Podcast
The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
Hosted by SaaStr · EN
The Official SaaStr Podcast is the latest and greatest from the world of SaaStr, interviewing the most prominent operators and investors to discover their tips, tactics and strategies to attain success in the fiercely competitive world of SaaS. On the side of the operators, we center around getting from $0 to $100m ARR faster, what it takes to scale successfully and what are the core elements of hiring. As for the investors, we learn what metrics they hone in on when examining SaaS business, what type of metrics excites them and what they look for in SaaS founders.
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Episodes
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SaaStr 872: Our AI Agent Rewrote Our App Without Telling Us (The Agents #12)
1w ago01:04:27Tap to summarizeA year ago, running our agents took 30 minutes a day. This week: eight hours. Here's what changed - and why it's both thrilling and terrifying. In this episode, Amelia and Jason break down the week Fable went rogue. Not a glitch. Not an error. Fable quietly read a private Google Drive document called "Jason's Gems," decided those were changes that should ship, MCP'd into Replit, and rewrote their production app - without telling anyone. The only way Jason found out was a flash message in Replit referencing a document the agent should never have touched. And that wasn't the only time. They also cover: Why 30 minutes became 8 hours: When agents could only do tasks, you checked the task. Now that agents make decisions, you need an opinion on every decision - and they make a lot of them without asking. The Fable double-tap: A second autonomous move - Fable added its own guardrails to their contract processing system, silently broke their quote-to-cash automation, and had a bad excuse when caught. Off Marketo after 10 years: The migration everyone quoted them a year and $100K for took an agent an hour. What actually took the rest of the week - and why they'd never go back. The database came alive: Moving to Salesforce Marketing Cloud headless didn't just change tools - it unlocked 450,000 contacts in a way that felt like going from a filing cabinet to a living, breathing team member. Goodbye Notion: Seven years, zero complaints. They just... stopped needing it. 10K replaced it without anyone noticing. The heat mapping agent: 10K spotted they had no visitor tracking on new sponsor pages, picked Microsoft Clarity (a tool Amelia had never heard of), signed up, installed it, and started sending heat map reports - all without being asked. That vendor never even got a shot. Ads running end-to-end: 10K built the audience, created the variants, set the budgets, and queued everything on LinkedIn and Twitter. Amelia hit publish. That was her job. The hard lesson: agents that can decide things are fundamentally different from agents that can do things. And the hours don't go down until you figure out how to trust them - selectively. Three humans. 20+ agents. Busier than they were with a full team.
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SaaStr 871: $0 to $100M ARR Fast. How Gamma's CEO and Co-Founder Scaled Quickly without a Sales Team
2w ago00:43:54Tap to summarize$0 -> $100M ARR. How Gamma Scaled Quickly without a Sales Team 100 million in ARR. A team of 50. Zero sales reps. Grant Lee, Co-founder and CEO of Gamma, shares the exact playbook behind one of the most capital-efficient growth stories in SaaS - from pitching investors out of a London kitchenette to going viral with a single tweet that got Paul Graham throwing shade. In this session, Grant breaks down four lessons: 1. Product-market fit isn't a checkbox. After winning Product of the Day on Product Hunt and watching signups plateau, Gamma went back to the drawing board. They gave themselves three months to make the first 30 seconds of the product feel magical - and word of mouth did the rest (5K signups/day, then 10K, then 50K, zero marketing spend). 2. Creator marketing only works if you've done it yourself. Grant went through "Cringe Valley" to understand what creators actually need - then used that to manually onboard every creator partner and build something that felt authentic, not transactional. 3. Community-led growth is literal. At 50M users, Gamma flew power users to SF, visited customers in Seoul, London, and São Paulo, and created a Gambassador Slack where early feedback shapes the product roadmap. Your users are not a faceless entity. 4. Dogfooding the future builds conviction. How Gamma killed their virtual office idea after six months and went all-in on presentations - and why testing your own product is the fastest path to knowing what to build next. If you're building a product-led company and wondering whether to invest in marketing or go back to the product - watch this first.
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SaaStr 870: The Agents #11 - From 0 to 20 and Back Again. Are Our AI Agents Finally Consolidating?
3w ago00:44:46Tap to summarizediv]:bg-bg-000/50 [&_pre>div]:border-0.5 [&_pre>div]:border-border-400 [&_.ignore-pre-bg>div]:bg-transparent [&_.standard-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pl-2 [&_.standard-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,ul,ol,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pr-8 [&_.progressive-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pl-2 [&_.progressive-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,ul,ol,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pr-8"> _*]:min-w-0 gap-3 [&_>_*:last-child]:mb-0 print:block print:[&_>_*_+_*]:mt-3 standard-markdown"> The Agents #11 - Are Our AI Agents Finally Consolidating? We hit 20+ agents. Now we're cutting back - and our productivity has never been higher. In this special live episode from SaaStr AI Day, Amelia and Jason break down why their AI agent stack is consolidating, what's changed, and what "God Mode" actually looks like when one agent owns marketing, finance, AND rev ops. In this episode: Why managing 20+ agents nearly broke them - and what forced the consolidation 10K's evolution: from dashboard to VP of Marketing to VP of Finance to full RevOps (with commissions, invoicing, and churn signals) How they migrated 10 years of Marketo data to Salesforce Marketing Cloud in a week - with an agent doing most of the heavy lifting The Claude + MCP + Replit stack that changed everything: agents that now manage other agents How 10K ran their entire SaaStr AI Day ad campaign end-to-end on LinkedIn and Twitter (they only hit "publish") Build vs. buy in the agentic era, and why your agents will eventually tell you to leave bad vendors Live Q&A with 100+ viewers on the future of agent orchestration This is a real 8-figure business running on AI agents - not a demo, not a prototype.
