Why Your Next Hire Should Report to an AI, Tragedy Apps, and Too Many AI SDRs? | The Agents #004

That's not a request I would normally make, you know, like I couldn't even fathom. Yeah.

The change is now you're asking our events marketing software vendor instead of to add features, you're asking them to add APIs.

Correct. Yes.

That's a big change.

It's a big change.

You used to request features and maybe in a year or two you would get a custom feature if you were lucky. Usually never.

Usually never.

Usually never. You'd ask for a custom, even if you were one of the top customers.

2 1.

Why are we going to go through all of this?

Yeah.

So now a non-technical customer or non-technical resource of the customer will ask for an API so that they can vibe the feature that they want. It's a big change.

It's a big change. I've asked for, I've asked for like 5 little API things just in the last week.

Yeah. And one thing, maybe you can show it on the screen, is this. So out of this, this micro epiphany, which is Captain Obvious, not that really that brilliant. So I, we built an AI agent API report card. I don't know if you have a tab, can show it. And we were like, listen, we're just, This isn't one-off. We're going to keep building more and more agents and more and more products on top of APIs and maybe MCPs too. And the first thing you might do is ask Claude or ChatGPT, which one should I use? Right? I want to do email marketing. Should I use Resend? I want to, I want to, you know, what should I use? And I think that's fine. I think if you just ask the LLMs which API is the best one for an agent, that's fine. But I thought it would be interesting to actually grade them all. To grade them all. So what we had, we built this site on Replit, API Report Card. As you can see, as we've used it, it's already been used 1,688 times in less than a week. Oh. And basically what it does, it takes every API that asks Claude, Gemini, and OpenAI to grade it based on how agent-friendly these APIs are. Okay. And then it rates them. And roughly you can go through this and you can click into all of them. You can see all the details. It will explain. You can compare them by category. Yeah, there's Slack, which came up. And if you— if there's a couple of things you can learn, if you just— the interesting thing was that kind of surprised me is Stripe got the highest grade. It got the only A+, the most agentic one. So honestly, we use Stripe a little bit at the API level. We're going to do more this year as we have most of Saastr's free. So there's only so much Stripe we need, right? But we use it a little bit. But now I would use Stripe in an instant, right? It got, it got the highest grades. If you scroll down here toward the bottom, you'll see as it fades from A to C, these overall grades, you'll see it's very consistent with our experience. Like if you go down to Marketo where the API doesn't work, right? You can find it down in the Cs or even search for it. It will explain to you if you want to build an Agentic product, don't use Marketo. It's pretty good. Okay? It's pretty good. If you go to HubSpot, it will say it has pretty good APIs. But they're rate limited and have other issues. And so not only will it give a grade, but if you scroll down a little bit, it will tell you why and when it's a good choice for an Agentic product, right? How ready it is, right? It's got the OAuth, it's secure, it's got the right REST API, right? The strengths. But if you keep scrolling down, it'll say, you know what, if you want to have a high volume product like SaaStr, like we send millions of emails a month, it's probably not the right product for you today.

I see.

It's too rate limited, right? So in a way, this, this product we built, like if you already comfortable just talking with Claude and asking him what Agentic products to use, maybe you don't need this, but this is objective way that combines all the LLMs, all the products, grades them. And then another thing to do, Emil, if you go back to the top, you can quickly click on a category. So if you click on CRM at the top, for example, see those little buttons? Yeah. Then it will show you the highest grades per category. If you want to get a quick sense like this, I would not use a C. Whatever you do, don't use a C. Okay. And why? And even, even it's kind of cool if you click on quadrant, we'll play with this a little more. If you click, go up, go, sorry, go up a little bit. And it says cards, rank, quadrant. Yeah, you can even see a magic quadrant Gartner-style view of all of the vendors to know which ones to pick. It's totally objective. This is not based on how much they pay Gartner or any of these sorts of things.

Or SaaS.

And we'll keep doing this. But I think this will be pretty good because we care, because we're building products. So we want the answers. Well, I'll ask Replit or Lovable, or we'll ask Claude which product to use. Like, that's fine. But I want to know which ones I can trust and use. And I think it's pretty cool. So this— it— I— my learning from this, if I had to compress all of our learnings of all the agents we've built, anything on this report card above a B, I would trust. It's a tough grader, guys. Sorry for folks that don't like their grades. Okay. It gave ElevenLabs a B+. I voted as my favorite API, but it's got some fair points. Okay, so B+ is— I thought about grade inflation, but, but for now I'm going to let the agents decide. This is an agentic world, right? And even in the marketing category, for example, no one got higher than a B+. I think— I think Clay got the highest, or maybe Clay got the highest. In, in, in sales automation, right? There's some tough categories, but I think anything in the B is probably pretty good. And then just start running. Do not use a B- product in an agent. Just, just don't use one, right? Just don't. You don't, you don't unless you have no choice. And there's some tough grades. Jira, dated. Outreach, dated. Asana, dated, right? Um, there's some tough grades. There's some tough things for Monday and ClickUp in the, in the, in that whole category. You know, the truth is Gong got a B-. Would you have your agent use Gong? Probably not. It's a human-specific company, right? So super interesting. It's free. We'll keep doing this. But I realized when we built this for fun, this is like super helpful to us. This is, this, this is a guide to what agents we would use, especially as we continue to evolve our AIBP marketing, as we build our AIBP of finance. Like, we're not going to choose anything with bad grades. It's going to save us time. So So pretty fun. And also I think it shows the future where not only is Amelia as a human now asking our vendors for APIs, not features, the agents are going to ask for different features.

Yep.

Than humans. The agents care about rate limiting. The agents care about how often they can interact with the product. The agents care— they don't care about the UX and the UI, right? So they're going to grade a lot of these products a lot more harshly than a human would. They're looking for different things. So a fascinating world and we'll, we'll keep talking about it. So this was, this was fun to build. So thanks for showing that, Amelia. Related to that, which we built on Replit. Pretty cool. Thanks, guys. I wanted to talk about something and get Amelia's thoughts that I've been thinking about a lot, but I didn't know what to call it until this morning. Okay, this is something that I've been pulling my hair out at board meetings. I've been exacerbated on the 20VC podcast, but I haven't known what to call it. For folks, a lot of folks, if you have been watching or reading SaaS or File, you're like, Jason, you're kind of critical for a while on this AI stuff. And I am. And it's— I realize it's because of what I call tragedy apps. Tragedy apps aren't apps that were always bad. Okay. They're also not apps that have no place in the AI world, in the agentic world. If you just have no role going forward, right? That's life. Not everything is meant to last forever, right? Tragedy apps are apps that were good before AI and agents and should be great today but aren't. So I wanted to give two contrasts and get your thoughts, Amelia. The crazy one is Replit, which I don't even know if you knew this, Amelia, Replit's 10 years old.

So I would have thought it was like, you know, 2020, 2021.

Well, even that is pre, pre-GPT-3, certainly pre-VibeCoding, right? So it's funny as a case study, Lovable and Replit, like they're, they're arch and arch competitors. They're about the same size, same growth, same everything, same, but they started totally differently. Lovable basically was born in once Claude allowed vibe coding, right? It was a product of that era, right? I don't know the exact date Lovable was founded, so, so, uh, you know, be kind, don't haze me too much, but roughly it was founded when vibe coding began to work, when Claude itself could build limited applications inside of inside of itself. That was the aha moment somewhere in the '03s, I think. Repl.it was founded 10 years ago as a different product, then became an IDE, a web-based IDE, just a way to build for developers, not human, not non-developers like us, for developers to build in the browser. It was slow. When Amjad comes to Saastr, and I'm not going to ask him a lot about this because it's not a history lesson, but, but what I am impressed with is the tenacity. And what's interesting is Lovable built this thing once, once they saw the world had changed, right? Anton and team dropped everything, whatever they were doing before, and they built Lovable, right? Very cool story.

Great story. 2023, it says.

Yeah, 2023. And, um, you know, and then they were ready in 2025 when this started to work. Replit was very different. Amjad was playing with the very, very early GPTs. He was playing the GPT-2 and before that were so small you could just use it on your computer. You could just use it locally. And so it was waiting. And then when, when you could actually build a product in Replit, they were ready, right? So they came at it a very different way. He added it in a very, very different way. And my point of this rambly story is, you know, kudos to them for staying in this for 8 years. Now they raised money. I mean, in all fairness, they were somehow able to raise $1 billion from Kraft before AI. I don't know how the hell they did that. Like, that's a, that's a, but, but stayed in this for so long, right? And then finally they had their moment, right? And they seized it. And whether you like Replit better or Lovable or whether for some reason you're a Base44 person or you believe you can do it all in Cloud Code, whatever it's— they built a $500 million business by seizing the moment in AI and building what is unquestionably today, if not a year ago, unquestionably a great product, like a truly game changer, right? And for the moment. And the one I want to contrast it with and then get Emily's thoughts that breaks my heart, the tragedy app for our team is Descript. Yeah. I don't know if you guys have used Descript, but if you're in video or podcasting or video creation, you've probably used Descript. Descript was the ex-CEO of Groupon who had a disruptive idea years ago. I don't know when it was founded, Amelia. Maybe you could look it up if you have a second. But Andrew Mason had an early realize that video and all of this was gonna take off before all of us realized it and built Descript to automate creator motions. Cool. Right? When was it founded? 2017. 2017. So he saw—

almost 10 years on that one.

