From -19% Decline (1st half year) to +47% Growth (2nd half year): What Actually Happened
That’s a 66% swing in growth in SaaStr readers over the course of 2025. Over less than 12 months.
At the start of the year, SaaStr website traffic while still substantial … was declining. Not dramatically. Not falling off a cliff. But that slow, steady erosion over 18 months. By May 2025, we were down -19% year-over-year. Just like many old B2B companies, really.
The combination of AI eating search traffic, social algorithms deprioritizing links, and general attention fragmentation was doing exactly what everyone warned it would do.
We had a choice: keep optimizing around the margins and hope for the best, or make a real bet.
We made a bet. We went all in on sharing how AI agents can turbocharge your business. For real. And we started by doing it ourselves.
The Decision: Go All-In on AI Agents After SaaStr AI Annual 2025 in May
At SaaStr Annual + AI Summit in May 2025, we made a call. Instead of treating AI as a topic to cover, we decided to go all-in on AI agents—both as content and as product. And to manage and run SaaStr itself.
The thesis was simple: if AI is going to change how founders build and scale companies, SaaStr should be the place where they figure out how. Not by reading hot takes, but by using actual tools.
And we didn’t just build AI tools for our audience—we ate our own dogfood. We deployed 20+ AI agents across our own revenue and operations teams.
Within weeks of Annual, we launched SaaStr.ai.
What We Actually Built
We didn’t just write more blog posts about AI. We built tools and products powered by AI founders could use:
A Startup Valuation Valuation Calculator that became our quiet monster hit—nearly 25,000 views and the kind of tool people bookmark and return to repeatedly.
An AI Agents Directory where founders can discover and evaluate the agents actually being used in production B2B environments.
An AI VC Matching Tool that helps founders find investors who are actively deploying into AI-native companies.
A Pitch Deck Analyzer that gives founders instant feedback on their decks.
An AI Mentor that draws on the thousands of SaaStr posts, podcasts, sessions, tweets and videos to answer founder questions.
Each of these serves a real need. Each gives founders a reason to come back. And each creates something worth sharing—which matters more than ever when organic reach is harder to earn.
Eating Our Own Dogfood: 20+ AI Agents in Production
Here’s what separates us from everyone else writing about AI: we’re not theorizing. We deployed 20+ AI agents across our own business. Real agents. Real revenue. Real learnings.
The AI Revenue Team:
We now run 3 AI SDRs handling ticket inquiries, sponsor outreach, and sales support. 2 AI BDRs qualifying leads and nurturing prospects. 1 AI RevOps agent tracking our sponsor pipeline. 1 AI Support agent handling event questions 24/7. 1 AI Content Review agent vetting speakers and sessions. 1 AI Matchmaking agent connecting CEOs at our events.
It Really Worked:
Our inbound AI agent generated over $1M in closed revenue in its first 90 days. Not pipeline—closed revenue. $2.5M+ in additional pipeline. 70% of our October closed-won deals came through the AI agent.
Our outbound AI sent 19,326 messages with a 6.7% response rate—more than double the industry average. It directly sold 21% of our event tickets. The AI doesn’t just book meetings anymore—for deals under $1K, it closes them directly.
Between inbound and outbound, AI agents now drive over $1M in direct revenue and 20%+ of our ticket sales.
The Reality Of Managing So Many AI Agents:
They require daily management. Not weekly check-ins. Daily. Every morning I’m reviewing conversation quality, lead accuracy, edge cases, and training updates. Each agent needs constant fine-tuning. Our sponsor AI SDR took 47 iterations to stop being too aggressive on pricing. Our support agent had to be retrained three times on VIP escalation.
But here’s what makes it worth it: the agents never quit. They work weekends. They don’t complain. They’re not distracted by side hustles. They know the products cold. And the work compounds—unlike human training that walks out the door.
SaaStr AI London: The Format Pivot That Proved the Model
We didn’t just change what we built. We changed how we delivered it.
SaaStr AI London 2025 in December sold out at 2,000+ attendees—and we completely reinvented the format. No more firesides. No more hero founder stories. No more “lessons from my journey” keynotes.
Instead: 100% hands-on AI content. Live demos. Real deployments. Tactical workshops where attendees walked away knowing how to actually implement AI agents, not just inspired to “think about AI.”
The sessions covered exactly what operators needed: how to stop AI SDR disasters, how to build personalization that actually works, how to deploy AI across the entire sales process from lead routing to deal coaching. Speakers from OpenAI, Intercom, Clay, Qualified, and dozens of AI-native companies shared real playbooks—not theory.
This was the logical extension of eating our own dogfood. We’d deployed 20+ agents. We’d generated $1M+ in AI-driven revenue. We’d learned what actually works. So we built an event around teaching that to others.
The response validated everything. The room was packed with founders, CROs, and marketers who weren’t there to be inspired—they were there to learn implementation. The urgency was palpable. Everyone understood: figure out AI in GTM now, or watch your competitors pull ahead.
The Results: Bending the Curve
By late June, we could see it in the data. Our 30-day active users started separating from the prior year trendline. By September, we’d opened up a significant gap. By December, we’d turned a declining trajectory into 17% year-over-year growth.
The full monthly numbers for May 1 – December 16, compared to the prior period:
- Active Users: 664K (+47% … instead of -19% at start year)
- Sessions: 887K (+40%)
- Views: 1.17M (+29% … instead of -17% at start year)
- New Users: 649K (+52%)
- SaaStr.ai Tool Usage: 780,000+ valuation calculations, 2,700+ pitch decks analyzed (all new)
But here’s what matters more than the topline growth: we arrested a decline and reversed it. The dotted line was heading down. The solid line is heading up. That’s the story.
Where the Growth Actually Came From
SaaStr.ai drove roughly 31% of our total session growth. A single new product, launched mid-year, accounting for nearly a third of our growth. It generated 112,551 views, 53,122 active users, and 79,790 sessions—all net new.
Direct traffic exploded by 87%. This is the brand flywheel accelerating. People typing in the URL, bookmarking us, coming back to use the tools. You can’t fake direct traffic. It means people actually want to come to you.
Referral traffic nearly doubled (+76%). People sharing our tools and content with their networks. The AI tools especially spread through founder communities because they’re genuinely useful.
Email grew 161%. Our newsletter strategy started working harder as we had more compelling reasons for people to click through.
Organic social on SaaStr.ai hit 27% of that property’s traffic—way above our site average. The tools were spreading through Twitter and LinkedIn because founders were posting about them.
What didn’t grow much? Organic search. We’re essentially flat there. Which tells you something important: this growth didn’t come from Google. It came from building things people wanted to use and share.
What’s Next
We’re not done. The AI agents space is evolving weekly, and we’re planning to evolve with it. More tools, deeper functionality, tighter integration with the SaaStr AI content library.
But the core bet has been validated. Going all-in on AI after Annual wasn’t just a content strategy or a product strategy—it was a survival strategy. And it worked.
The traffic was declining. We made a bet. We bent the curve.
That’s the story of SaaStr’s last 12 months. From Slowdown Pre-AI to Turbocharged With AI.
SaaStr AI is on fire. Find your AI tailwinds. They’re out there.
