's also speaking at this event. All right. Anybody else got another question? Hi, I'm Patrick. Quite a specific one. In a podcast the other day, you said something along the lines that AISRs didn't work, but then SONNET 4, and now it works. Can you elaborate a little bit on that? It's a rich question. Two different threads. One. We really, none of these products, these SDR products, I think worked before Claude 4.1 Sonar or Claude 4 this year, right? Replit didn't work. Lovable didn't work. Base44 didn't work. Nothing. I mean, they were out there. They weren't very good until the magical moment when Claude 4 came out and everything was kind of magical. Gamma didn't— Gamma was around since 20— We were about Gamma and we love Gamma for, for, for AI presentations, 1 to 80 million that we'll do this year. But it was founded in 2020, so it was 5 years to 1 million and then 1 to 80 this year. It's not a coincidence that all of these apps took off January, February, March of this year. That's when the LLMs got better. Okay. So in a way it doesn't matter, but if you bought a lot of overhyped go-to-market SDR tools before February, March, or April of this year, they just didn't work well. Right. And, and I mean, literally we were, Amelia and I, It's on our sastr.ai/agents website. We were at this company Qualified that does AI inbound and outbound. We use it on the website and we were with the CEO. They've been around for like 5 years. He was the ex-CMO of Salesforce. Okay. They've been doing this for trying to use AI to qualify inbound leads since like 2019 or something. Okay. Repeat founder, great guy. I'm like, I don't have any of your numbers, but this really took off around February or March this year. Right. It's like, yeah, like that's what your product actually worked. He's like, yeah, that's when it finally actually worked after 5 years. Right. Same with Gamma. Replit was founded almost 10 years ago, right? And blew up. It'll go, it was 10 years to a million and then 1 to 250 million. So, so you kind of almost have to, if you had, it's less, it's less an issue for this room than maybe the, the, maybe the, the less techie of the world. But if you had a bad experience with almost any AI, LLM, GTM, other product before March of this year, write it off. It was a different time. It was different LLMs, different world. Okay. That, that's a base point. The second point, which is not the same question, but it's related. Plenty of folks, whether they tried to deploy an AI sales agent before or after Q1 of this year, so many folks just told someone on their team to do it or hired an agency that didn't know what they're doing. Okay. Literally, Amelia and I were on a call with global technology leader we all know and love, we've all heard, that's pretty AI forward, okay? Pretty impressive company. And said, we're thinking about buying our first AI SDR. We're just going to buy it and hand it to our SDRs and have them figure it out. Have them figure it out. It's not going to work. You got to train it. You got to train it for a month. You got to train it every day. You've got to iterate in onboarding. So that's another failure mode that I've already heard like 10 times since I've been here today. Folks like, Well, if I just, can I just buy one of these tools and turn it on and walk away? You can't. We've said this in every Workshop Wednesday that Neely and I have done with every other speaker. It still doesn't work. So one failure mode was like pre-the fours, pre, pre, you know, Claude 4 and GPT-4, pre-the fours, the stuff, the LLMs weren't good enough. And the other one was we bought it and, and just turned it on and we didn't magically get millions of revenue. It don't work that way. Right. And the real way, if I had to summarize it, and we'll talk a lot about it, at this event. Here's the other mistake folks make. If you want, Amelia makes this a lot of times on our, on our live webinars or AI Workshop Wednesday on Wednesday. Here's the, the captain obvious thing for any AI SDR, BDR, even AEs as we do more of them, CSMs. First you gotta have it work in the real world with humans, then you tell the AI what worked. That you, the, the, there's no magical prompt. Okay? The prompt is, here's the script. That I use with a customer that I closed. Then you iterate that prompt and then you hook it up to data like Salesforce or HubSpot or other sources of data or Snowflake, and then you have it ingest the data to keep working with that prompt to make it better. It's not that complicated. Okay. So many folks are like, oh, well, SaaStr's AI SDR works because you have inbound leads. I'm like, well, everyone has some inbound leads or it's just You, you've got the only— as long as you closed any customers, you can train the AI to be almost as good as you and work 24/7. It's that simple. But folks think that like, I'm going to buy— I have no inbound leads at all. I have no inbound. I've never done outbound. So I have no inbound leads. I've never done outbound, but I'm going to buy a tool and turn it on. I'm going to make millions. Like, how the fuck would that work? Just, this is to the sales rep that got a commission at that vendor, but you know it doesn't work and you can laugh. But I would say 80% of the conversations, Amelia, do you agree, that we have are a version of that? I bought a tool. I bought a tool and I have no leads. I bought a tool and I have a lot of leads, but I didn't connect it to my leads. It didn't magically work. And like, so you just figure out what works in the real world and then train the AI to just do it again and again and again with more and more and more data. And then read every email it sends, read every response it ingests. And some of them will be dumb and some of them will be wrong. And all these tools have some bit of training and you say, hey, that was wrong. You know, Saster, Saster AI London