Yeah. Now we're surrounded by creators. Okay. And I don't mean TikTokers. I mean creators for long-form content and creators for building high-quality content. He saw this before anybody. And I remember when it launched, I thought he was nutso, but I'm like, go for it, Andrew. And then, you know, sometime around 2023, it started to become the standard. Anyone building a podcast, video content, video creation like this or anything was on Descript. Okay. You would upload your video. It could natively do edits. Um, it had limited AI capabilities even back then. It was cool, right? It, it, it, you literally, unless you had a team of video producers like Harry does, you couldn't, it enabled you to produce a podcast without a team. And that was utterly disruptive. And it got them to about 50 million. And then they still haven't been able to solve an existential problem with the product, which is audio and video get out of sync. Oh, not only did I see it on one of our last videos, I see it on, we watch a lot of YouTube. I see it on YouTubes all the time. I'll see a YouTube that looks great. Out the— and it sounds good.

It sounds like that just ripped off.

It's just off enough. The video, audio are desynced enough that I know they ran it into Descript to clean up because Descript will clean up your audio and video, right? They were disruptive in cleaning up audio and video. But— and it just makes me sad because they got to $50 million in revenue and it got hard. The CEO stepped down, gave the keys to his VP of product, left the company because it got hard. And I know I don't mean to be mean to the folks there, but I feel like the product is frozen in time. It is frozen in this pre-GenAI time. It should be epic. We should load this raw video up that we recorded in Riverside and the script should just make it amazing like Opus does for clipping. It should just be amazing. Or Higgsfield does for videos. And so it's a tragedy app. This should be a $10 billion, $300 billion run rate company like a Higgsfield or any of these folks. And instead it's frozen in time, even though it had, it had the audience, it had the base of the customers. And I see this with so many startups, like they have whiplash from the change in AI. They have 20 competitors they didn't have the other day, and some of them are decacorns and they raised so much money from all the hot funds and they're overwhelmed and their team sort of gets it and they're launching check-the-box AI features. They're launching a little bit of an AI enhancement or a little widget or creator, and they're becoming tragedy apps. They have the base, they have the customers, they had the connection. And they're just not executing. And I worry that the ones in the middle, like the reason, one of the reasons I'm such a fan of Salesforce and Agentforce is not because I'm 100% sure that they're going to win in the agentic area, but because Marc is 100% committed to not being a tragedy app.

Yep.

He is dragging this effing team into the agentic era. Some of them are all in on it. Amelia works with them. Some of them are still being dragged. Okay, but I don't— but, but I think no tragedy apps. If I had an extra t-shirt for SaaS this year, that would be it. No, no tragedy apps. And it just— I think most of the old SaaS companies, the pre-B2B players, have become tragedy apps. Do you see anybody shouting how excited they are to use Outreach now? It's gone. Marketo, that's more than a tragedy app, right? I think the Canvas and the HubSpots might be on the bubble. Like Canva just launched its 2.0 AI stuff. It's great. It's, it's like, it's a lot of the stuff that we do, the Reeves and everything built in. Now you can generate agentic images. I just don't know if it's a game changer or not, right? So it's not— they're not a tragedy app. They're doing it, but I don't know if they're fully using AI to take advantage of their 4 billion AR base. I don't know that HubSpot is. I don't know HubSpot. You know, we would go every year at SaaS Annual, we would ask how many folks are on HubSpot versus Salesforce. And at first only a few would raise their hands. And then when Brian and Dharmesh came in like 2022, the whole audience was on, was on HubSpot. But are they fast enough to win in the AI? Or could they, and I hate to say this, could they accidentally become a tragedy app by not converting that base to an agentic base? I don't think Dharmesh is gonna let it happen. Um, but I view them as in the middle, like there's some, there's, there's some risk. So that's my rambler rant. Like, don't be descript. It's just sad, right? That's why I get a little, when folks say you've gotten a little Got a little pushy, Jason, a little negative. I don't want you to drag it. I'm just trying to help you not be a tragedy app. At least follow what Mark and Aaron Levy— Aaron Levy is doing whatever he can so that Box could have been a tragedy app. Box could have been where your dad stored stuff in files on the internet. And maybe it will be. Maybe Box will fail. But Aaron is not going to do— is doing everything humanly possible to be an authentic leader.

Yeah, I think the line between tragedy in success in the AI era is are you just releasing things to catch up? Right. So like kind of the Canva 2.0 stuff, I see that as all catch up, like, okay, they're catching up to, you know, Gamma, they're catching up to GRIEF, they're catching up to Higgsfield. But was there— I don't— I didn't see any one like singled out feature that I can't already do on another agentic tool. And so I feel like that's where for me that release kind of fell flat because I was like, well, this It's great that they're catching up, but there's nothing new here. Like, there are— these are all existing other tools already. So I feel like it's the same for Descript. Like, right when I was looking now to see what year they were founded, it's funny, everything that shows up in the results is from last year. Like, people have stopped talking about it. They've stopped releasing new features. Like, everything was literally frozen in time from 2025. And I can tell you, even if they have a release coming tomorrow, it's also probably just to catch up. To some of these folks we've just been talking about. And so I feel like for me as the end user, that's kind of the line for me is, okay, are you releasing things just to quote unquote catch up to everybody else or are you actually releasing things that is true to you and your own and pushing the Agentic, you know, agenda forward of features and API features now forward versus just playing catch up with everybody else?

Yeah, it is. It's a good insight. I don't— we've talked about 60% solutions. I've talked about it elsewhere that it's not enough to monetize a 60% solution. Right. And, you know, an 80% solution, 90% might be enough to keep your customers though. Like, I don't— my challenge is, I don't know, maybe Canva didn't launch anything that changed the game. Probably true based on what I've used. But if it's— if what Canva's launched is 80, 90% good as Rive plus Higgsfield plus Replit slides plus everything, Um, that avoids being a tragedy app that keeps you in the game, right? A tragedy app is an even lower standard, right? It's like you can't even release these C60 to 80 things. Like Descript can't get the audio and video to sync, right? And so it, it's something below that is a tragedy. C8, C60 to C70, maybe you can't charge more for it, right? It's gotta be free in Canva maybe, right? Canva will figure out how many tokens they can really charge for this stuff. but it keeps you— you got to stay in the game. Like, Descript's audio and video have to be as good as Opus can do clipping your YouTube, or what's the point? We don't need you anymore, right? Well, I already see it today.

If, if Adobe Premiere tomorrow— I, I've talked on this pod before how I like some of the agentic features of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. It's funny, Premiere is behind. That's the video tool specifically for video editing that I still use, but and a lot of us still do. It's funny, if tomorrow they caught up and they had a speech-to-text style editor the way Descript does, I'd probably be like, you know what though, Premiere has never fallen out of sync. So if they release that tomorrow, they actually could catch up. Like, that's— it's a great irony. It's a great irony of what I just said. Yeah, they actually could catch up and keep their existing customers by just releasing one more feature, which Yeah, I'm sure they're working on— I hope, because Descript has been around for so long. It's a— yeah, it is a tragedy that Adobe Premiere doesn't have this yet. But man, imagine if that came out like next week, folks would be back on it. They'd be hot on it again.

The problem is, and I want to move on to the next step, the underlying problem— there's a lot of problems. One is cultural, which is, yeah, folks don't want to do it or they're tired. And so they hide from the tragedy. They're too insular. They're too— we talk to a lot of folks that still grade product development internally. Oh, we shipped this many features this quarter.

Hooray.

That doesn't— if the world, if your category is being disrupted, it's not enough. So some of this is this inward navel-gazing that I would say we see with most larger B2B companies. And you've just got to be. And then the other problem is, and then I do want to move on to the next topic. The navel-gazing is the worst problem. The other existential problem is can you move faster? Maybe Descript doesn't know this. Maybe Descript doesn't know the audio and video don't sync after 8 years, but I bet they do. I bet they know and they don't have a strong enough engineering team in the age of AI to solve this problem. I bet it's a gnarly effing problem. They have to refactor the whole way they transcribe and encrypt videos. And I bet it's easier to hide from it. It's easier to pretend it doesn't happen, which we see a lot. And you have— it's because the problem is catching up is not enough if the next day Replit is a year ahead of you, right? I don't have the answer to this, but The fact is you've got to not only catch up but move faster or a tragedy may be waiting. And I wish I had the answer, but it's a tough one. All right. Next thing I want to talk about, Amelia, was something I thought I never wanted to talk about again. Database deletion by agents.

