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
SaaStr's AI agent replaces 60% of VP of Marketing basic functionality
“He doesn't think he's replaced a VP of marketing, but he has replaced about 60% of like a basic functionality.”
Ibarra: SaaStr Will Never Hire a Dedicated RevOps Person Due to AI
“I mean, not that we've ever had like a true ref ops person. I've just kind of done it as a backfill, but now that we have 10 K and QB, why would we need, I was like, I would never hire an actual. Rev ops person to fight me on the data. There's just no need.”
Lemkin: SaaStr Inbound AI Agent Booked 614 Meetings From 442k Chats
“This agent booked 614 meetings from 442,000 chats. It's almost unbelievably strong numbers from 2.2 million website sessions. That's our funnel to get to handing them to you and David to close.”
Lemkin: SaaStr's custom agent outperforms Intercom Fin and website chatbots
“This is fin or whatever intercom to the millionth degree that we built because it knows every so many details in real time for a hundred people and gets them all right. It's better than any chatbot on any website.”
Lemkin: Tested AI CMO startups are just glorified ad managers
“The ones that we've tested are really marketing managers or ad managers on steroids. That's all they're trying. They're no, they're not CMOs. They, you can mock us for calling Tenk and AI VP of marketing, but mock the startups calling themselves AI CMOs that a…”
Lemkin: SaaStr's internal AI marketing and CS agents cost $257 monthly
“Our AI VP of Marketing customer success together cost 257 dollars.”
SaaStr plans AI VP of finance to manage outsourced finance team
“Literally we're going to build this AI VP of finance. And Amelia and I were talking this morning, we have two outsourced finance resources and we appreciate them. But honestly, once this AI VP of finance works, it'd be best if they reported to him.”
Lemkin: SaaStr has three humans, 20 AI agents, and growing revenue
“Back in 20, 20 saster was 20 some odd folks, full time equivalents. Now we're three humans and 20 AI agents. And we're doing more and with more revenue and more output than 12 months ago”
Lemkin: SaaStr would replace Bizabo if an agentic rival existed
“Bizabo is our events platform. It's pretty dated guys. It hasn't been touched in years. If there was an agentic version that worked, we would switch, right? No question. But at least the API works with our agents.”
Lemkin: Well-Trained AI SDRs Deliver Better Interactions Than Mediocre Humans
“So what we found is if, and it might be hard to quantify that, maybe it isn't, but if you get above a certain line, if you invest the time to train your agent, if you read the email exceptions every day, if you upload all the documents, you're going to find th…”
Lemkin: AI SDRs Generated 15% of Revenue for SaaStr London
“Hey, we just sent 70,000 automated emails. They're better than humans and it generated 15% of the revenue for SaaS for London. 15% of the revenue.”
Lemkin: AI agents generated 15% of event revenue that human SDRs ignored
“So the 15% of ticket revenue folks coming here, we, for Six years on and off. We tried to get our human SDRs to help us reach out to return attendees to get them to come to Sastradion London. They just wouldn't do it. It wasn't worth their time. They wanted to…”
Ibarra: SaaStr's Artisan AI achieves a 6% response rate versus 2-4% human average
“For artisan, that one has, it actually went up, it's about a six percent overall response rate now. You know, average for normal SDR is two to four.”
Ibarra: SaaStr's AI agents scaled outbound email volume 32x over human SDRs
“The average SDR we had here as a human would send, you know, on the low end, maybe 75 emails a month per rep, and at the high end, maybe somewhere like two, two eighties, 300, right, per rep per month. So if you look at this total over the last six months, alm…”
Ibarra: 70% of SaaStr October Closed-Won Revenue Came From AI
“A crazy stat I just saw too, like, 70% of our October closed one came from the AI.”
Ibarra: SaaStr Inbound AI Agent Generated $1M Revenue in Three Months
“We've only had this, let's say three months. The inbound agent has been responsible for already a million dollars of revenue.”
Lemkin: Webinars and Case Studies Work Better Now Than Two Years Ago
“In fact, in many ways, all this stuff in my experience works better today than it did. 18 to 24 months ago.”
Lemkin: Perplexity Operates With Only Five Salespeople
“So we had the chief business officer of perplexity at SAS or this year, you can read the post. He had five folks on the sales team.”
Lemkin: SaaStr Adopted AI SDRs Because Human Employees Kept Quitting
“The reason we got started on this Saster journey, and I think people are missing is Amelia and I didn't want to use AI to make Saster better. We wanted to use AI because people kept quitting that didn't want to do the work. We, the reason we replaced our human…”
Lemkin: Top AI Companies Rely on Traditional SaaS GTM Leaders
“If you look at who is running go-to-market at some of the hottest AI companies from open AI to anthropic on down, you'll see folks that spoke at Saster in the past few years. You will see the exact same people essentially running the same playbooks they ran be…”
Lemkin: SaaStr generates eight figures in revenue with single-digit headcount
“You know, our organization is tiny, but you know, Sasser does do eight figures in revenue with a tiny team. So it's interesting to track us because we have a single digit amount of headcount doing eight figures of revenue.”
Lemkin: SaaStr passed on two leading vendors due to combative sales reps
“And I can tell you there's at least two leading vendors that we said no to, not because the software is not good enough, but because the sales team fought us, they didn't know the product.”
Barut: Half of SaaStr event tickets are now sold via chat
“Like, they used to just come to the website, buy a ticket to Saster, and many people still do that. But we're literally seeing it fifty-fifty now. Some people prefer to buy this via chat, we call it, sell by chat.”