is not December 4th, okay? Or whatever mistake it makes. And you do it every day for about a month, and then the mistakes start to go away and they become recurring and it gets trained on better, more and more. It's not that complicated, but it's, you've gotta sell it just like anything. Going back to doing the Saster, if you can't sell it yourself, the AI can't sell it for you. It's that simple. You can't sell yourself, the AI can't. So thanks for the, a, a big answer, but thanks for the question. So for Lead Gen, for us, yeah, what do you think, what kind of skills should we uplift in 2026? And what's the, like, the golden nugget channel or the main channel? Which one do you think that is? Well, I'll give you two answers. First of all, for marketers in general, for B2B marketers, I talked to, I talked to a great marketer when I came in at an AI-focused company saying she was pretty confident about her job. Things were going well, but she, she was nervous. The world's changing so much. She was worried for her job. And I said, you should be. Everyone should be worried for their job. Every CRO or CMO should be worried for their job. On the one hand, it's the same people in the same place, but there's so much change and you got to get ahead of it, right? If you don't get ahead of it and build skills, it's going to be hard. So the advice I gave there, and then I'll, I'll give a second piece of advice. The number one piece of advice is become proficient at like a couple tools here or otherwise, a couple leaders. Okay. Right now, today, if you are world-class at AgentForce or Clay or Qualified or Artisan or any of the tools here, it really doesn't matter which one. Pick 2 or 3 leaders that, that, that have decent revenue that people have heard of. And it, and, and you go through the deployment yourself. You do the training we talked about, you onboard it, you get it working in your company. And you can point to the metrics just like Amelia is going to do tomorrow. Here's how we had 7.2% open rate and here's how long it took. And here's how, if you have those skills, you will be infinitely hireable for the next 18 months because only like 2% of marketers have those skills. So become the expert in deploying agents. And it doesn't need to mean, you know, every agent or even needs to be technical, but you need to pick a few leaders and deploy them yourself. Not, not tell someone on your team to do it, which is what we see. Do it yourself. Do it, watch it, iterate it, train it, iterate every day. Spend a week nonstop deploying it and then work on it every single day for a month. You will learn so much and you will become infinitely deployable. That's sort of at the agent level. You know, I think On, on, and just sort of generic demand playbook. I don't, I, I'm still learning. I don't have all the magic ideas, but I think if you think like, like buying GEO vendors and just figuring out how to automate LinkedIn posts is going to save your job, it's not. I think you just, just like always, we got to be careful of LinkedIn bullshit and charlatans because even if it's like a little bit better, it's not going to, it's not going to save you. If the CIO is canceling your app that they like, it's not going to save you. I don't know all the answers, but you need to, it's harder and harder to sell fungible products that don't show massive instant ROI. And I think back a lot, the first podcast that Marc Benioff did with us earlier in the year, I asked him what he thought of Palantir, obviously one, you know, one of the biggest successes in AI B2B. You know, he said, he went on to say this a lot other times. He's like, I'm jealous of how much they charge. Ha, pretty funny. You know, they charge more than he does. But I really love the thing he said next. He said, I'm jealous in a way. I wish— I love what they're doing for forward deployed engineers. And what Mark said was, I wish everyone at Salesforce could go live even before they pay. They could go live before they even paid. This— think about this, and this is a marketing and sales weapon. The way we used to buy B2B software for years was I need a CRM, I need a marketing automation. Your friends would use it. You saw your last company, you talked to a sales rep that could answer 6 questions, you'd buy it. And if you're lucky, by the end of the year, you might deploy it. I mean, in the old days, if we've been— if you've been around for a while, you might have customers that were new for year 2 that never even deployed in year 1. Okay, that don't fly today. It flies a little bit, but it don't fly much. Okay. What Mark's point was, he said, I know I can't deliver this today. It's not, it's not feasible, but the technology is there. I wish every single customer would be live on an agent force or whatever, a Gentec Salesforce before they gave me a dollar. Think about that. This is my best advice. Get as close to that today as you can for your customer. When you look at the ones that explode, the cursors, the gammas, think about— go back and use them again. Think about how much value you get in the free program. Think about how much value you get in the first month. What can you do with AI to provide that much value to customers before they even pay you? If you provide insane value with an agent before they pay you, they're gonna be kind of happy to pay you rather than the sucker bet that we all made for the better part of two decades, a sucker bet. I think it works. Like someone gave me a demo, the demo kind of works. I can't use it myself, but I, you know, I need that. And then half the time it's a horror story. So my, that's my best idea is make your provide insane value before you get a check. And then the percent of your leads that's going to convert is going to skyrocket. It's whatever it is, it's going to skyrocket. So thanks for the question. I'm still learning that part.

