Here’s something I didn’t expect when we went AI-first at SaaStr: we run one CRM. Just one. But we now run four different AI sales agents — Agentforce, Monaco, Artisan, and Qualified — all at the same time. And we might add more. This wasn’t some grand strategy. It happened organically. Each agent does something…
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The Bottom Line: Launchpad is a low-code, AI-powered platform from Pegasystems (Nasdaq: PEGA, ~$7B market cap) purpose-built for B2B software companies that need to build, launch, and operate enterprise-grade SaaS applications. It’s not another vibe-coding toy or AI prototype generator. Lauchpad.io is a full production stack: multi-tenant cloud architecture, workflow automation, compliance, subscriber management, and…
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Dear SaaStr: Our CFO sounds very polished but we are missing the burn rate plan almost every month, and he takes no responsibility for it. What should i do, if anything? This is a serious problem, and I’d be direct: you need to act on this now. Here’s what I’ve seen happen a hundred times: A…
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We’ve just gone through 3 phases with AI that most people don’t fully appreciate: Phase one: most of 2023. You had to be technical. The models were there but they hallucinated constantly. You needed to be deeply technical to get anything useful out of a raw LLM API. Most of us — myself included — weren’t…
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Dear SaaStr: Should I Hire More FDEs or CSMs for Our AI Agent Product? That depends entirely on where your bottleneck actually is right now. In AI B2B, deployment is the new constraint — not retention. If customers are signing but not going live, or they’re live but underperforming, you need FDEs. If customers are…
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Harry Stebbings, Rory O’Driscoll, and Jason Lemkin break down the biggest stories in tech and venture right now. Harry Stebbings of 20VC, Rory O’Driscoll of Scale Venture Partners, and Jason Lemkin of SaaStr sat down to work through the week’s biggest stories: NVIDIA’s trillion-dollar forecast, a new wave of purposeful layoffs at Atlassian and Meta,…
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So the very first AI Agent we rolled out was “Digital Jason” on our websites and it has served us well, answering 100,000s of thousands of questions for founders and B2B execs. But we are builders, so this week we decided to build our own. It’s better, and you can try it free here. It…
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Dear SaaStr: At What Stage Should a Startup Hire a CMO? Answer: Roughly, when demand gen is no longer the core function of marketing. This also often is the time when you are ready to expand beyond a core small, effective, efficient marketing team: When you have enough of a lead generation engine going, AND…
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Software disruption, software deflation, and the death of the old vendor playbook. All in one screenshot. I added an AI chatbot to our AI VP of Marketing today to talk directly to it It really works great It is better than 98% of products we could buy. Cost? $0.20 on @Replit and took 25 seconds…
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Dear SaaStr: Is it Bad to Leave a Stuggling Startup? It can be a tough situation. And one more and more folks are in today. It’s toughest when you are in a critical role. Especially one with no redundancy, and no one else to take your place. If you’re a critical resource and leave a…
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Look at that chart. Almost every major public software company has printed lower growth rates every single year since the 2021 peak. Not every other year. Not in patches. Every year, in sequence, without exception. Salesforce went from 25% to 8%. Snowflake from 106% to 24%. HubSpot from 47% to 17%. The conventional explanation is…
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Russ Fradin, CEO of Larridin, walked through how they help companies actually measure AI adoption across sales teams at our last digital SaaStr AI Day. Larridin builds what is essentially an analytics layer for enterprise AI usage. Their product, Scout, tracks which AI tools employees are actually using across the org, how effectively they’re using…
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Another founder I know—one running a company at $100M+ ARR—just announced on LinkedIn they were leaving. Stepping down. Handing over the keys. The reason? They were “excited to explore what AI could do in the space.” Everyone congratulated them in the comments. Except any of the existing employees. And as a human being, I get…
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Dear SaaStr: Should Your Ask a Prospect What Competitors They Are Looking At? Yes. You’ll find 90% of the time you’ll want to not just tell a client who you are competing with — but do so aggressively. And box the competition out at the start. “Great to learn about your business! Is there anyone…
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We’ve now been running AI SDR agents for 10+ months at SaaStr. We use four different vendors in daily rotation (Artisan, Salesforce AgentForce, Qualified, and Monaco), we’ve sent hundreds of thousands of outbound messages, processed 1.5 million inbound sessions on a single website, and we’ve made every mistake you can make along the way. Someone…
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