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: SaaStr agent TenK replaced 10-15 weekly admin hours
“We used to have an admin who spent 10 to 15 hours a week building this. Wow. And she would go to, cause a lot of these aren't even exposed APIs. She would go manually put it in a Google sheet. Right. Collect it, forget to do it. Now, Tenkay can do all of it be…”
Lemkin: SaaStr replaced a $4,000 annual newsletter tool with an AI agent
“Most important thing is we also got rid of a piece of software we've used for eight years. It was 4000 dollars to do this. So Amelia would manually use this company called Bee. Which would not really hook up into Marketo, but it's a nice little newsletter buil…”
Lemkin: SaaStr runs four to five AI SDR tools including Artisan and Agentforce
“Until we deployed our own, and we're going to talk more about whether this is too many, our four to five AISDRs, Artisan, Qualified, Monaco, Agent Force, and probably more to come.”
Ibarra: SaaStr Downsized From 20 People by Not Backfilling Departures
“We used to be 20 people, but they all kind of left, right? So we just didn't replace them. That's the easiest thing you could do. It's just not, you know, you just replace folks versus rehire them.”
Lemkin: A SaaStr AI agent silently failed for four months
“And we talked last week how one of our agents stopped ingesting content for four months and it took us a while.”
Lemkin: Clay rejected SaaStr from advertising platform for being too small
“Clay told us they wouldn't even let us on their this will transition to our next station. They wouldn't even let us on their advertising platform. Cause we weren't big enough. We were just to know it wasn't they, it wasn't worth their time to give us a human t…”
Ibarra: AI SDRs perform far better with hyper-specific audience segmentation
“We've run these for 10 months now, it just works a heck of a lot better to have accepted segmented and have the context that you're giving the agent hyper specific to that segment.”
Ibarra: Most prospects prefer chat or email over voice/video AI SDRs
“And what we've found for the last year is that most people still prefer to chat with an AISDR. Over chat or over email versus either phone, voice, or video.”
Ibarra: 99% of Inbound Prospects Are Satisfied Interacting with AI SDRs
“But for the most part, 99% of people are happy to talk to Amelia because we're busy. Like, I can't come answer your questions about tickets or Where are the hotel room block is? Or when did, when does the ticket code expire or when do prices go up and what's t…”
Ibarra: Most companies only need one AI SDR vendor
“Most of what you will need to do slash want to do with your agents, you'll probably be fine using just one vendor. Versus using the four or five that we have for outbound.”
Ibarra: AI agents act as relentless truth-tellers with complete operational visibility
“What does the agent care? The agent's just gonna tell me the truth. The agent has all the data more than I probably look at it, right? Like I look at it a lot. But it's got all, like, it knows where I'm behind, it knows my calendar, it knows all these things”
Ibarra: Teams can only realistically add 1 to 1.5 agents monthly
“But I'd say in that math, you can really only add one slash one and a half agents per month max. Like, Otherwise, you're running in place because you can't really keep up with your current agents to add the new agent, so it doesn't actually, maybe it doesn't m…”
Lemkin: SaaStr would cease using AI agents if Ibarra left
“If you left for some reason, we would have to cease using our agents. There's no plan B.”
Lemkin: SaaStr lost $10 million during COVID conference disruptions
“We lost ten million in COVID. We lost, I lost ten million as the majority shareholder. I lost ten million dollars.”
Ibarra: SaaStr pays $40k-$100k for AI tools that replace headcount
“Some of these tools are, like, you know, 40 to a hundred K a year-ish, but we replace headcount.”
Lemkin: SaaStr Human Reps Left 5- and 6-Figure Inbound Sponsor Leads Unanswered
“These are folks who reached out to us and said they wanted to sponsor SASTR for five or six figure tickets. And we did not respond to them. As our human team.”
Ibarra: Managing AI agent activity becomes harder than building agents
“Once you get a few agents, actually your problem becomes not having agents. Your problem is keeping up with your agents.”
Lemkin: 80% to 85% of Users Prefer Text Chat Over Voice AI
“I can tell you on our first agent Delphi, we've done like a 150,000 chats. The ratio is about. 80, 20, 80%. Maybe it's 85, 15, 85%. People like to chat. 15% like voice”
Ibarra: SaaStr AI outbound sends 3,000 monthly emails versus 75-285 per human rep
“Our outbound emails per rep across the board. So across the things I just mentioned for us, you know, tickets, sponsorship, speakers, whatever. On the average band six months ago with anywhere between 75, you know, let's say at the low end to two 85 at the hig…”
Ibarra: SaaStr AI outbound hits nearly 7% response rate
“Overall our outbound with the AI is almost a seven percent overall response rate, which is, you know, kind of double just overall averages across anything you'll see from all any, you know, tool that does sequences and outreach of four percent positive respons…”
Lemkin: SaaStr funded AI agents by reallocating budget from two unreplaced headcounts
“No, but we replaced two human, the budget from two humans to support our agents. And we didn't fire anybody.”
Ibarra: Outbound AI agent generated 10% of SaaStr AI London revenue
“10% of ticket revenue for SaaS or AI in London only on this agent.”
Ibarra: SaaStr AI support agent fails less than 3% of the time
“There are times where our agent can't answer a question, and it's a support question, and I'm like, that's my failing. That's, and they should, I know people roast the AI in those times when, you know, It's happened. I put it somewhere in a slide. I think less…”
A SaaStr Salesperson Quit the Day AI Tracking Was Deployed
“Even at Saster on our little team, we rolled out a tool called momentum for AI or from attention. They're great too. Even our little team, the day we rolled it out, someone on our sales team quit. The day we rolled it out.”