It's a more generic question. There are some AI experts that think or say that with AGI in 2, 3 years, SaaS will be dead because you can literally just talk to OpenAI or so on and say, write a code that does that. And you don't need to buy software, it will just do it on demand or look and learn from itself. I would love to hear your thoughts on that. I mean, it's possible.

Listen, all, listen, it's, it's, it's, if you'd, if you'd ask me 6 months ago, I'd say the odds that's true is zero. That's, that's like ChatGPT nonsense, right? I mean, ChatGPT is very, very powerful. We, you know, it's very extensible. It's very open. It's still impossible. You cannot reproduce the amount of workflows, the amount of corner cases, the amount of complexity that complex B2B software does. We, but you can chip away at it. You can chip away at it. And so I know I can't quite show it on the screen, but like this app we built, I mean, we've built 11 apps. I've built 11 apps. I've bytecode coded 11 apps in 90 days that have been used 800,000 times. They're all at saster.ai/agents. 800,000 times in 90 days. I haven't, we haven't stolen revenue from anybody, but that's a bit of an existential threat to somebody, isn't it? So, and the other point I'll say for folks, the, since we, I built these 12 apps on Replit, I can't tell you how much better the agent has gotten. So if any of you follow me closely, you'll know the first app I built on Replit, like 170 days ago, it blew up. It didn't work. It deleted my database. Those posts went viral. It was on Reddit. We got some like threats, some death threats from Redditors. It went crazy, millions of views. Okay. And there's a lot of reasons that happen. And if you want, we can talk about it for fun. I've learned a lot. I intentionally went into, I did this experiment. It was, it was an experiment from like 160 days ago or whatever. Because everyone, Microsoft, lovable Replit was all saying, just tell us in, tell us in a sentence. Hold on, sorry. Tell us in one prompt what you want to build and you can build it. They all said this 180 ago. Tell, tell us you want Salesforce, we'll build it in 60 seconds. Of course that was impossible. So I said, but they're all saying it. It's not just these startups like Lovable and Replit and Bolt. So Microsoft was saying it. Microsoft was saying it. I'm like, okay, I'm going to do a social experiment with all of us. I'm going to build an app for this Astro community without learning anything. I'm not going to study these apps. I'm not going to understand how they work. I'm not going to read anything. I'm just going to ask Twitter which one I should use. And they said by a narrow margin, pick Replit. So I picked it by a narrow margin and it went off the rails for the first one. Okay. I could tell you why it deleted the database and all these other things, but they fixed all of those issues for, for real. But more importantly, the agent is like 100 times better now. When I go, when I started writing apps on Replit 170 days ago, I'd be like, I want to build a way to connect folks in this room together. And the code would just be wrong. It would hallucinate. It would say things that were all wrong. I couldn't test it. I couldn't QA it. It was, I was never going to finish an app and And almost no one finished these app sign deals. Now, now I wrote one, you know, in an hour for this event. And what I'll give you an example of something that's changed, and then I know it's a long-winded answer. When Replit launches V3, and I'm sure Lovable has it and Claude itself has some of this functionality now, now in Replit V3, which only launched like 45 days ago, there's multiple agents that talk to each other and check the work. Okay, so when I did the first app in, in Replit, it deleted my database. Now it calls in other agents to help it. So before it deleted my database, now it has an architect. And when there's a tough problem, it doesn't just do something, go off the rails. It says, hold on, I'm not sure. I'm gonna call in another agent, the architect, and the architect talks to it. And if there's a security question, they bring in other help on security, and now they have a design specialist. So they're so much better. And so my learn— so the rate, We're not going to build the classic CRMs and ERPs that we all use, but don't underestimate the rate at which this stuff's getting better. And so where do I think that nets out today? And maybe next year I'll have a different answer. I'm still— I mean, I know a lot, but I'm still in learning mode. Just realize that like your competitive edge is shrinking in time, shrinking in time. We— when I started in SaaS, you basically had— you'd build something really slick and then you'd have about 18, 12 to 18 months until you were copied by a startup. Then you'd have like 5 years until a big company copied you. Okay, I know I'm really dating myself, but for fun, when we launched EchoSign, DocuSign, which is like $18 billion company today, it only worked in Windows and only was partially web-based. We had like 18 months before they decided, hey, we're going to copy what what Lemkin and his team did. We needed to get users. They needed to see traction. They had traction in printer drivers for real estate agency and weren't there trouble. Then it took like 5 years to 6 years for Adobe to decide to copy it. Then the copy didn't work and they bought us. Then like Google just launched a clone like last year, like a decade later. Like that's the way it used to happen. Not too recently, I invested in a startup that I love incredible, incredibly powerful startup. Within 2 weeks, they had like 4 clones. 