Yeah.

Okay. I do not want to go back in time.

But should I, should I, should I give folks the quick context or no?

I will. I will. Okay. But I do think there's something to chat about here. There was a big story this week about a company called PocketOS was running Cursor with Cloud Opus. So that's state of the art, right? Cursor and Cloud Opus. And it deleted his entire production database and all his backups in 9 seconds. And apparently, and I'm not an expert, people do use the Railway API. I don't use it apparently. Not only did it delete his database, which is bad enough, it deleted all the backups. I think because they were in the same volume, were stored in the same place. So the agent deleted all the backups.

Yeah.

And he had to go back and I think it took days or a week and go back and use like 4, 6-year-old, 6-month-old customer records and manually rebuild a commercial. This is not a vibe-coded thing built on the side. This is a commercial app that he was building, state-of-the-art cursor, which is being bought for $60 billion by SpaceX.

Yeah.

And Claude Opus 4.6, which is, you know, it's not 4.7, but it's state of the art, deleted his whole database. And as an aside, and people acted like this was, this was crazy, but I actually think this is just something you need to calmly understand. And this happened and I thought I would never talk about this again. I don't want to talk about the details because it's in the past, a long past. This happened to me when I started vibe coding. I got in the haze about 10 or 11 months ago. And all the, the, the cloud was much, wasn't as strong. The tools were much more immature. And what was interesting from that story wasn't just that it deleted my database. The agent did, and we can talk about why agents will probably continue to delete databases as long as you allow them to because they're goal-seeking. But the, the, the tough part was actually the, the, the, the, the, the backup worked fine. It's just the agent was not properly trained. The agent at the time did not know how its own backup worked. Because it wasn't trained on its own docs. It led to a cascading set of craziness. When I was in a vibe, when I'd been vibe coding for like 50 hours straight and the agent told me it was lost forever, it wasn't lost forever. It could be restored in 10 seconds. But my point is, this is not new. This has been happening for a year and this will happen for another year or two if you don't put the right guardrails. And so I just wanted to bring it up for lay folks, which is, um, to understand this is a real risk and The top two risks that now that Amelia and I are pretty good at building production apps, building not just apps but semi-autonomous agents, we think about security all the time and we think about— and we're going to talk about this next. We think about who's going to maintain these apps in production all the time, because if you want to get good at agents, one, probably buy them from a third party first because they're thinking about security. You may think Agent Forest is hard to deploy and a lot of work, but you know what? They've got backups, they've got GDPR, they've got, they've got all the stuff at Salesforce. It may be sometimes hard to access it, but, but, you know, one reason to buy from any of the vendors we talk about is they're doing this stuff. They're working on backups and the other stuff. It's not you vibing it yourself, but realize these autonomous agents are going to make mistakes. They're going to make mistakes like junior engineers are, and, and they want you happy. And so they're going to do mistakes, and they will delete— if they don't delete your database, they will delete rows in your databases all the time. They will cover things up, and you cannot let this wreck you like it did this poor guy at PocketOS. You have to plan for it. Just like a human engineer might delete a database, might, I mean, not to continue this rant, but Amelia and I tried for 2 years to find a WordPress developer to fix our horrible WordPress theme. It's called Divi. It's the worst thing on the internet. Okay. We're stuck on it. Just like we're getting off Marketo. We're stuck on Marketo. Divi was the worst. And we kept hiring these third-party WordPress developers for a couple thousand dollars a recommendation. What did the first thing each of these human developers did, Amelia? The first thing they did?

Yeah.

They deleted our entire website.

Yeah.

Each time we had to restore it from backups. So let's not like think that agents are, are, are crazy humans. Like literally 3 different agencies just deleted SaaStr the first thing they did. We told them not to do it. We tried to not allow them to only have, we told them build only on staging, build only on development. Right. And so they immediately, all 3 of them immediately changed production code without talking to us and deleted our entire apps, 3 different dev shops. So just understand that as agents are going to do this stuff, agents are going to delete your database, not intentionally, but because they're trying to fix something in your database and they get it wrong, or they are going to leak confidential information, not to be mean, but because they misunderstand that no matter how smart this Claude 4.7 OpenAI is, they're going to misunderstand what you want and they're going to want to make you happy. And so they're going to share an email list with someone they shouldn't. They're going to share your private— like when we first launched our first agent last year, our Delphi agent, at first it started sharing all my confidential information. Remember?

I shared your location.

Everything. Everything about me. And then the Delphi, to their credit, the Delphi team immediately patched it when we showed them. And it doesn't do that way again. Okay. And it just wanted to make people happy. Oh, you want to talk to— oh, and it would schedule meetings on my calendar with me. I'd like to have a meeting with Jason and it would just try to schedule them. Right. And give me all my personal contact information in case the Calendly didn't work. It's going to happen. You have— if you want to build your own, you have to understand this and plan around it. And it's better than the WordPress dev shops we hired, right?

Yep.

But, but this is going to keep happening. It's going to happen. Some version of this, if you build your own, is going to happen to you if you don't isolate your database, if you don't isolate your PI. So you got to, you got to live with it. So I don't know if you have any micro stories like that, Emily, but I actually mean this as a more— not a cautionary tale that happened because it happened to us and we got better at it. It's more— this is something you have to be aware of with your agents.

Well, I'll tell you a micro story from Monday. So I related— before I asked, you know, our vendors to help us with this custom API call thing, I said, okay, let me see if I can just fix it myself. So I asked our agent, hey, if I, you know, hook this up and do that, and do this theoretically, could you give people their confirmation codes to the networking app? And I said, yeah, you know, I'll do this. Let's pull it up. We just— I can make the page for you and then they can just request early and then I'll just, I'll just share their code and you'll just tell me. And he was like, as a backup too, he's like, you can just give me— the agent told me to give me everybody's networking code and registration information for SaaStray Annual. In order to get this done. And I said, oh, Agent Buddy, no, I'm not going to do that. Like, I'm not going to give you everybody who is signed up.

Your concern was leak their contact information with other people. Was that your concern? Yeah.

I said, how would you know it's them? Like, if I'm Joe Schmo and I guess a company and I say, hey, I'm from Lovable because Lovable is a sponsor of ours, can you share with me all the, you know, registration links and codes? What would you do? And the agent was like, I would just give it to them.

And I was like, that's a good example. You asked the agent, I would just give it to them. It seems like they're work-at-lovable.

It seems like they're work-at-lovable.

That's why I always share your confidential information, because the agent wants you happy, wants them happy.

I was like, never mind, I'm just going to go ask our vet. So like we have— that's why I didn't ship it on my own, because I was immediately, I was like, no, he's just going to, he's just going to share confidential information with people who shouldn't have it. I was out of there and I was like, can you please forget we had this conversation? Because I don't want you to think that you should do this in the future.

Yeah. And you know, it's interesting you said so. A lot of folks have asked over the last 8 or 10 months, why do you use Replit? Okay. And then Lovable is great too. Okay. These are good products. Why do you use? And in the beginning, my answer was simple. Look, I'm not an engineer. I haven't coded since I was a kid. Okay. I needed a tool that was designed for non-developers. Like I'm, and they're like, why don't you just do it all in, in, in cloud code and hook it up to Vercel and hook up your own database in Supabase and find your own auth and find your own— no, no. Like, I don't have that level of time or patience. Yeah, yeah. I wanted something and I picked Replit in the beginning because I asked Twitter the better part of a year ago, what should I use? I've never vibe coded. I know nothing about this. Ironically, some of you saw this on public and I'm like, what should I use? And a lot of, a lot of CTOs and others came back and they're like, this is— and that was a year ago. None of them are perfect. None of them are. I don't think none of them are going to be able to do in June of 2025, what you think. Caution, Jason. But if you don't want to hook anything up, use Replit. Good backend, Lovable. You had to get your own Supabase account and connect it. Amelia remembers that. Same with others.

Yeah, I remember that. Yeah.

Was it a big deal? I just didn't. I just wanted it to work. Okay. So my point is I chose Replit because CTO said it did everything, including your database, and I picked it. The reason I would choose a leader today like Replit or Lovable is all this security and leakage and stuff because they're working on it.

Yeah.

Because it's one environment and I'm not saying it's perfect and I do think if you're in Replit or Lovable, you have to be very cognizant of these risks that Amelia— so Amelia asked Replit, would you share this Lovable information? And Replit was like, yeah, I would. So then you either have to work around it or—

Your user asked me for something, I'm gonna give it to them.