Jason Lemkin: His venture returns are 10x lifetime and 5x recently
“I'm 10 X lifetime, almost five X in the last five. Like that's like top couple percent.”
LaRue: Validating a working theory beats wasting 20 minutes on discovery
“It's so much more productive, even the calls we've had recently in the last like two weeks, to do a working theory and to validate those points versus waste 10 to 20 minutes on asking the human beings questions that one, your AI already knows, or two, they don…”
LaRue: AI SDRs Cannot Replace Marketing Teams or All Human SDRs
“Again, it's not a magic wand. It's not a genie. Don't say I'm going to turn on the AISDR and I could dump everything else I'm doing in marketing or fire my whole marketing or fire all my STRs. It doesn't work that way.”
Lemkin: Most SaaS customer success teams have degenerated into aggressive upsell reps
“Most of the vendors we work with customer success has turned into upsells and account managements, and they're just there to get us to buy more stuff.”
Lemkin: Replace Sales VPs Immediately Once Fear Sets In About Sellability
“When fear sets in sales, it, it's almost unrecoverable. It's the one symptom where if you're ever deciding, should I give my VP of sales more time? We've talked about this for years since after. The numbers aren't improving, but things look okay, or this or th…”
Lemkin: Great Sales VPs Assign Their Startup CEO A Meeting Quota
“A great VP of sales will literally give the CEO a quota.”
Lemkin: Full-time sales and marketing leaders are always accretive over fractional hires
“A great head of sales that will actually carry a bag. A great head of marketers is actually willing to do a campaign themselves or to put together an event themselves. The great ones are always accretive. This is like a recurrent Sastra post for 12 years. A gr…”
Lemkin: 80% of 50+ VP of Sales Candidates Did Zero Pre-Interview Research
“I actually interviewed over 50 VPs of sales this year. Some of them actually for Saster itself. Cause we need one. If anyone really wants this and knows what we're doing, let me know. Other than for a bunch of portfolio companies. And I can't tell you, oh, tho…”
Lemkin: Hosting a consistent weekly webinar always works for B2B pipeline
“If you do a great weekly webinar, it always works. This is so true. We even do it ourselves at Sastr. If every single week at the same time, at Wednesday at 10 a.m., you do a webinar for prospects and customers, and the first week only one comes and people are…”
Lemkin: Startups under $20M ARR expect too much magic from product marketing
“I do think we expect too much, even going into series B, even up until 10, twenty million air, I think we expect magic from project market. I don't see it there”
Lemkin: SaaStr survey shows under 20% of sales reps hit 70% attainment
“I did a Saster survey of a couple thousand folks. I put it on Saster in the last week or two. You know, only like, only teens of folks are hitting 70% attainment.”
Lemkin: Enterprise SaaS pricing should withstand total transparency across customers
“However you do pricing the enterprise, it should be as if you should be comfortable every other customer knowing what every customer is paying. Then it simplifies your life.”
Lemkin: Founders do not need to sequence executive VP hires perfectly
“You do not have to sequence it perfectly, and we've talked about this on Sastr. It's a classic post of what order to sequence it in, but the real key to understand, and this is not intuitive until you're later, is any great VP is accretive.”
Ibarra: Layering ZoomInfo and Clay in Cowork yielded best enrichment data
“So it used ZoomInfo in clay in cowork, three layers deep of agents to enrich this list. And it was like the best enrichment we've gotten so far.”
Ibarra: AI renewal workflows take half a day to build
“This is one of those things where in the age of AI, ah, this took me an extra, let's say, half a day with 10 K to build. Like, you gotta, sure, you might have to set up these sources the first time, but then you can output something like this for literally eve…”
Lemkin: SaaStr migrated off two of its three primary systems of record
“In fact, until recently at Sastr, we basically had two and a half, three systems of record. We had Salesforce, we had Marketo, and we had Notion. We left two.”
Lemkin: SaaStr is building the first agentic B2B executive recruiting app
“We're trying to build an app called Saster Connect that will connect you folks to the best opportunities. If you're looking to network, if you're looking for a new job, more importantly, if you're hiring, if you're a founder, how do you find VPs you don't know…”
Lemkin: Agency Quoted $100K and One Year to Migrate From Marketo
“A HubSpot agency wanted a 100,000 dollars from little saster to migrate our data and a year. And we had to run and we would have had to pay for Marketo for a year because it would take them a year to do the migra.”
Salyers: Connected AI agents resolved SaaStr's five-year pension tracking issue
“When they started talking to each other, they just reconciled all the data. They looked at all of our past history of how much, you know, we've put in and they came up with a recommendation, which is all I ever wanted. And so five years for five years.”
Lemkin: SaaStr fell six figures behind on collections with human staff
“Our human team got worse that they stopped doing it.
They went on a vacation, but never caught up.
We got six figures behind on collections and it creates a lot of stress because it's sometimes you have to write off collections if people don't get it.”
SaaStr's AI agent autonomously makes marketing decisions and executes campaigns
“So what 10 K is now, which I'll show you today, where he is making some autonomous marketing decisions. He helps us send campaigns. He's literally our co-pilot.”
Revenue impact data is the primary dataset for marketing AI agents
“If you have any sort of data around marketing's final goal on an impact on revenue, that's the very first thing you're going to want to give your agent.”
Semi-autonomous AI marketing agents require native CRM and MAP integrations
“Hook up natively To your marketing automation platform via the APIs hook up to your CRM, whatever you're using, some of your major tools. Again, you don't have to add those all day one. Eventually, you will need to, though, if you want to reach the same level …”