10 Things To. Know Before Rolling Out Your First AI SDR
We’ve now deployed 20+ AI agents at SaaStr, sent 60,000+ AI SDR emails, and generate 50%+ of our pipeline and revenue from AI sales agents. Here’s what we wish someone had told us before we started. The first thing I’ll say about AI SDRs: the tool...
What the Co-Founder and CTO of FAL Learned Building an AI-Native Business From Scratch
Gorkem Yurtseven is the CTO and co-founder of FAL, an $8B generative media platform that hosts open and closed source image and video models and exposes them as APIs through its own inference engine. He joined us at the last SaaStr AI Annual, and here’s what...
Dear SaaStr: Buyers Keep Pushing for Shorter Contracts. Should I Give In?
Probably yes. And the sooner you accept that, the sooner you can build a sales motion that actually works in 2026. Here is what the data shows: average initial contract lengths have been declining across B2B for the past two years. According to ICONIQ’s January...
The Danger Zones and Dead Zones of B2B Growth
There are two thresholds in B2B for startups at scale that should … terrify you. Not because they’re clearly death sentences in the Age of AI. But they are signs you are … dying. Under 20% YoY growth: You’re in the Danger Zone. Under 10% YoY growth:...
How to Build a Highly Efficient SMB Sales Machine With AI and Automation (7.2x Bookings-to-Comp) with Mangomint’s VP Sales
Most SMB sales organizations are inefficient by design. Low ACV, high volume, constant churn at the rep level, and a tendency to throw bodies at the problem when pipeline slows down. It doesn’t have to work that way. Marshelle Mooney, VP of Sales at Mangomint...
Dear SaaStr: Growth Has Slowed for 2 Years Now. What Can I Do To Reignite It?
If growth has been declining linearly for two years, you’re in a tough spot. Not a hopeless one. But a tough one that requires honest assessment and decisive moves — not incremental tweaks. But first, let’s be clear about what’s happening in the...
20VC x SaaStr This Week: Anthropic Is Eating OpenAI’s Enterprise Lunch, Figma’s Real Problem Isn’t Stitch, and the Unicorn Math Nobody Wants to Talk About
With Harry Stebbings, Jason Lemkin, and Rory O’Driscoll We’re back! Ramp data put a number on what OpenAI has been avoiding: 73% of new enterprise AI spending is going to Anthropic. Ten weeks ago it was 50-50. That shift — plus a Figma stock rout, a $100B...
Our AI Customer Success Agent Is Working Harder Than 95% of Human CSMs I’ve Worked With. Maybe More Than 95%.
Here’s what happened yesterday. At 8:37am, our AI Customer Success “QBee” agent sent out 150+ personalized sponsor update emails for SaaStr AI Annual 2026. Not a batch blast. Not a mail merge with a first-name token. Every single email was genuinely...
Faster Closes. Shorter Contracts. Leaner Teams. The Top 10 Learnings From the Latest ICONIQ GTM Report.
ICONIQ just published their State of Go-to-Market in 2026, based on a January 2026 survey of GTM executives at 150+ B2B + AI software companies. The data is always good, Iconiq invests at the growth state in a large cross section of the best in B2B + AI. Here are the...
Dear SaaStr: Can I Convert My Customer Success Managers into Forward Deployed Engineers?
Short answer: Only in very specific cases, and it usually means you need to hire a different type of person. Most CSMs aren’t built for FDE work. That’s not a knock on them — they’re doing a completely different job. A CSM manages relationships,...
Five AI Agent Vendors Asked Us to Try Their Product This Week. Just One Got Deployed. Here’s the Difference.
This week alone, five leading AI Agent vendors reached out asking us to try their products, and another 20-30 LinkedIn’d us or emailed us hoping to get our time. From Public companies to hot startups. All of them. The problem: we already run 30+ AI Agents at...
The SaaS Rout of 2026 Is Even Worse Than You Think. For the First Time Ever, Software Now Trades at a Discount to the S&P 500.
Most of us have been doing this long enough to remember when software stocks trading at 40x forward earnings felt cheap. That era appears quite .. over. Software forward P/E multiples have now fallen below the overall S&P 500. Not at parity. Below. This has never...
Dear SaaStr: How Long Does It Take to Deploy an AI SDR?
Longer than the vendor told you. But shorter than hiring another rep. Here’s the real answer: the technology is live in days. The training that makes it actually work takes 60 days of focused effort. Most companies skip the training. That’s why most AI SDR...
You Can’t Train an AI Agent and Then Just … Go Away. We Did, It Fell Off The Rails. And We Didn’t Even Know.
We have an AI agent that we use all the time. One of our now almost 30. It’s a good one, people really like it, and importantly, it’s not directly connected to revenue. So we made a biggish mistake. We sort of ignored it once it worked and was dialed...
Founder SaaStr
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