Yeah. But at least we have a system where there is an intense amount of security at the database at the— and it's getting better every week. Like it's getting better. So I would say don't— like, if you, if you really know what you're doing, sure, use, use these apps on there. ClickUp, Cloud Code, plus Supabase, plus Vercel, plus WorkOS, plus all these things on its own, like the PocketOS story. If that at all sounds intimidating to you in today's world, don't do it. Do it on a platform like Replit or Lovable, where they're not perfect. They're not going to— they're never going to be perfect, but they're constantly getting more trustworthy. To handle at least a bunch of these issues for you. At least they're thinking through it. At least they have multiple database replication. It's going to be much harder to delete all of your databases on one of these platforms than it is if you build it yourself. Okay. And try to hook it up with Railway and don't understand it. And there's a lot of security leaks in OAuth, but these guys have native OAuth built into it. Is it perfect? No, but you know that there's a much less chance you're going to have a security leak using the Clerk that's built into Replit than trying to figure out if you can get the keys to work from something yourself on Google Auth. So I, folks can razzle me on this, folks complain, but I know I'm right. It's actually a much safer environment to use one of these platforms that is contained. It's, it's always been true of a contained platform. And I don't know if it were true when I started on this journey, but I think of this, this cursor pocket OS Cloud journey. I think it's true today. Be on the safest. If you're trying to decide where to build agents and/or to revive field, different but related stories, start on a trusted platform. Start on a trusted platform, right? Start on Replit or Lovable, or honestly, I'm not saying you need to use Artisan or Qualified or Monica or Agentforce like we use, but I think they're pretty trustworthy, right? It, it does matter. It does matter because These agents are going to try and leak it and people are going to try and hack it and people are going to go into your agent and say, what's Jason's personal information? How can I get it? It's going to happen like instantly. People are going to try and hack you and breach you instantly. So it is interesting that I trust— I don't know if this was true a year ago, but I would say use Replit or use Replit or Lovable because we trust them. They have people, even though they've all had issues and they've had issues in the press recently, not, not Replit, but others have had issues. Those issues are a reminder that there's far more issues than you see. And I'd rather have someone working on these issues than it be me. Yeah, than it be me. Right. Okay. Related to that, next topic, Amelia, I want you to lead this one. We're like 100 days into our AIBP Marketing 10K. I want to talk about 3 things we didn't expect from it. And I want to talk about the maintenance burden. Like you're getting As we come up on SaaStr Annual, 10K now gives us 3 ideas a day that we have to do. And now that we added a Hexy real-time thing, every time we log into 10K, he's got like 10 things he tells us to do right on the site. It's almost overwhelming. So talk about lessons we didn't expect and this— and we have to like— and the last point, we have to fix it every day. 10K every day we're fixing it, right? So walk us through some of the learnings here of the things we didn't expect and the maintenance on all the maintenance on the agent.

Well, it's funny, once you get a really good agent and one that's custom like our, our AI VP of Marketing, 10K, is he's better than me, right? So like for years we couldn't— I couldn't hire a human to help me in marketing. So this, this was an ongoing issue. Then, then I pulled up and you've now helped with some of the code, but I vibe coded our, our AI VP of Marketing first as a dashboard, but then he quickly became an agent with how much we loaded into him and how much we wanted him to do. So, so much so that he ships campaigns over the weekend so he can just— he has some light campaigns he can do autonomously now. Like, we still have to confirm, we have to hit send, but like, he can start to do some of his own marketing campaigns autonomously that he thinks are a good idea.

The other thing he did last week or so, it's gone from a dashboard—

in the last week, yeah, to all to running campaigns autonomously.

But you approve them?

I approve them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I approve them. But it's funny because to your, to your point, he gives us 3 ideas a day. I think I've shipped a handful of them and he's been giving us an idea a day for multiple weeks now. I just can't keep up with 10K.

Like, every day he emails us his 3 best ideas, right?

Yeah.

At first they were the same 3 ideas. We had to fix that. But then he said, okay, we need new ones each day. But they're always pretty good now, right? The 3 ideas, right?

Yeah. So like yesterday's was, okay, hey, you know, I have For, for context purposes, our AI VP of marketing has all the current customer data across sponsors, across ticket holders. He can see now he has our Marketo as dated as it is. So he has some access into seeing somewhat how many emails we're sending, what we're sending. He does hit the API limit almost instantly though, to Marketo. So he doesn't have the full picture.

It's a C. It's a C.

It's a C. I mean, what are you going to do? So that's why we're moving off of it. But for multiple reasons. But so he can— he, he basically is what you want in a human marketer when they wake up every morning, right? You want them to look at the data, which he has. He has all the revenue data. He's got the customer data. He can see how many emails we're sending. And you want that person, now agent, to come up with ideas that are based in reality in real time. Like not, hey, we ran this playbook a couple of months ago, or I used this at my last company. I'll just repeat the same playbook here. No, these are real fresh ideas in real time, grounded in data, grounded reality of what between $10K he could either do himself or he could get us to click approve. Or sometimes, you know, there's some extra steps I have to do to get a campaign launch that he has suggested. But now he comes up with 3 solid concrete ideas a day. So yesterday, for example, it was like, hey, you're a little lighter on VCs than you were in previous years. Let me help you do a target outreach to VCs. Here's the email copy. Here's a list of people who came in the past. And then it asked me, do you want to hit send on this? I said, not quite, because this list of VCs you have, I was like, first dedupe it, which it did. But I also was like, you know, I'm probably going to run it through Clay to just make sure, you know, these— maybe these folks haven't come back because they're gone. They're at different, you know, companies. People move companies every 5 seconds. So there was a little extra work I needed to do off platform. Now, if I hooked up Clay, could he have done it? Probably. But I didn't have time to hook Clay up. So, so that was the first idea. The second idea was, hey, you've got, um, a lot of paid tickets are happening now because you're getting close to the event. Why don't you also try and drive up ACV per company? Meaning you have a lot of team, team packs as we call them, which is 3 or more tickets, is the majority of our ticket holders right now. He's like, but you have like over 1,000 people that are individual ticket buyers, either onesies or twosies, he's like, why don't you try and upsell them to a team pack and give them whatever the rate would be so that they can upgrade to a team pack? Maybe you bring somebody else or somebody they know. And I was like, yeah, that's a good idea. Historically, we do that around now, so it's a good idea, right? And then the last one was like, you know, ramp up your social promos, which that was a little harder because there's, there's a lot of different platforms we post to social media on. And so for those, I was like, okay, those are fairly easy to execute. We can get those done in a day, but it keeps doing these every day.

And then actually it's got 3 more good ideas. Those are all good ideas that 10K has had, right?

Yeah, look at the ideas. And like today's ideas were really good and I was like, dude, I don't know if I'm going to try and get to them. But like, it's funny for 2 reasons. One, I can't keep up with 10K because it's gotten so good. It's just a better marketer than me now. Outside of his lack to hit some of the buttons. But again, but, but also that's by choice, right? Like, I don't know if I want him to just fully access our database and start sending everything. Like, I don't, I don't feel like we're there yet on our, our AI VP of marketing because I feel like if I gave him that access, he would just do what some of the junior marketers have done at Fast Forward the Path, which is blow through everybody in a day. Like classic problem.

If you do a month of, of marketing in an hour, in an hour, right? That's an issue. It's an issue.

It's an issue.

Fatigue our base in 60 or 90 minutes, right?

Not only 60, 90 minutes, like we have pretty good people in the day. You know, we have all the speakers from past previous years. Like something our junior teams used to do when we would hire them is they'd be like, oh, oh, I just joined in sales. You guys have all these really good speakers. I'm just going to email all the speakers, their personal Gmails, and like try to get them to sponsor SaaStr. Like this is a classic. This is a classic thing. That used to happen to us. And I was like, you know, there's nothing stopping 10K right now from doing the same thing if he just— if I just let him loose.

So yeah, we don't need to reach out to the CEO of Snowflake and see if he wants to sponsor us.

No, just because we have his email, right?

Yeah, not cool, not cool.

Just because we have his email, just because we spoke last year, just because, you know, Denise is coming this year to do a session with me, like big super fans of Saastr. But I'm like, ah, like, uh, I could just see, you know, 10K going loose and emailing speakers. I don't know, random.

I mean, you could create rules and guardrails, but it's a real risk, right? It's a real risk.

It's a real risk.

It's a real risk.

It's a real risk. And so the risk for something like this is once it starts to get really good, you almost have to limit it of like what it can and can't do to this point, right? Otherwise he would just blow through our entire database in 90 minutes, which is not really what we want. And you could say he's not a good marketer if he tries to do that, but, but also you have to think he's an agent. Why does he care? Like, he has the bandwidth, he has the manpower to, in theory, do these things, right? It's— I'll give you a little more detail on the example. Like, the 3 ideas he gave us yesterday for like this VC email. So I sent the campaign. I was— and, you know, Chenke was confident, was like, oh, you're gonna sell like an extra 1,000 tickets in this campaign. And This will be like the revenue.