SaaStr Notionally Spends $500K Across Its 21 Internal AI Agents
“Notionally, we spend 500,000 dollars on our AI agents across these 21 agents, 500,000.”
Lemkin: SaaStr gets top results among all Artisan and Qualified customers
“On two of the ones we use artisan for outbound and qualified for inbound of all their customers, this is the most important thing. We're the number one vendor. Number one results.”
Lemkin: No excuse for lacking instant AI customer interactions in 2025
“There's no excuse to not have extremely high quality customer interactions instantly through AI in twenty-twenty-five.”
Barut: Enterprise demand for AI orchestration roles will skyrocket
“The rise of AI orchestration as a job role is going to skyrocket. I think it's already taken the place of AI GTM ops.”
LaRue: Outbound AI campaigns perform best with instant human follow-ups
“The other learning was once we turned this on and people started responding to our AI
and we had a human in the loop, which was me and it for a while and it worked the best.
You have to respond instantly.”
AI sales tools require extensive tuning and data to generate high response rates
“It does take one, a lot of tuning, and it does take a lot of data and a lot of conscious effort to get these AIs to work this well.
And have this good of a overall response rate, positive response rate, and also to make the emails seem like we actually wrote …”
Lemkin: AI outbound will not achieve top results without brand and database
“You know, if no one's ever heard of you and you have no base to email from, no matter how well you do, you're not going to see these results.”
Lemkin: AI models require daily manual QA for the first couple months
“Even if you have all your data in, even if you have it all in, you may have to QA it every single day for the first couple of months.”
LaRue: SaaStr Boosted Sales AI Results by Simplifying Data and Hyper-Segmenting
“And we started to hyper segment more and actually like rip out some of the data from this to make it more hyper segmented and actually a little bit more simple. And that is part of why it's also working so well for us.”
Lemkin: Buyers debating 'build, buy, or partner' usually lean toward acquiring
“When a potential buyer says build, buy or partner, right? That's usually internal code word for we're thinking about buying, but we're not quite there yet, but we're pretty close. Like they're not really thinking about build or partner or they'd be partnering …”
Lemkin: Marketing vendor quoted SaaStr over $100K for 500K records
“One vendor that's several thousand dollars a year for a marketing tool wanted over a 100,000 dollars a year to support our records of 500,000.”
Lemkin: SaaStr Immediately Submits Cancellation Notices When Buying Software
“You know, a couple of years ago, we instituted a policy at little tiny Saster that as soon as we buy an app at Saster, we have to immediately send a termination notice and people made fun of me four or five years ago, but now this has become a common practice.…”
Lemkin: Founders must only hire sales reps they would personally buy from
“Founder led sales. You need to hire the type of sales reps that you would buy from that you believe in. That's it. That you would buy for real. This is the mistake. Every time when I talk to a founder where they hit a roadblock and founder led sales is the cla…”
Lemkin: Top Product, CS, and Sales VP Candidates Prioritize Customer Meetings First
“The best heads of product, the best heads of customer success and the best VP of sales will give you the same answer. I'm going to go meet customers. It's always the same.”
Lemkin: Founders Hiring Unfamiliar Roles Should Have External Domain Experts Interview Candidates
“Two, if it's for a role you've never hired before, you don't know, find someone that's great at it, truly great and ask them to just interview your final candidate. Simple answers, but that sounds simple, but that always works.”
Lemkin: Top Sales VPs Turn Founders Into Dedicated Deal Middlers
“The great VPs of sales and CROs just change what the founders do and they turn you into dedicated middlers.”
Lemkin: SaaStr Fund Never Invests Before Startups Reach $10K MRR
“I personally, what I invest, I don't invest before, 10 K MRR. I don't do any pre-seed, because I'm not smart enough. I want to see 10 customers, 15 customers.”
A Truly Great Sales Rep Can Close 10x What Average Reps Close
“A great sales team can close two X what a mediocre sales team can sometimes more and a truly great rep can often close nine to time, 10 times what an average rep can.”
Lemkin: Complex SMB SaaS requires a 1:1 post-sales to sales headcount ratio
“What I've learned is that SMB SaaS now, that does True onboarding. That's like, it's not instant deploy, right? You can't deploy in 60 seconds. I find, typically speaking, their total onboarding plus success plus sales headcount equals their sales headcount. I…”
Lemkin: Eric Yuan and Stewart Butterfield learned SaaS from SaaStr
“It's where Eric Wan learned SAST, and Stuart Butterfield learned SAST, and so many, that's why we get so many great speakers, because they were part of SASTR so early on.”
Lemkin: SaaStr does not have a marketing strategy or marketing team
“We don't really have a marketing strategy or even a marketing team.”
Lemkin: Startups cannot scale software revenue until two sales reps hit quota
“Do whatever it takes to get two reps hitting quota. Whatever it takes to get two reps to hit quota. You'll never scale revenue if you can't get two people to hit quota.”
Lemkin: Startups should set C-10, C-60, and C-90 operational plans
“The 60 is probably where your core plan should be. We have a 60% chance thinking we can do it. More likely than not, but barely. That's how you build your core model. Your core model's for sales, for marketing spend, for hiring and engineering and product. And…”
Lemkin: Go-to-market motions are dictated by ACV rather than product features
“If there is any genius in Sastra that's now 10 years old, it's abstracting product away from the fact that our go-to-market motions are pretty much the same at an ACV. Like, it sounds obviously, but 10 years ago, it's like, it was really disruptive that, hey, …”