2 weeks. And then I talked with a massive company that's building a clone themselves that'll be out this year. So the rate at which that— this is where I think it's not that we're gonna rebuild Workday and Salesforce and Oracle, but our competitive edges are gonna be measured in months and when they used to be years. And that compounds. That compounds. And if you can't run at that pace, I don't see how you're going to fall to 0% growth. So that's what I worry about is this rate of iteration. And so it's not exactly the narrative of you can prompt everything in ChatGPT, but our moats are all weakening. Our moats are all shallower and the pace of copying and improving I mean, literally this, it's funny, this, so Google just launched a Replit lovable clone. It's had its own. It launched it. What's Monday? So I think it launched it on Friday or Saturday or something. So I'm like, I know these apps. I'm going to try it. So I put in this prompt to build VaporSell. Didn't quite work. Okay. It just launched. Okay. It doesn't have a database. It does. It's missing a lot of things, but I just took that work, which literally took about 10 minutes and I gave it to Replit and Replit cloned it in 5 minutes. It worked better. It worked better. I'll give you another example. I, we talked about this, worried about a little bit. We took, we, we're running about 5 AI SDRs and BDRs at Saastr now. Took us a while to do this. Our most recent one, we just took a prompt from one and put it into another and it just worked. It just worked. And, and so agents will actually, may make our moats even weaker and shallower because If the agents can just take prompt— if I can take a prompt from one app and give it to another app, my switching costs have gone down radically, haven't they? It's not 2 years of business process change and mapping data, and the mapping data doesn't work, and the leads don't map to the leads in the context. If I can literally take the prompt, which is reach out to my top 50 attendees from Saastr Lender this year and give them a special coupon for Saastr Annual in May, and that's my prompt and it works, and I can just give it to another agent that does the same thing. Where's my moat? I mean, there is switching costs, but it's so much lower than it used to be. So that's the kind of stuff I worry about, that the cloning's gonna be much faster. The agents, the agents create short, shallower moats. The agents can ingest each other's prompts. And I just feel like everything is on shakier competitive moat foundations. And that's the world we gotta adapt in. We don't get 5 years to wait for a big guy to clone us. That was the old days. We got 5 years. 5 years to wait, sometimes like 7 or 8 years. And then a big company would say, oh, well, they hit $100 million. Because for a lot of big companies, you're so big. I mean, if you're, if you're doing, you know, I keep coming back to Salesforce, I'm forgetting what everyone else's revenue is, but Salesforce is $45 billion. Okay. So one way you're thinking about competitors, one way to think about competition is it's got to be 10%. Okay. So at the end of the day, it's probably not worth Salesforce doing something that can't make them $4 to $5 billion in revenue. Okay. Now it's a little more atomic than that. It might be each business unit is smaller, right? So maybe, maybe CRM is, is, CRM's like $6 billion. So maybe it's worth them doing, getting out of bed for $600 million or $800 million of revenue, et cetera, et cetera. Billion-dollar competitor, it's the same. So it used to take everything 5, 7, 10 years to get to $100 million. So no one would even bother to compete. Now, when you, when, when, when, if, if Replit gets to $250 million one year, of course Google's going to clone it. Right. So everyone's, everyone's aware of this and cloning faster. And, and, uh, you know, I don't want to be one of these guys on X, which is that the only mode is speed and working 996, but there's a lot of, I think there's a lot of truth in it. And if you don't like it, you're going to, you might, you, you, you might go into terminal decay. Like you'll, you'll hang on to your existing base, but you won't get any. I mean, it's tough. I wrote up today. I really tried to be positive and then it got like 500,000 views on X. On LinkedIn, I wrote up PagerDuty. PagerDuty. Missed its last quarter. PagerDuty is doing— just crossed $500 million in ARR. It's worth $1 billion, 2 times revenue, 2 times revenue. Now there's a bunch of things that happened