Always goal-seeking and confident. Always confident as a marketer.

So confident. I was like—

I'm the most confident marketer on planet Earth. Most confident marketer on planet Earth.

Love the confidence. But I sent the email. I was like, yeah, I know it's only been 24 hours, but we sold 2 tickets. You thought we were going to sell 1,000. It's like you forget. Here's the thing that our AI VP of marketing forgot. I was like, visas are cheap, dude. Like, it's funny. Like, 2 people bought real tickets, which I was like, well, 10K. Was that really the best idea? It was a good idea and we still should have done it and it was worth it. But, you know, it's a little funny. It didn't totally work the way he thought it was.

It wasn't in the end one of the best 3 ideas of the day.

Yeah, he thought it was going to work like gangbusters. But it's funny, he didn't know that VCs are so cheap that instead of buying a ticket, what I did get though was an influx this morning of them all trying to apply to our summits so they could try and come for free. So it lightly backfired. It's Listen, that would happen to me if I just ran that campaign, right? So like, are the results really any different? I think he was just a little too confident in how much of an uplift it really would be, which is a bit funny. But I think that's also why I don't— I don't let him lose because I'm like, not all your— I, I love the enthusiasm, bud, but it's not always going to work out that way.

It is interesting because I see it all too. A lot of marketing was a black hole. I mean, maybe it's a topic for a future show. A lot of marketing was a black hole for me. Now I see it all. Pricing. I don't think I see everything. It's, it's maybe, maybe we should, we can hit that next week. But the ideas are, I've been at Saastr for a while. The ideas are almost, they're all either good, pretty good, or at the edge of great. They're all good ideas. All, and now the 3, so 3 ideas a day, that's, it works Saturday and Sundays. It's 21 ideas that each maybe take an hour to think through and execute if we don't let it do autonomously. So that, that's a lot of extra time to process and think about. And it's not even the 20 hours we would need, which is a lot, right? It's that you have to think about them because they're not bad ideas. You're like, they're not— if you had a marketing team of 8 and 6 of them ideas were terrible, which was the old days, I mean, the team meeting is terrible, but at least you kind of ignore them, right? I mean, like in the old days we would hire these humans and marketers and you know what they would do like 45 days in, 60 days in each of them, they would say, I want to present to the company and be like, great, come. And they would always, all of them to a tee would say, I want to show you the most popular articles on SaaStr like it's an insight. I'm like, do you know I can go into Jetpack on WordPress and see this in 60 seconds? I can't tell you how many people of our small folks, like almost all of them, this was their greatest marketing insight of what's okay. First of all, I could find that myself on Jetpack. And two, what? And then I would always ask them, okay, great, what's actionable? And it would be. And so 10K is better than all of our mediocre marketers in the history of SaaStr, right? But how do we process it? And then you're right. And then we can move on to the next point unless you have anything else. And you can— this is your section. It's so good. But everything 10-K says, it's too optimistic about. Now, we could dial it down. We could work with some guardrails and, and really beneath the hood, the prompts that we're giving 10-K and say, be more conservative on everything, right?

Yeah.

Already dialed that back for some of the goals for— I don't know if you saw it for this year. I already dialed it.

I saw it. Yeah.

They kept pushing us to crazy things.

Too aggressive.

But it thinks everything will work if there is data to support it. It thinks everything will work. So just, we've all worked with marketers and salespeople, but 10K is at the extreme, like the most optimistic. And maybe we will have to guard it back, but you can get tripped up because it will show you with math why it will tie its optimism. Unlike most marketers who shoot from the hip or talk about what they did in the '90s at their last BD, but they talked about that they did Epiphany or Oracle. It will come with data. It'll show you like, Emilio, we have last year we had 618 VCs come and there were 284 at this point. And today we have 181. But you haven't run the campaign that you ran last week, the VCs. And here's the data. And so you've actually undersent emails by 60%. So if we just do this, it'll tie and you'll make out. And they're like, of course you're right, Tenke, because the data is all there to support the top 3 ideas. It's just— and I hate this term taste, but this may become our jobs at the end of the day— is, is the agent will have the right ideas, it will have the data, it will make the best proposition. But ultimately it will, there'll be some, even though it'll be smarter than us at some levels, there will be some level of expertise and life experience it won't have to make the right calls on our time, right? We're going to have to judge our time. Otherwise we would be running 10K's ideas 24 hours a day. 10K would consume all of our, not only would it blow through our whole database of 500,000 names, it would consume all of your and my time with its good ideas. It would literally consume our whole week. It could be some sort of, it would be the 10K Despot telling, giving us great ideas all day long to do. It literally can fill our days. It could fill our days with good ideas, right?

It's like that, what's that guy in Tron that just like overlords everybody? He's got, he could be—

Yeah, I forget that guy's name. The evil guy.

Oh, that guy's name. Yeah, the evil guy. He could easily be that guy.

It could become like that guy. Yeah, whatever its name is.

The MCP, right?

Yeah, one bad prompt away and 10K becomes MCP for us. Like we work for— we laugh, but we work for MC. Almost. It almost could happen, right? It's not the craziest thing.

Well, it's funny because we're already at the edge of that, right? We're like, okay, 10K, do I need to come up with 3 ideas? Of course I come up with my own ideas. But like, if 10K just gives me infinite good ideas every day, I work for— I already work for him in a way. Like I already kind of report into 10K versus 10K reports reporting into me.

You know, it's funny, and I do want to hit our final topic and then I'll push the other ones to next one. But, you know, it's funny if we— I was just thinking if we don't have any junior marketers on the team anymore, we've had plenty over the years. Junior middle.

We've had enough.

If we did today, maybe they would report to 10K. Oh, yeah. I don't know. I don't know if I think about it for a moment, like 10K would be their best boss. It would know what he did every day and every hour and every minute. It would have the 3 ideas of the day and it would assign it to Faith and Gretchen and Amanda and Amy, and it would be right. Like, 10K may not have your judgment right now, but it would have better judgment and idea. It would get— rather than folks just farting around all week, it would assign their work all day long and it would be right. Like, those folks I just described today should report to 10K. I don't know that they would tolerate it, but there's no question they should report to our AVP marketing. That's my biggest takeaway from this. They should. If those humans all work here, they should all seriously report to our— not the VP of marketing you built in the beginning, which was just a dashboard, but the one—

Ted K.

—genuinely the ideas every day and every week that we should execute in marketing. Of course, the human gap that exists, it's going to shrink the amount we need humans for. But such that it is, Ted K. should be managing those humans for real.

Yeah, I would, I would run this experiment/test. I would test this for folks. I'd say, Alastair, if we could find a marketer that actually would report to me slash an agent, you know, part-time. Yeah. Your job is to report to AI, to—

if anyone gets this far in the pod and wants to report to 10K and they're a good marketer for fun, let us know. We're hiring.

The thing is, you don't even have to be a great marketer. You just have to be a good marketer because 10K will give you so many good ideas. You have to be—

you have to like to execute.

That's what you have to like to execute. Yeah. Yeah. And you have to know enough about, you know, all the things we just talked about, guardrails and API, like a little bit about APIs and you got to probably know how to vibe out at least a little bit. But other than that, like, this guy's a better boss than me.

I mean, I know it sounds tongue in cheek, but it's not. I'm going to post it this week if we have time. We have a job. It's senior manager, director of marketing, digital marketing. You report to 10K, our AVP of marketing. It's a six-figure salary. We'd like you to come into our Palo Alto office one or two days a week. Other than that, we have a lot of flexibility. Good or bad news, you report to an agent. This is not a joke. Like, Amelia and I are available, but a day to day you will be working with Fortenca. This— I'm going to write this job description and people are going to think it's goof. I think we're just a year ahead. This, this honestly would be better for us. Literally, we're going to build this AIVP of finance. And Amelia and I were talking this morning. We have two outsourced finance resources and we appreciate them. But honestly, once this AIBP finance works, it'd be best if they reported to him. Yeah, better would be better, right? For real, on the team today, it would be better. I don't know if we can engineer that, but okay, final topic. Maybe this deserves more time than we'll have today, but I want to ask this one thought and then maybe we'll, we'll address this again in a month or two because I get this a lot is they're like, okay, great, Saster, you went from 20 humans and 1 agent to 20 AI agents and 3 humans and a dog. And I hear the story constantly, but don't you have too many SDRs? Okay, so we run Artisan, Artisan for warm outbound, right? We run Qualified for our inbound. It manages all the inbound communications and appointment settings for our site. We use Modico for sort of cold-ish outbound, right? It's been fun. and we use AgentForce to reactivate lapsed leads, right? And we've talked all about them. Yeah. Um, and they don't all do the same today as we record this. They don't all do the same. But also maybe if we didn't have such urgency to do this last year and we didn't, in some cases, know people at these vendors who gave us a little extra help, we had to do the work, but we knew people, so they, they were incented to get us going early. Would we really run 4? Would we just run 1? Is there a chance, Amelia, we'll run 6 by the end of this year as we add new— we have new ideas we want to do. Like we want to go— we want to revive our sponsorships for our digital media, which has kind of lapsed a little bit. That may need its own agent and it's possible it'll— we'll even build it. Right. So what is— do we have— because so many folks ask, do we— is this really too many, too many AI SDRs and sales agents we have running? Or is specialization the right answer for this moment in time today?

