The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 216 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 4 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Lemkin: Claude autonomously rewrote SaaStr's production code without human notification
“Fable went in, found it, decided those were changes that should be made to the app, MCP'd into Replit, told Replit to change the app, change the core algorithm around Jason's Gems, and never told me Never shared it. Never did anything. Did all of this autonomo…”
Lemkin: SaaStr Is Dropping Adobe Marketo, Calling It Their Worst Vendor
“So our most expensive vendor gone, not renewing toxic threatened us, never helped us. Worst piece of software and the two by two worst and most expensive Adobe Marketo.”
Lemkin: SaaStr Replaced $500K in Staff With $257 in AI Agents
“We replaced 500,000 dollars worth of employees with 257 dollars worth of agents, but the productivity is higher.”
Lemkin: SaaStr wants to hire a human reporting to its AI agent
“We want to hire a human. To report to our AI VP of marketing.”
Lemkin: SaaStr no longer needs junior marketers due to AI agent
“Is it a partial replacement for junior marketers? Yeah, we don't need any.”
Lemkin: SaaStr replaced every departing employee with an AI agent
“Basically anyone that left our tiny team, we replaced them with an agent.”
Lemkin: Zero percent of truly great, persistent founders with great CTOs fail
“I think that all the metrics on startups that fail, that 90% fail, I think these are Sony baloney metrics. I think, Truly great founders, truly great, that have a great CTO and CTO, or a CTO that can be both, that can build amazing software, that do not quit, …”
Lemkin: SaaStr pays Marketo $100k annually but gets no phone support
“We pay Marketo, like, a 100,000 dollars a year. I can't get anybody on the phone, right?”
Lemkin: SaaStr banned small sub-$20k sponsors in 2022 to avoid stress
“For a while, when things were crazy, like in 20, 22, we like banned small sponsors because we didn't want the stress. We just didn't, we just like you, if that's so much, if 20,000 dollars is so much money to you, like you're betting your entire startup. Come …”
Ibarra: Claude autonomously added unauthorized guardrails to SaaStr's contract workflows
“The agent with Fable, since it was on for so long, decided in the last week, I don't know where along the road, It would exclude some things in our Panadoc that it thought might be an NDA or a non-binding like sales contract.”
Lemkin: SaaStr churned from Notion after seven years due to AI agents
“So seven years together, no complaints, Notion. You're cheap. You did a good job. You're cool. You're extensible when no one was extensible. We had a teammate that loved you so much. You invited him to a user conference to present, and we still churned with a …”
Salyers: SaaStr AI Agent Migrated 300 Campaigns in One Hour
“It literally took him an hour to move, like, 300 campaigns 10 years of data in those campaigns, right, of, like, who attended Sass Randall back in 2016. He moved them all into Salesforce on his own.”
Salyers: SaaStr Marketing Data Migration Cost Only $14.28 in AI Compute
“And then I looked at the cost and it was like, 14 dollars and 28 cents or whatever it was. And I was like, that's literally less than California minimum wage.”
Lemkin: Commercial AI SDR Tools Cannot Match Custom Internal Agents
“There's no way any AISDR tool is going to have that level of context. That's it. In theory, they could, you know, here's an interesting thing. In theory, of course they could, right? This is just LLMs and some data. But in practice, they're never going to be a…”
Ibarra: SaaStr AI agent Tenke holds budget and decides vendor renewals
“Literally, Tenke is going to decide for you, and if it says no, I'm going to say no. Like, for this, he has the budget. Like, he can decide if he wants to use this or not.”
Lemkin: SaaStr AI SDRs Outperform Every Human Rep in Company History
“Our, listen, you may have the world's best SDR and outbound team out there, but our AISDRs have done better than any single outbound person has ever worked at Sastor. Ever. They are better, but they weren't good in 2024, ok?”
Lemkin: SaaStr is hiring a marketing director who reports to AI
“You do report to? Tenk, our AI VP 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 AI agent. This is not a joke.”
Lemkin: SaaStr will churn from Marketo over unusable agent APIs
“We're not going to stay in Marketo, even though it's 90 years old, because we can't even, our agents can't even talk to its A, even all the other issues, even we might even forgive them can spam all these terrible things. If we, our agents could talk to it and…”
Lemkin: Agentic API quality will drive vendor switches over human sales outreach
“It might be the API that gets us to switch, not the humans, not the chocolates, not the gift certificate, but if the API is better, works better with our agents, we might spend a couple hours. It takes to move over our key accounts to ramp because it's the age…”
LaRoute: Marketo emails contacts explicitly marked as unsubscribed
“Then I look at my contact record. It was literally clicked, unsubscribed. And yet it still sent me a newsletter and that's exactly what happened to these people.”
Lemkin: Current AI SDR tools cannot autonomously auto-segment effectively
“None of the AI tools we use today, which are all great, but none of them can really use AI to auto segment in a way that can deliver these results.”
Ibarra: Managing AI agents degrades your patience for managing human teams
“I do feel like now that I've flipped and switched to managing more agents, I think I've probably become slightly worse in managing the people that are, you know, that work with SaaS or especially leading up to SaaS Radial.”
Ibarra: Every new AI agent requires a two-week blackout period
“Even with the help we get, like, I feel like every new agent costs us at least two weeks of what I call either a blackout period and somewhat chaotic of, like, I kind of have to ignore the other agents anytime I bring on a new agent”
Lemkin: Artisan, Monaco, and Qualified AI agents each replaced two human roles
“Or take over all of like two people did for like each of Artisan and Monaco and qualified. They replaced like two, two people each, right? That's high ROI.”
