If you’re building or leading a SaaS company, this conversation explores how the AI SaaS playbook is changing traditional go-to-market models. Jacco, Founder of Winning by Design, explains why product-led growth, real-time systems, and growth loops vs. funnels are becoming the dominant approach to B2B growth in the AI era.

Together, Jacco and Manny discuss why the traditional SaaS funnel is losing effectiveness and how modern companies are building self-reinforcing growth engines instead. They explore the SaaS expansion strategy, the shift from logo acquisition to user adoption, and how AI-native organizations stack growth loops to maintain momentum.

“There are no seat sales. That doesn’t exist. There’s user sales, and users have usage.”

The Death of Logo Worship

For years, SaaS companies optimized for winning logos.

Get the company. Hang it on the wall. Put it on the deck.

AI-native companies think differently. They optimize for users.

“Logos don’t bring in new logos. Users bring in new users.”

Jacco argues that disruption doesn’t start with logo churn. It starts with user migration. AI-native tools land with users first. Once usage consolidates, the logo follows.

Funnels vs. Growth Loops

Traditional SaaS growth is an open-loop system. It requires constant external input: more leads, more SDRs, and more spend.

AI-native growth is closed-loop. When growth creates more growth, the system compounds.

Jacco explains that nearly every fast-growing company today operates on at least one growth loop:

User-based loops
Expansion loops
Community loops
Viral loops

If you have to pay for every dollar of growth, you will eventually hit a ceiling.

The S-Curve and Stacking Growth

All growth follows an S-curve:

Slow start
Exponential phase
Plateau

Every S-curve eventually becomes a bell curve unless you stack another one.

That’s why companies like Dropbox and DocuSign continuously launch adjacent products. When individual-user growth saturates (often around 200k–300k users in B2B), churn dampens the exponential curve.

To sustain momentum, companies must stack new growth loops on top of old ones.

Velocity Is the Real Shift

What’s different now isn’t growth theory, but speed.

AI-native companies operate at a different clock speed. If win rates in Spain jump from 18% to 26%, a traditional SaaS company might respond next quarter. An AI-native company reacts in days.

The difference lies in infrastructure, real-time systems, automated feedback loops, and humans designing systems rather than manually steering every move.

“When things go this fast, humans are no longer the control stick. We design the system and let it run.”

The 50,000 User Thought Experiment

Consider a $100M SaaS company with:

$30k ACV
3,000 customers
50,000 users

If just 1% of users per month generate an opportunity signal, that’s 500 quality signals per month. 6,000 per year. Instead of sending SDRs to cold outbound lists, Jacco proposes redeploying them toward users:

Build advocacy
Create community
Enable propagation

The growth engine is already inside the customer base. You just need to activate it.

AI Is Not Stealing Logos. It’s Stealing Users.

The biggest misconception in SaaS today is that competition happens at the logo level.

It doesn’t.

AI-native tools enter at the user layer. They win individual adoption. They observe usage patterns in real time. They iterate faster. Then the logo shifts.

If you’re SaaS-native, you are not doomed. But you must:

Focus on the users, not seats
Understand your dominant growth loop
Upgrade to real-time infrastructure
Design propagation into the product

Because in the AI era, velocity compresses the S-curve. And the companies that achieve irreversible time dominance don’t just win first. They become almost impossible to catch.

Companies Mentioned

Winning by Design
Canva
Dropbox
DocuSign
Superhuman
Grammarly
Starlink
SpaceX
Boston Dynamics
HubSpot
Cursor

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