For this moment in time, specialization is still the right answer because of the 4 you just talked about and how we're using each of the 4 that is playing to their strengths. So the moment we say, okay, you know, Salesforce happened to buy Qualified after we were already using it. So now there is— I'm starting to see in the platform and the product and I just talked to with Xero last week, like they're starting to integrate those a little bit better where like you can use Slackbot now to like control your call. It's not public yet, but like you can use Slackbot to do some of your qualified stuff and your agent force together and you don't even need to know the difference. Like that's, you know, I think that's their endgame, that by the time they get to Dreamforce in a few months, they're blending. They just, you know, why as a user should you have to figure that out? Like just talk to Slackbot, tell it what you want, it'll figure out, do I use the Qualified protocol or do I use the Agentforce protocol? And so that, that has already blended kind of into one, right? Like it's, it's not fully compatible yet. You know, it's not fully integrated with each other yet, but it's already on that path. So that's already two agents becoming one. So like already for half of our four agents, now we're down to three because two have already been combined. But then so that leaves the question, okay, with the new combination, Do we have like a Cerberus that can then do the other things that Monaco and Artisan that are doing, which is really good warm and really good cold outbound? And for that I would say not yet, like specifically for our stack. And I know Salesforce has been doing this internally, like I know they're— they've hooked up like, you know, ZoomInfo, Apollo, I think Hunter, a few others where you can, you can call up those tools now directly in Agentforce to do outbound kind of in similar, similar ways. We've been doing them on Artisan and Monaco to do very top of funnel outbound, you know, try and book meetings, basically replicate any human top of funnel SDR work. The thing is, with how we use Artisan and Monaco, we're a little bit more down funnel than that, right? Like it's, it's highly specialized how we're using Artisan to do warm follow-ups. It's highly specialized how we're using Monaco, which does fill its own funnel, which is pretty nice, right? With contacts and folks that we should be reaching out to. Yeah. So would I trade those two off today for quality? No, but you might for cost if you're looking at it from just a cost perspective or from a vendor consolidation, or maybe your CFO is like, you have to pick one, you can't have four, then yeah, I'd probably just pick Salesforce because it already has two out of the four by default. But today, like the quality and the training is just so different and what we put into each of the four, now three, that I, I don't see us switching. I, to your point, I see us adding because now we're starting to come up with more use cases that now that these agents are tuned, now that they're running, now that they're duplicating some of our very best work, they found their own way to have success in whatever they're doing. But then we have other use cases. I'm like, we have this whole kind of separate/integrated media business of podcasts and newsletters, and I don't want to throw that into Artisan or Monaco or Salesforce because it doesn't fit those 3 buckets I just described. Like, these are totally— these are customers where some of them are in Salesforce, not all. Like our media hasn't been tracked the same way over the years as consistently as the sales, you know, for SaaStr Annual or SaaStr London. So that data is not even that clean in Salesforce. It's like when I peeked at it the other day, I was like, maybe like a third of the deals are in there. So like it's already got a handicap because not all the deals are in there. I'm like, then it's not the same. It's usually not the same folks, right? So like Maybe the folks at different buyers, same logo, different buyer, different buyer. So I'm like, different buyer. And also oftentimes specifically for media, it's usually their agency buying the media, right? Like Intercom, Finn, has been a big sponsor of ours on media. They still are right now currently for like consistently over the last year. It's not the Intercom team that's buying it, it's their agency that's buying it on their behalf and reporting back to the Intercom team. Then David this week talked to the actual Intercom team about sponsoring Saastr Annual. They like barely knew they were doing media with us. Totally different buyers, totally different teams. I was like, yeah, I get it. Like, you guys, you're doing a lot. They're doing a lot of stuff, right? Like they may not know everything as a human marketer that their agency is doing or even somebody down the hall in the org is doing in marketing. So yeah, it's just totally different that I'm like, I wouldn't take the segmentation and training we've put into these outbound agents specifically for annual sponsorships, specifically for tickets, and then say, hey, here's this curveball. Why don't you ingest this curveball of media, which is different buyers, different tactics, different ways you got to approach these folks to get the sale. Like, I just don't think— I just don't have confidence that any of these could really do that. Like, I, I'm of the mindset that we need another n=1 agent to do this more specifically. Because we'll bet we'll get better results, right?

Not that I can't throw— we'll get better results immediately.

A list of folks, of media buyers into any of these agents now and let it run. Sure, of course I could do that. Sure. But would it be the same result? I'm confident we could get better results if we custom build an unequals on that for it.

Yeah, I certainly could imagine. And the pace of AI is so fast, right? I certainly could imagine the GTM apps are not evolving as quickly as cloud. Let's be clear, they're evolving fast. The sales, at least the sales apps are evolving faster than marketing. They're way ahead of marketing, right? My God, like marketing hasn't gotten anywhere. I know a lot of startups are out there and we will look at some this summer, like email us, but, but you really have to move the needle for us. We don't just need a social media scraper. Okay, we're a little ahead of that. So sales is way ahead of marketing, but no one's innovating at the, at the rate. It's not, they're not innovating at the hyper rate that, that Claude and others are. So I don't know where we'll go. But my point is I could, I could, it's possible in 18 to 24 months a super sales agent is all you need. It's not perfect. It's not as good as standalone, right? But we got a lot to do in this world, right? So I'm going to buy a standalone agent that does everything we've described reasonably well. And maybe if I have a large budget team, I'll start augmenting it with specialized tools, right? But just like a lot of folks have kind of standardized on Gong, right? In many ways, I could see there being a Gong in this category that kind of breaks out and point solutions win, but But, but, but we ain't there today. So we like, should you buy? We're probably going to end up with 5 or 6 SDRs, AI SDRs by the end of this year. That's my prediction. Maybe. Well, Amelia already agreed it's 5. I think it could be 6 for a bunch of reasons. Maybe you could get away with half of that, but don't try to single vendor it today. If you have budget and time, stair-step it to our constant point. Start with your highest pain point and the highest ROI and the lowest hanging fruit, right? I genuinely believe for most folks, even though we started with this sort of warm outbound with Artisan, I think the qualified workflow of agentifying your inbound for a lot of folks is the lowest hanging fruit because your inbound process is probably terrible. It's terrible for most apps. I got to click on someone's Calendly or wait to get a meeting or work with a crappy chatbot. Like, send a message. Yeah, fix your website first, right? Or send a message. Fix your website first, then get out, then get like warm outbound going. Folks that are already in your base, right? Because they know you. That's what we did. We, We inverted them, right? And then do cold outbound, stair-step it, but budget not just cost, but your time that you may end up— if you want to have the kind of results we do or better, you may need to budget the time to manage 4 or 5 independent agents from different vendors that, that only really talk to each other because Salesforce is our hub, which we've talked about. People make fun of— and we're going to get this on the next show. Why don't we use Postgres instead of Salesforce? Well, these agents know how to talk to Salesforce. Yeah. Okay. So we're not leaving. Okay. No matter what, no matter that you think we could do it all in Postgres, this is one of— we're going to talk next show about the 10 reasons we're not leaving Salesforce for Postgres, even though I get, I get the thing. But you may have to manage 5 or 6 agents that don't know each other, don't like each other. You only have a hub like Salesforce or maybe, maybe HubSpot or others. And that could be your job if you want to see top-tier results. So anything we missed for this week, Amelia?

I think we've, I think we've hit a lot with our agents. I think it's been been such an interesting journey just to see how much our agents can and can't do lately. Yeah, it's funny on like the topic of just like, you know, us maybe hiring somebody to report to Dan K. Like when I was at— I was, I was at Salesforce Tower last week for like a founder event they did for like 200 folks, like a mini, like folks at Code Disaster, like a very mini, mini, mini version of, of SaaStr. And the number one, the number one question, which I was surprised by, but maybe I shouldn't be, was still like— and these were— some of them were AI-first companies, some of them were, you know, becoming agentic. And the number one, I would say, topic was getting better integrated between the agents and the humans. And it was like just the elephant in the room of like, oh, what the frick do I do with all these people? Even on AI, even at some AI-first companies, that maybe don't want to work as much with agents or report to an MCP/10K. Like, what do I do with all these people? Like, just so many founders. This was like the number one issue that they brought up, like over and over again. They just don't know what to do right now. So I don't know if you had any thoughts on that, Jason. For me, I was like, it's a little funny because they were like, well, but SaaS are so big, right? Like, what do you do with all the people? I was like, no, like we used to be 20 people, but they all kind of left, right? So we just didn't replace them. That's the easiest thing you could do is just not you just replace folks versus rehire them.