there, but they, their customer count is flat, 15,000-something customers for 4 years. So Datadog came out with a clone. Atlassian's product is better. Startups are better. And they just didn't move fast. I don't mean to be critical of folks at PagerDuty. I'm sure they're doing a great job, but Objectively, they didn't move fast enough. And I think it's only going to accelerate. Everyone will build, will build a clone now. They'll build them faster. It took Datadog 15 years to decide to do this, or 10 years. It might take them 8 months to do it next time, and 90 days to do it with next time. And, and then I will take another question. If you guys haven't vibecoded or something, whether it's Cursor or Replit or something, there's a lot of learnings, but, And one thing that's much, much easier is if you already know exactly what you want to build. So cloning is so much easier. Like literally I took the prompt from Google and put it into Replit and I instantly cloned it because I knew exactly what I wanted to build. We built this VC founder matchmaking whole suite of apps. There are, if you go to saster.ai, click AIVC, we've done like almost 1,000 VC founder connections for free. We've, we've graded almost 3,000 pitch decks and done 700,000 startup valuations. Okay. And that took me a couple months to figure out. Now I know how I want to connect founders and VPs through this same workflow. I already know how to do it in my head. This isn't going to take me 90 days. It's going to take me like 2 weeks to do this one. And so my, my point is, is cloning is going to get even faster because once you build it and work, smart folks already know what they want to build. They already see it and know it. That's the easy stuff to build. And you can just fly in Cursor or Replit or whatever when you know exactly what you want to build. When you hear, you'll hear folks say like, oh, our team's not much more productive with these vibe coding apps. There's probably a lot of reasons, but one reason is they don't know what they want to build. But when you talk with the best engi— when you'll talk with some of the best engineers and they'll say something crazy like, I do 90% of my code with vibe coding tools. Like, like how is that possible? Well, often they're not 90% of the time for the 90%, they're not building something that's never been done before. They're really building something else that's been done before. So they already know in their head how they want leads, contacts, and opportunities or email automation. Whatever, and they're thinking through it and they go for a run or they think about it for a couple weeks and they can see it form in their head. They get pretty good. I call it replet fluent for me. I can already see in my head how I want to write the application, but there's cursor fluent and everything fluent. And so it's just, you're just 10 times faster when you know what you want to build. And so I'm worried about the modes, but thank you. Maybe that's too much, but anybody else got a question? In the go-to-market world, a lot of people talk loosely about the importance of ROI and value selling and quantifiable business cases. Well, why is it so hard for sales teams to action on? Is it awareness, understanding, a process or tools issue? What's really holding teams back from speaking the language of CFOs? Well, listen, let's be honest. Got to be honest in the age of AI. Most, most sales reps have no idea how to sell value. You can't sell value unless you're a product expert. You cannot sell value. Most sales folks want to talk with a war sheet, a tear sheet. They know 6 things. You can't sell value if you're not a product expert. AI makes it more extreme. We try these products. We know these products. We need onboarding. We need to train our agent. We, I was, we were with an AI leader the other day. Emily and I were there. They closed a 7-figure deal while we were there. We, the solution architect left the sales team behind, closed it without them. Didn't want to talk to the sales team. Sales team didn't know the product. Had no value. They added no value. So what was the term again? What did we call it? Solution? What was the, sorry. What do we call it? Value? What do we, sorry. Value-based selling? It's dead in the water. Value-based selling is providing value. You cannot provide value in the age of AI if you do not know the product cold, ideally how to deploy it and how to get it going and apply real value. Not to have a valuation calculator on your website that says 18 months down the road, the product will work. Okay. So I think a lot of these, I, these, these are just a bunch of lazy sales ideas from reading from a script. From high-demand, fungible, complex-to-deploy products where they think taking folks out to lunch or knowing 4 buzzwords adds any value to a customer. And it's always been hard to sell a technical— for non-technical sales folks to sell a technical product to CTOs and VPs of engineering. And why has it always been hard? They just don't know the product well enough. And the easiest thing for sales