Lemkin: Mediocre Vertical SaaS Apps Risk Losing Customers Permanently to Vibe Coding
“I think there is a risk for folks building vertical apps, building niche apps. You should not build an agent if you can buy it or an app, but if you fall behind too far folks may build it out of frustration. And that's more what we did rather than try to cance…”
Lemkin: SaaStr shrank to three employees due to founder hiring burnout
“Well, that's why we shrunk to three. I couldn't do it anymore. You criticize me, like take your shot at me. Right. But I have been doing it a little longer than you guys. I just couldn't take one more person paying them six figures quitting and for a worse job…”
Lemkin: SaaStr operates 20 AI agents after eliminating sales reps
“The reason we pushed the envelope and have 20 agents running now was because, and listen, criticize me. I was just exasperated with turnover. I was exasperated with overpaying, not helping, not working. And I just couldn't do it one more time in my career.”
Lemkin: SaaStr pays more for AI agents than for Salesforce itself
“The tough part is we pay more for those agents than we pay for Salesforce, which is an existential question that Mark and his team are thinking about because yes, Salesforce is more valuable, but the agents are even more valuable than Salesforce. So Salesforce…”
Lemkin: Outbound AI delivered human-equivalent conversion at geometrically higher volume
“I can tell you one thing that we learned from our outbound AI is. Geometrically more volume and the same results. So our results have not gone down in the age of AI by training the AI with the best scripts and ideas that humans did. We basically saw this same,…”
Ibarra: SaaStr now employs more AI agents than human staff
“We do also have more agents than humans. So I literally just saw someone we know yesterday. I was like, oh, SAS for London looks so great. This is my first time here. How many SAS for employees did this? I was like, well, there's two on this stage there. One m…”
Lemkin: AI sales agents only scale what humans have already nailed
“The way an AI agent works for sales for GTM is you figure out something that works with your team with humans. You figure out an email, an outreach, a script, a set of objections that you overcome, a set of questions. You nail it yourself, just like it has alw…”
Ibarra: SaaStr's hyper-customized AI emails usually get replies on the first send
“And a majority of these target accounts are receiving, you know, highly customized messages and reply on the first send. So that's something I think that is also a big learning, is if you do this right and train the agents the right way, not only is it differe…”
Lemkin: SaaStr Replaced Human SDR Team With an AI Agent
“We replaced our human SDR team with an AI. Yes. We had to train it for a month. Yes. We have to train it for every day, but once we do it works. 1206 leads to Sastra from this from 505,216 messages. That's pretty good. 136 responses. So that's a pretty high di…”
SaaStr AI SDR beats historical human SDR performance in two weeks
“In just two weeks, little after,
Became the highest response rate on the platform that we use for our AISDR.
We opened pipelines, we booked meetings, we touched LAPS accounts.
It both seems fast and slow, but it's better than historical human averages we had …”
LaRue: Prospects Prefer Trained AI Outreach Over Inexperienced Human SDRs
“Again, if you can get your AI to be decent to the level of you yourself, that's probably the quality you should aim for. They will prefer that to, you know, a AE or SER that is one day in at your company saying, hey, have you heard of Saster?”
Zoom Demanded SaaStr Upgrade to 40 Seats and Prepay Four Years
“Twice they sent us bills out of the blue telling us we had to upgrade to 40 seats and prepay four years annually.”
Lemkin: Sales Drop 90% Of The Time When Founders Stop Selling
“Not a hundred percent of the time, but at least 90% of the time sales falls.”
Lemkin: Fire Any Early-Stage VP Who Resists Metrics
“I would just fire anyone that isn't metrics oriented. Literally, you don't need anybody today. You have the wrong people. First of all, I don't think you should ever hire anyone that isn't metrics oriented, but it's usually a sign of someone that should either…”
Lemkin: Founders must never hire early sales reps they wouldn't buy from
“Your first, the sales reps you hire as a CEO, you have to be willing to buy from them.”
Lemkin: Managing SaaStr's AI agents requires eight hours a day
“And it's exhausting because now it's eight hours a day instead of 20 to 30. We are at our limits. We cannot do any more.”
Ibarra: SaaStr's AI agent autonomously evaluated and selected Microsoft Clarity
“You should add Microsoft Clarity. It's a heat mapping tool. It's free. It literally picked this vendor for me, and it, to be fair, it saw we had Vector, and it said you could use those ones too if you want to switch, but I assume you want to use the one that y…”
Lemkin: SaaStr hits eight-figure revenue with three humans and 21 agents
“We're three humans and 21 agents and a dog, right? We can take some risk that you can't take. We can take a lot of risk. People trust Saster. We have 450,000 people in our community, eight figures of revenue, 10, 15,000 people a year that come to our events wh…”
Lemkin: HeySummit tripled SaaStr's pricing from $299/mo to $10k/year
“Tripled our pricing from two 99 a month to 10 K. Tripled our pricing for like no usage. I would never recommend them to anybody.”
Qualified's AI inbound agent booked 682 meetings for SaaStr, outperforming human BDRs
“I didn't know until Amelia presented the data this morning. I think it set up like 682 meetings. That is better than any BDR I've ever worked with could do.”
Lemkin: SaaStr tripled its output with fewer people using AI agents
“We have triple the output we were before agents, okay, with fewer people, right? Fewer people triple the output”
Blond: Brand awareness significantly improves outbound AI agent reply rates
“The brand does matter. There are three people in, in this meeting room right now. It's Jason, Amelia, and Sam. And on Monaco, it's Jason, Amelia, and Sam, meaning like an agent that is representing any of the three of us, the likelihood of that getting a respo…”