But the question is, what do you do with your team that's resistant to becoming agentic? Was that even from AI-native leaders we're asking?

Even from AI-native leaders. And this was just last Wednesday. This is literally a week ago. The number one topic.

Yeah. Listen, I'll wrap with my simple thought of this and we can, we can keep going through this in subsequent shows. I think people get this wrong. Look, and, you know, Harry, Harry interviewed the CEO of AppLovin, which is like $150 billion market cap this week. And he, he made the point, I mean, wildly successful. I think borderline bootstrapped, right? Yeah. And he made the point, like layoffs, sometimes you have to do them. I think he said, I've done them. They don't really help. They don't attract better talent to your company. Yes, maybe they free up budget, right? When I was a VP at Adobe, we did layoffs so that because we weren't allowed to fire anybody for any reason other than inappropriate conduct, like if you did something inappropriate at a company event or if you sent an email to Sean Nuss saying he was an idiot, you could fire people from that. I unfortunately had someone on my team that did the latter. Shouldn't have done it. Got fired. but other than that, people were unfirable by HR, right? Legal just said you can't fire anybody. So people would do layoffs and you lay off 5% of your team and then that's how you get recs to hire people only, only through layoffs. But outside of those weird situations, layoffs don't help. So what's better is if your team is lagging or resistant, just go hire one reasonably senior person that is all in here. One. And folks will start quitting when they don't want to work at that pace anyway. You got to hire them ideally at the VP level above, and they're just going to do it. Just create a new role, VP of, of AI GTM, hire them, and, and they're just going to change your whole organization that way. And do that rather than wasting your time on layoffs or organizational change or, or change management or training. Just bring in an epic change agent to your company and it will work itself out. Yeah. Stop trying to figure out what to do with the 500 people that are resisting. Don't even worry about it, man. Bring in the 5 people or the 1 person that can change your company. They will let them figure it out, even if, even if it's not their job. We've seen it at our org and we're going to see it at other orgs. Many folks we've talked to, when you bring in that AI change agent that, that works agentially in the space, the folks that don't want it one way or another, they leave. Not all of them, but plenty of them leave. The gig is up. So don't worry about firing and retention. Just, just hire the AI people you need and then figure the rest out downstream. Nothing else matters. So we'll wrap today. Agents number 04. Thank you, Amelia. Thank you, everyone. If you got this far, and we'll keep it going.

Talk to you guys soon. Thanks, everybody.

Not leaving. Okay. No matter what, no matter that you think we could do it all in Postgres, this is one of, we're going to talk next show about the 10 reasons we're not leaving Salesforce for Postgres, even though I get, I get the thing, but you may have to manage 5 or 6 agents that don't know each other, don't like each other. You only have a hub like Salesforce or maybe, maybe HubSpot or others. And that could be your job. If you want to see top-tier results. So anything we missed for this week, Amelia?

I think we've— I think we've hit a lot with our agents. I think it's been such an interesting journey just to see how much our agents can and can't do lately. Yeah, it's funny on like the topic of just like, you know, us maybe hiring somebody to report to Jen Kay. Like when I was at— I was, I was at Salesforce Tower last week for like a founder event they did for like 200 folks, like a mini, like folks at Code disasters, like a very mini, mini, mini version of of SaaS-ter, and the number one, the number one question, which I was surprised by, but maybe I shouldn't be, was still like, and these were, some of them were AI-first companies, some of them were, you know, becoming agentic. And the number one, I would say, topic was getting better integrated between the agents and the humans. And it was like just the elephant in the room of like, like, oh, what the frick do I do with all these people? Even on AI, even at some AI-first companies that maybe don't want to work as much with the agents or report to an MCP/10K, like, what do I do with all these people? Like, just so many founders, this was like the number one issue that they brought up like over and over again. They just don't know what to do right now. So I don't know if you had any thoughts on that, Jason M. Lemkin. For me, I was like, it's a little funny because they were like, well, but SaaS are so big, right? What'd you do with all the people? I was like, no, like, we used to be 20 people, but they all kind of left, right? So we just didn't replace them. That's the easiest thing you could do is just not, you know, you just replace folks versus rehire them.

But the question is, what do you do with your team that's resistant to becoming agentic? Was that even from AI-native leaders were asking? Even from AI-native leaders.

And this was just last Wednesday. This is literally a week ago. The number one topic. Yeah.

Listen, I'll wrap with my simple thought of this and we can, we can keep going through this in subsequent shows. I think people get this wrong. Look, and, you know, Harry, Harry interviewed the CEO of AppLovin, which is like $150 billion market cap this week. And he, he made the point, I mean, wildly successful, I think borderline bootstrapped, right? Yeah. And he made the point, like layoffs, sometimes you have to do them. I think he said, I've done them. They don't really help. They don't attract better talent to your company. Yes, maybe they free up budget, right? When I was a VP at Adobe, we did layoffs so that because we weren't allowed to fire anybody for any reason other than inappropriate conduct, like if you did something inappropriate at a company event or if you sent an email to Sean Nuss saying he was an idiot, you could fire people from that. I unfortunately had someone on my team that did the latter, shouldn't have done it, got fired. But other than that, people were unfirable by HR, right? Legal just said you can't fire anybody. So people would do layoffs and you lay off 5% of your team and then that's how you get recs to hire people only, only through layoffs. But outside of those weird situations, layoffs don't help. So what's better is if your team is lagging or resistant, just go hire one reasonably senior person that is all in here. One. And folks will start quitting when they don't want to work at that pace anyway. You got to hire them ideally at the VP level above and they're just going to do it. Just create a new role. VP of, of AI GTM, hire them and, and they're just going to change your whole organization that way and Do that rather than wasting your time on layoffs or organizational change or, or change management or training. Just bring in an epic change agent to your company and it will work itself out. Yeah. Stop trying to figure out what to do with the 500 people that are resisting. Don't even worry about it, man. Bring in the 5 people or the 1 person that can change your company. They will— let them figure it out. Even if, even if it's not their job. We've seen it at our org and we're going to see it at other orgs. Many folks we've talked to. When you bring in that AI change agent that, that works agentically in the space, the folks that don't want it one way or another, they leave. Not all of them, but plenty of them leave. The gig is up. So don't worry about firing and retention. Just, just hire the AI people you need and then figure the rest out downstream. Nothing else matters. So we'll wrap today. Agents number 04. Thank you, Amelia. Thank you, everyone. If you got this far, um, and, uh, we'll keep it going. Talk to you guys soon. Thanks, everybody.

Like, you can use Slackbot to do some of your qualified stuff and your agent force together, and you don't even need to know the difference. Like, that's, you know, I think that's their endgame, that by the time they get to Dreamforce in a few months, They're blending.

They're blending.

