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 40 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
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.”
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?”
Interacting with an agent builder develops its distinct personality
“If you start to talk to the agent in this builder in the back end, it will develop its own, what I call personality or you can call it brain, but it will develop its own personality to do it.”
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.”
Guardrails matter more than prompt engineering when building AI agents
“Guardrails is, you know, better than prompt engineering.”
LaRoute: Adobe Illustrator remains gold standard for print production over Figma
“Adobe Illustrator is still the gold standard. That's still what we use. That's what we use for print. For things going to print in actual production, Illustrator is, you know, as oldie as it is, Illustrator is still the thing we all consolidate on between, you…”
LaRoute: Self-serve AI SDR deployments will fail without human optimization
“And the problem with self-serve is there's no way to catch for that. Self-serve is click some buttons, load in a list, use some AI-generated copy, probably from Claude or Chat, GBT, and let the agent run, right? So like, How will you ever catch in a self-serve…”
LaRoute: FDEs do not need engineering backgrounds if they know the product
“If you have people in your org who know the product, they can be an FBE. They do not need to be an engineer as long as they know the product and can get your customer deployed. I feel like we're also losing the plot. That the whole point of the FDE is to get y…”
LaRue: Onboarding sales AI requires as much time as training a human SDR
“But if you don't have two weeks to onboard your AI, just like you would spend two weeks onboarding a human being, then don't do it. Like you literally need to spend the same amount of time, maybe more, on training the AI that you would a human being.”
LaRue: Prospects do not care if outreach is AI-generated if it adds value
“At the end of the day, if your AI is adding value, it will not care it's an AI.”
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.”
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…”
AI agents excel at ad creative due to endless ideation capacity
“Agents are really good at ads because they have, like, endless ideas, whereas I feel like as humans, if you want your ROAS to be really high, you need to change it, like, every other day or so and change it, like, seven times over.”
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.”
AI marketing agents generate ideas exclusively grounded in data
“The nice thing about building something like an agent is any ideas it's going to give you is only based in data. Like, that's all it has. It's got all your data. It's got your numbers. It's got a goal, hopefully. You give it a goal, maybe write down your goal …”
AI agents must each be assigned a single, specific goal
“Make sure you give your agent one goal. So that's also why we have like multiple agents between our AI VP of Marketing, our AI VP of Customer Success, our AI Sash Reannual agent. Like, they all have different brains. I don't like to overload them. I like to ke…”
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 …”
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.”
LaRoute: I have stealth churned off ChatGPT since December
“I hate to say that I've stealth churned off ChatGPT, but I literally just looked. I haven't used it since December.”
Lerutte: Every AI SDR platform requires two weeks for domain warmup
“So every AISDR platform I talk to needs this two week warm up.
So that's part of it. It's going to spend time just warming up those domains and mailboxes for you.”
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 …”
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.”
LaRue: AI SDRs Need Six Weeks of Data to Avoid Generic Outreach
“You might want to spend the next, even like six weeks of data might be enough for it to get up and running and going with something things. So it has some historical context to help your open rates. I think otherwise it will start to default to being too gener…”
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.”
LaRue: Human SDR Responses Must Match AI Outbound Quality and Speed
“If you're going to be the human in the loop and respond, you got to do it one right away and it's got to be good. Like, it's gotta be at the same level as the AI, or they're gonna be like, oh, was this just a bad AI email that I got?”
LaRue: Prospects assume sales reps know everything their booking AI knows
“You will need to do this working theory more and more, the more the AI sets up these calls and meetings for you, because you yourself may not know as much about this company as your AI does, but if it got the meeting for you, the person who comes to the Zoom
W…”
SaaStr operates nearly 30 AI agents used almost 1 million times
“We have, I don't know, almost 30 agents now at Saskr that have been used almost a million times.”
SaaStr built its AI agent over five months of daily work
“We've been building with Tenk literally every day between myself and Jason for the last five months, and so it might take you some time after this session, if you leave with a basic one, to build it to the full feature and functionality that we have at Saster.”
Autonomous AI email reminders drove spikes in SaaStr ticket sales
“Again, this one collected emails when people put in for the code, so it already had their email, and then just started emailing them, I think only twice, autonomously on its own, and then every time we saw it send out daily a reminder, we would see ticket spik…”
LaRoute: SaaStr's AI agent sent 83 customized sponsor emails in minutes
“So you can see here, he sent 83 in a row just in a matter of minutes. And he emailed all of our sponsors while I was going to sleep for the evening or morning, however you look at it.”
LaRoute: AI agents completed 4+ hours of sponsor onboarding in 10 minutes
“QB and co-work do it together because research mode is pretty good, right? In about 10 minutes, so then I just uploaded it to the platform in 10 minutes versus four hours slash a day. It was more, more richer data than we used to upload for sponsors previously…”
Lerutte: SaaStr's AI SDR sent 15,000 messages in 100 days
“So in the last hundred days,
It's done about 15,000 messages.”
Lerutte: Artisan CEO says average platform response rate is 2% to 4%
“Five percent, you know, Jasper and Arzen, who's the CEO, has said like, average is like two to four.”
Lerutte: Artisan plans to automate campaign pitch ingestion by year-end
“I do know Jasper from artisan says that's coming by end of year, but right now you just put it in yourself, you know, pick the best pain points, improve points.”
Lerutte: Most users who query Jason Lemkin's Delphi AI become repeat users
“When we looked at the data, most people come back to it. So they'll actually ask Jason's AI a question.”
Lerutte: SaaStr's average sponsorship selling price is approximately $85,000
“Our ASP for tickets, yes, it's a couple hundred bucks for London, slightly more for South for annual, but our ASP for sponsorships is probably 85 K.”
Lerutte: Tailored sales decks save buyers from creating internal pitch decks
“Send them a either pre or post sale, highly customized deck. They can share it around. Like a lot of the times we do these decks now and send to folks, they, the number one response I surprisingly get is like, oh, I was going to have to actually do that myself…”
LaRue: SaaStr uses Gamma and Genspark for custom sales proposals
“I've been using Gamma and Genspark for these kind of as a mix with other things, like with other things we have here too.”
Lerutte: SaaStr had almost no Salesforce call notes before implementing AI
“We didn't have any call notes in our Salesforce prior to this. Like we just had like loose information. Like if there was a close one deal, it was in Salesforce. Otherwise it was pretty much not in there, which means it did not exist.”