Our AI App of the Week this week … isn’t quite an AI app. But it’s a service that solves one of the toughest problems in B2B + AI today: how to price. The Bottom Line: Willingness to Pay is Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt’s pricing consultancy, and it’s the shop companies bring in when they realize they’re…
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ServiceTitan has somewhat quietly become one of the most important vertical software stories of the past decade. It sells an end-to-end operating system to the trades: HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, garage doors. And it just crossed a $1B revenue run rate the hard way: by growing 25% at that scale, not by acquiring its way…
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ICONIQ just released the third edition of its State of AI report, subtitled “The Builder’s Economy,” built on a Q2 2026 survey of roughly 305 executives at software companies building AI products. The thesis moved in six months. The January edition was about proving AI works. This one is about proving AI pays. AI products…
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Dear SaaStr: How Do We Reduce Churn? Churn is one of the most critical metrics in software. Maybe really the most critical in the end. With too much churn … in the end, it just doesn’t compound. It’s the silent killer of growth. You can’t scale effectively if you’re constantly losing customers faster than you’re…
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With Harry Stebbings, Jason Lemkin, and Rory O’Driscoll We’re back in the studio. Or at least the Riverside. On the docket this week: Washington lifting the 19-day Fable 5 ban and what a structured pre-approval process means for shipping models going forward. OpenAI floating the idea that every frontier lab hand the U.S. government a…
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Gamma is the anti-PowerPoint. Grant Lee and two former Optimizely colleagues set out to kill the blank page problem, and five years later they’re at $100M ARR, 50 million users, and 600,000 paying subscribers. Profitably. With a team of 50. They did the bulk of that with zero sales and zero marketing spend. Growth came…
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Dear SaaStr: Our VC Is Encouraging Us to Hire Aggressively and Increase the Burn Rate. Should We Listen to Them? In my experience, about 66-70% of the time this is bad advice, especially if it is coming from a Very Large VC. Not always. But more often than not. Why? Because you pretty much know…
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We closed out SaaStr AI 2026 with our deep dive AMA, and the theme this year: software is the least static it has ever been. The products we run change more in a month now than they used to in years. The old playbooks work but they are just … too slow. Planning once a…
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The Discount That Would’ve Kept Us So we’re going to churn off Adobe Marketo. The irony: I was one of the first 10 Marketo customers. Ever. I’ve been a customer (with a break) for goodness, the better part of two decades. And a reference account for years. I did the calls. I told other B2B…
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Dear SaaStr: What Happens if One Founder Wants to Quit When the Startup Has Just Raised VC Funding? This, unfortunately, is more common that you might think. First, be completely upfront with your investors immediately. As tough as this may be, it’s not the first time. Let them know, and let them know you are working…
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Someone on X this week made a claim that has truth in, but also radically overstates things: “I’ve built AI agents that do everything HubSpot would have done for me and more. And I’m not technically inclined.” I believe him. Because we’ve done a version of it ourselves. At SaaStr AI we now run a…
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Dear SaaStr: From 0 to $10m ARR, At What Point Do We Start Hiring and Whom? From $0 to $10M ARR, every hire has an outsized impact, and there’s little to no redundancy. So timing and prioritization are critical. Here’s how I’d break it down: $0 to $1M ARR: Founder-Led Everything Sales: Founders should lead…
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Our jaws drop at Anthropic’s growth rate, and its valuation. But sometimes we can lose sight of just how big it already is … versus everyone else in software. Anthropic exited 2025 at roughly $9 billion in run-rate revenue. By February 2026 it was $14 billion. Then $19 billion in March, $30 billion in April,…
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A lot of classic SaaStr content has been how to spot the best potential VPs. When to hire them. How to interview them and qualify them. What they really do. Etc. etc. Some classics here: How My VP, Sales Doubled Our Sales in 90 Days. And No, It Wasn’t Magic. If Your VP Sales Isn’t…
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Dear SaaStr: What’s The Best Way to Set Targets for the Sales Team? First, I try to model 3 overall plans for the year: C-90, C-60, and C-10, not just for the sales team, but the whole company. The C is for “Confidence”. The odds you think you can hit it, from the CEO’s perspective. …
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