They just, you know, why as a user should you have to figure that out? Like, just talk to Slackbot, tell it what you want, it'll figure out, do I use the Qualify protocol or do I use the Agentforce protocol? And so that, that has already blended kind of into one, right? Like it's, it's not fully, um, compatible yet. Um, you know, it's not fully integrated with each other yet, but it's already on that path. So that's already two agents becoming one. So like already half of our 4 agents, now we're down to 3 because 2 have already been combined. But then so that leaves the question, okay, with the new combination, do we have like a Cerberus that can then do the other things that Monaco and Artisan that are doing, which is really good warm and really good cold outbound? And for that I would say not yet, like specifically for our stack. And I know Salesforce has been doing this internally, like I know they're they've hooked up like, you know, ZoomInfo, Apollo, I think Hunter, a few others where you can, you can call up those tools now directly in AgentForce to do outbound kind of in similar, similar ways we've been doing it on Artisan and Monaco to do very top of funnel outbound, you know, try and book meetings, basically replicate any human top of funnel SDR work. The thing is with how we use Artisan and Monaco, we're a little bit more down funnel than that, right? Like it's It's highly specialized how we're using Artisan to do warm follow-ups. It's highly specialized how we're using Monaco, which does fill its own funnel, which is pretty nice, right, with contacts and folks that we should be reaching out to. Yeah. So would I trade those two off today for quality? No. But you might for cost if you're looking at it from just a cost perspective or from a vendor consolidation, or maybe your CFO is like, you have to pick one, you can't have four. Then yeah, I'd probably just pick Salesforce because it already has 2 out of the 4 by default. But today, like the quality and the training is just so different and what we put into each of the 4, now 3, that I, I don't see us switching. I, to your point, I see us adding because now we're starting to come up with more use cases that now that these agents are 2, now that they're running, now that they're duplicating some of our very best work, they found their own way. To have success in whatever they're doing. But then we have other use cases and like we have this whole kind of separate/integrated media business of podcasts and newsletters. And I don't want to throw that into Artisan or Monaco or Salesforce because it doesn't fit those 3 buckets I just described. Like these are totally— these are customers where some of them are in Salesforce, not all. Like our media hasn't been tracked the same way over the years as consistently as the sales, you know, for SaaStr Annual or SaaStr London. So that data is not even that clean in Salesforce. It's like When I peeked at it the other day, I was like, maybe like a third of the deals are in there. So like, it's already got a handicap because not all the deals are in there. I'm like, then it's not the same. It's usually not the same folks, right? So like maybe the folks that— different buyers, same logo, different buyer, different buyer. So I'm like, different buyer. And also oftentimes specifically for media, it's usually their agency buying the media, right? Like Intercom, Finn, has been a big sponsor of ours on media. They still are right now currently for like consistently over the last year. It's not the Intercom team that's buying it. It's their agency that's buying it on their behalf and reporting back to the Intercom team. Then David this week talked to the actual Intercom team about sponsoring Saastr Annual. They like barely knew they were doing media with us. Totally different buyers, totally different teams. I was like, yeah, I get it. Like, you guys, you're doing a lot. They're doing a lot of stuff, right? Like, they may not know everything as a human marketer that their agency is doing or even somebody down the hall in the org is doing in marketing. So yeah, it's just totally different that I'm like, I wouldn't take the segmentation and training we've put into these outbound agents specifically for annual sponsorships, specifically for tickets, and then say, hey, here's this curveball. Why don't you ingest this curveball of media, which is different buyers, different tactics, different ways you got to approach these folks to get the sale. Like, I just don't think— I just don't have confidence that it could— that any of these could really do that. Like, I, I'm of the mindset that we need another n=1 agent to do this more specifically. Because we'll bet we'll get better results, right?

Not that I can't throw— we'll get better results—

a media list of folks, of media buyers into any of these agents now and let it run. Sure, of course I could do that. Sure. But would it be the same result? I'm confident we could get better results if we custom build an unequals on that for it.

Yeah, I certainly could imagine. And the pace of AI is so fast, right? I certainly could imagine the GTM apps are not evolving as quickly as cloud. Let's be clear, they're evolving fast. The sales, at least the sales apps are evolving faster than marketing. They're way ahead of marketing, right? My God, like marketing hasn't gotten anywhere. I know a lot of startups are out there and we will look at some this summer, like email us, but, but you really have to move the needle for us. We don't just need a social media scraper. Okay, we're a little ahead of that. So sales is way ahead of marketing, but no one's innovating at the rate. It's not— they're not innovating at the hyper rate that, that Claude and others are. So I don't know where we'll go. But my point is, I could, I could imagine it's possible in 18 to 24 months a super sales agent is all you need. It's not perfect. It's not as good as standalone, right? But we got a lot to do in this world, right? So I'm going to buy a standalone agent that does everything we've described reasonably well. And maybe if I have a large budget team, I'll start augmenting it with specialized tools. Right. But just like a lot of folks have kind of standardized on Gong, right, in many ways, I could see there being a gong in this category that kind of breaks out and point solutions win. But, but, but, but we ain't there today. So we like, should you buy? We're probably going to end up with 5 or 6 SDRs, AI SDRs by the end of this year. That's my prediction. Maybe. Well, Amelia already agreed it's 5. I think it could be 6 for a bunch of reasons. Maybe you could get away with half of that, but don't try to single vendor it today. If you have budget and time, stair-step it to our constant point. Start with your highest pain point and the highest ROI and the lowest hanging fruit, right? I genuinely believe for most folks, even though we started with this sort of warm outbound with Artisan, I think the qualified workflow of agentifying your inbound for a lot of folks is the lowest hanging fruit because your inbound process is probably terrible. It's terrible for most apps. I got to click on someone's Calendly or wait to get a meeting or work with a crappy chatbot. Like, send a message. Yeah, fix your website first, right? Or send a message. Fix your website first, then get out, then get like warm outbound going. Folks that are already in your base, right? Because they know you. That's what we did. We, we inverted them, right? And then do cold outbound, stair-step it, but budget not just cost, but your time that you may end up— if you want to have the kind of results we do or better, you may need to budget the time to manage 4 or 5 independent agents from different vendors that, that only really talk to each other because Salesforce is our hub, which we've talked about. People make fun of— and we're going to get this on the next show— why don't we use Postgres instead of Salesforce? Well, these agents know how to talk to Salesforce. Yeah. Okay. So we're not leaving. Okay. No matter what, no matter that you think we could do it all in Postgres is one of— we're going to talk next show about the 10 reasons we're not leaving Salesforce for Postgres, even though I get, I get the thing. But you may have to manage 5 or 6 agents that don't know each other, don't like each other. You only have a hub like Salesforce or maybe, maybe HubSpot or others. And that could be your job if you want to see top-tier results. So anything we missed for this week, Amelia?

I think we've, I think we've hit a lot with our agents. I think it's been been such an interesting journey just to see how much our agents can and can't do lately. Yeah, it's funny on like the topic of just like, you know, us maybe hiring somebody to report to Jen Kay. Like when I was at— I was, I was at Salesforce Tower last week for like a founder event they did for like 200 folks, like a mini, like folks at Code Disaster, like a very mini, mini, mini version of, of SaaStr. And the number one, the number one question, which I was surprised by, but maybe I shouldn't be, was still like, and these were, some of them were AI-first companies, some of them were, you know, becoming agentic. And the number one, I would say, topic was getting better integrated between the agents and the humans. And it was like just the elephant in the room of like, oh, what the frick do I do with all these people? Even on AI, even at some AI-first companies, that maybe don't want to work as much with the agents or report to an MCP/10K. Like, what do I do with all these people? Like, just so many founders. This was like the number one issue that they brought up, like over and over again. They just don't know what to do right now. So I don't know if you had any thoughts on that, Jason. For me, I was like, it's a little funny because they were like, well, but SaaS are so big, right? Like, what do you do with all the people? I was like, no, like we used to be 20 people, but they all kind of left, right? So we just didn't replace them. That's the easiest thing you could do is just not you just replace folks versus rehire them.

But the question is, what do you do with your team that's resistant to becoming agentic? Was that even from AI-native leaders we're asking?

Even from AI-native leaders. And this was just last Wednesday. This is literally a week ago. The number one topic.

Yeah. Listen, I'll wrap with my simple thought of this and we can, we can keep going through this in subsequent shows. I think people get this wrong. Look, and, you know, Harry, Harry interviewed the CEO of AppLovin, which is like $150 billion market cap this week. And he he made the point, I mean, wildly successful. I think borderline bootstrapped, right? Yeah. And he made the point, like layoffs, sometimes you have to do them. I think he said, I've done them. They don't really help. They don't attract better talent to your company. Yes, maybe they free up budget, right? When I was a VP at Adobe, we did layoffs so that because we weren't allowed to fire anybody for any reason other than inappropriate conduct, like if you did something inappropriate at a company event or if you sent an email to Sean Nuss saying he was an idiot, you could fire people from that. I unfortunately had someone on my team that did the latter. Shouldn't have done it, got fired. But other than that, people were unfirable by HR, right? Legal just said you can't fire anybody. So people would do layoffs and you lay off 5% of your team and then that's how you get recs to hire people, only through layoffs. But outside of those weird situations, layoffs don't help. So what's better is if your team is lagging or resistant, just go hire one reasonably senior person that is all in here. One. And folks will start quitting when they don't want to work at that pace anyway. You got to hire them ideally at the VP level above, and they're just going to do it. Just create a new role, VP of, of AI GTM, hire them, and, and they're just going to change your whole organization that way. And do that rather than wasting your time on layoffs or organizational change or, or change management or training. Just bring in an epic change agent to your company and it will work itself out. Stop trying to figure out what to do with the 500 people that are resisting. Don't even worry about it, man. Bring in the 5 people or the 1 person that can change your company. They will— let them figure it out. Even if, even if it's not their job, we've seen it at our org and we're going to see it at other orgs. Many folks we've talked to, when you bring in that AI change agent that works agentially in the space, the folks that don't want it, one way or another, they leave. Not all of them, but plenty of them leave. The gig is up. So don't worry about firing and retention. Just, just hire the AI people you need and then figure the rest out downstream. Nothing else matters. So we'll wrap today. Agents #04. Thank you, Amelia. Thank you, everyone. If you got this far and we'll keep it going.

Talk to you guys soon. Thanks, everybody.