folks to sell has always been sales products. Sales tools, they use them every day. Just sell the tools, you know. But I think we're going to see AI is not going to replace the AE the way it is already beginning to replace the SDR, has already replaced support, is already replacing customer success. But it is going to replace a lot of AEs that aren't product, don't know the product cold. And I just got to tell you, I really think 70, 80% of the sales executives I have worked with over the last 5 or 6 years don't know their product cold. It's always— you've— if you— and if you look back, if any of you have— if you look back at your sales, whoever your top couple sales reps are, whatever, pre-AI, doesn't matter. The top ones weren't just good schmoozers or good— like, they knew the product cold, especially for startups, right? I call them sales magicians, but they're not magical. They just know how every nook and cranny works, how every— how to, how to, how to, how to get past feature gaps, how it all works. And we're just not going to tolerate mediocre sales reps in the age of AI. We're just going to buy from somebody else. The mediocre rep, the worst one you can't hire today is a sales rep that tells you they're a great people person. Who cares? Here's what I want. I want an AI SDR. I want it deployed in 30 days. I want it to get me this amount of quota. I want to do this workflow. I want to integrate it this way. And they're, and the rep's like, oh, that sounds good. We can do that. I mean, it's not going to work. You're a people person. I'm a people person. I text with all my, I close all my deals on text. But people, I, I, you see this one? I just closed, like, I closed $50,000 last month on text. I don't, I don't need to meet anybody. I mean, though, that, that worked in 2021 when there was infinite demand, right? It just does. I don't see it working today. And I'll tell you, I caught up with the sales rep that I've known for years in lockdown, made almost $1 million at a hot cloud company that had infinite demand, right? It was 3 to 5 deals a day, made $1 million. Then next year made about $600,000, felt, felt it was undervalued and quit, found a new job, made about $180,000. After that, that company is struggling. Now he's back in school. No job. Okay. Great people person. Got to be an expert. Got to be an expert. So I think all that stuff's dead and AI is just making us all too smart, all too product aware. Again, going back to the point, we're expecting almost infinite, infinite value. So you really don't need value selling if you're a product expert. They'll leave. They just don't want to. Just don't want to talk to the sales reps. It's my strong feeling. I know folks, a lot of sales folks want to fight this on LinkedIn, and I, but I know a lot of them, they're not crushing it. The ones that are fighting it are fighting the future, and you got to embrace the future. You got, you got to find your tailwind. So thank you. What you mentioned earlier, that the motions are the same in a lot of cases. Inbound is not dead. Outbound is not dead. What are the characteristics that have changed in like a successful outbound motion and what stayed the same? It's a great question. I should know all the answers to. I can tell you one thing that we learned from our outbound AI is geometrically more volume and the same results. So our results have not gone down in the age of AI. By training the AI with the best scripts and ideas that humans did, we basically saw the same, in some cases a little worse, in some cases a little better, but same as humans for the most part with much higher productivity. So I mean, it's outbound isn't dead and If you, if to some extent, no matter how much sales you've done, if you've never been a buyer at a big company, you don't get outbound. Okay. And then, and then, then I'll do one more, one more different point and then we'll wrap up. Let me step back for a minute. I remember, you know, back in the day when I was an early SaaS founder, I was at Dreamforce and we had a, we, We had a large SaaS company that SAP bought called SuccessFactors was on a panel with me, and I didn't even know him. I never met him. He turned around, he's like, yeah, I bought your product, Jason M. Lemkin. Like, wow, great. He's like, why? He's like, well, it was the end of the quarter. Our fax machines were broken and you said you'd figured out e-signatures and I needed the product today and I bought 300 seats. Okay. So one of his top problems at a given time Right? High ROI, immediate value proposition, read a cold email from a company at $2 million ARR. Okay. Now all the other emails, they, you know, you know, we help, we can, we can enrich your data better. We can, we can help you do— look, it just, it didn't. The fact was his team couldn't get the fax machines to work. Okay. Or some variant thereof. So my point is, and this goes all the way up to the CEO level. Every CEO I know of in the biggest companies— I asked Brian Halligan from HubSpot, the chairman of HubSpot, this the other day. I asked Yamini too. I asked Yamini at SaaStr Annual this year, do you, do you read your cold lead balance? She's like, I read them every day. Email is the best. Even today, it's the best thing in the world. Everyone reads it. It's an open medium. They get it. And your job is not just to have your LLM get you the right headline. Your, your job with outbound is to solve one of the top 3 problems of your buyer, whether it's CEO, SVP, VP, wherever. If it's the top 3 problems, you're going to get a meeting. Okay. Whether it's a top 3 pain point or a top 3 initiative, like I don't actually— all these AI SDR, BDR, Agentforce, Artisan that's here qualified. I don't actually know if this is a top 3 problem for a lot of buyers, but I know it's a top 3 thing on their mind. Everyone wants to— I want to figure out how to do an AI SDR. So. It's either a top 3 initiative or a top 3 problem. If you're in the top 3, you're going to see super high open rates if you have a, if you have a differentiated product and crystal clear value proposition. This has not changed in the age of AI. This has not changed. And I don't know why people thought crummy emails for the 10,000th, you know, cadence product worked and maybe it did work. I'm actually, I'm actually flabbergasted that those emails worked, right? Maybe they're sucker bets, but your job is to be in the top 3 initiatives or top 3 needs of your buyer. And then the last, the Captain Obvious thing I'll say, but this is why you have to read your team's emails, humans or AIs. You have to listen to their calls. It's gotta be great and it has to be something you would, would you buy your own product from your email? I would challenge everybody to go back and read emails from your sales team. Your revenue team, your marketing team. Read the email they sent out about your product and ask yourself, would you buy based on this email? I'll bet you over 90% you would not buy your own product from it. So why would you expect anybody else to? Slow it down. Read that email. You know, the next age of AI and sales prospect, but why would you buy that product? Slow it down. Put some data in it. Even better, put it, put it the best, you know, the best one that works. You know, if you, if you're reaching out to Lovable, hey, Replit used us and won 5 big deals, you know, reach out to direct competitors, HubSpot versus Salesforce, whatever. You know, those ones always work when you have a great case study from one competitor, you're going to get a meeting, but the lazy arse email never, never worked before. I guess maybe it worked before, it don't work today. So I don't know if that totally answers the question, but outbound works as well as it ever has if you solve a top need. And sorry, the last, I know it's a lot, what you, don't realize— I'll tell you how it works in big companies. Maybe you folks have worked in there. I was just a VP at Adobe for a little more than a year, but basically there were, you know, there was unbudgeted, discretionary, and budgeted, right? You sort of know these words, but you might not see them in practice. Okay. Getting budgeted money, it was big dollars, but it was really hard. Okay. They're melting million-dollar contracts. These often would take 1, 3, 5 years of discussing and planning until you could close that deal. Okay, maybe get a pilot. But then I was the most junior VP of all the VPs. I don't know how many VPs were, 40, 50, but even I had a $500K slush budget. Okay, and this was a while ago, so today it might be a million bucks. Okay, and everyone had more. And what was my slush budget for? My top 3 needs that I just couldn't get elsewhere in the organization. Elsewhere budgeted through the CFO and I needed. So if you gave me, if you solve one of my 3 needs sitting in my corner tower office and it was some fraction of that $500K to $1 million, I had budget. I didn't even care. It's use it or lose it in big companies. Okay. Now I didn't have one more dollar than that. I didn't have one more dollar and I didn't care about my 8th problem. I just didn't care. But selfishly, if you solved one of my problems, I had $500K to $1 million to buy. So those are the budgets you're fighting for. They haven't changed in the age of AI, but our priorities have changed. And no, so many folks have their own problems in their own org, but they're also under pressure to bring innovation into the enterprise. That's the AI budget. You got to be, be in these three. But I had— it was really, really hard for me to get a million-dollar piece of software, and it probably would have taken me years as the new VP. But I had a million bucks in aggregate, almost a million bucks to spend on whatever I needed. To get the hundreds of folks that work for me just to solve their problems. Not even that much per person, right? But I could, I could do that in a week or two. That was up until that line, and then I was tapped out for the year. So, all right, I think we're over for now. We'll keep going for the rest of the day and bar's open. Thanks everybody. Talk to you in a bit.

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