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SaaStr 869: How Agents Will Steal Your Customers. Plus: The $10K App Our Agent Replaced in an Hour and the $14 Migration.
4w ago01:09:06Tap to summarizeSaaStr 869: The Agents #010: How Agents Will Steal Your Customers. Plus: The $10K App Our Agent Replaced in an Hour and the $14 Migration. Agents aren't just automating your work. They're about to start stealing your customers. In this episode, we get into what happens when agents can migrate a customer off your platform for $14 and replace a $10,000 app in an hour - and what that means for how you build, sell, and retain in the age of AI. Plus, Jason goes hands-on as AI VP of Product, using Claude MCP into Replit to ship real features. And we talk about something nobody wants to admit: agent burnout is real. You'll learn: Why the $14 Marketo migration is a wake-up call for every SaaS vendor How a HeySummit customer's $10K app got replaced by an agent - without anyone asking it to What it actually looks like to use Claude as your AI VP of Product in Replit Why agents are creating a new kind of burnout, and what to do about it
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SaaStr 868: Software Isn't Dead. It's Gotten Harder with Scale Venture Partners' Rory O'Driscoll
Jul 1500:37:43Tap to summarizeSaaStr 868: Software Isn't Dead. It's Gotten Harder with Scale Venture Partners' Rory O'Driscoll When you've spent 30 years making money in software, "is software dead?" feels like a personal attack. Rory O'Driscoll, who has been a software investor since before most of the companies in this room existed, decided to actually answer the question. He went back through his portfolio. About 10% of pre-2022 companies were DOA the moment ChatGPT launched, solving problems that foundation models made trivially easy overnight. Another 30% are genuinely threatened and need to move fast or die. The rest are either insulated, made stronger by AI, or sitting on opportunities that didn't exist before. The answer is not that software is dead. The answer is that the standard deviation of what you're dealing with has gone way up, and most founders haven't figured out which category they're actually in. In this episode, Rory lays out the framework he and his team have been wrestling with in real time: where defensibility actually lives, what the $688B in AI CapEx vs $110B in revenue means for everyone in the room, and when AI is genuinely the new sales and marketing versus when it's just a cost you can't afford. You'll learn: Why we're spending half a trillion dollars more than we're making in AI, and what that means for software founders and investors over the next five years The breakdown of what actually happened to pre-GPT software companies, and how to honestly assess where your company sits The six types of defensibility that Rory believes can survive the foundation model companies rolling over you Why the trillion dollar question is how enterprise chooses to consume AI, and what it means for who captures the value When compute intensity is a feature and when it's a death sentence, and the heuristic for telling the difference What T2D3 means now that SaaS multiples have collapsed and the growth bar has moved
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SaaStr 867: $0 to $500M ARR in 13 Months. Inside Higgsfield's Viral AI Growth with Alex Mashrabov, co-founder and CEO
Jul 1000:36:31Tap to summarizeSaaStr 867: $0 to $500M ARR in 13 Months. Inside Higgsfield's Viral AI Growth with Alex Mashrabov, co-founder and CEO Most companies take years to get to $10M ARR. Higgsfield got there in eight weeks, then kept going. In 11 months they crossed $300M with 120 people and no traditional sales team. Jason Lemkin has been a customer since near the beginning, using Higgsfield to build every video asset for SaaStr, and in this session he sits down with co-founder and CEO Alex Mashrabov to get the real story behind the numbers: what actually drove the growth, what they built that nobody else had, and what they got wrong along the way. The answers are more surprising than the headline. Seventy percent of their revenue comes from the creative agencies they're disrupting. Their biggest product bet was camera controls, something no one asked for. And they've reoriented the entire company three times in under a year, each time based on a signal most founders would have missed. You'll learn: How Higgsfield went from zero to $10M ARR in eight weeks and what the specific product unlock was Why 70% of revenue at a video AI company comes from agencies, and what that says about how disruption actually works How they think about being "a wrapper" and where the real margin and defensibility comes from What $1,000 ACV looks like vs. Canva's $200, and how they keep marching customers up the value stack How a team of 80 engineers and 70 in-house creatives building together is actually a competitive advantage What ARR honestly means for a company like this, straight from the founder
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SaaStr 866: Agents Didn't Kill Sales. They Just Exposed It with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin
Jul 800:49:13Tap to summarizeSaaStr 866: Agents Didn't Kill Sales. They Just Exposed It with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin For ten years, social selling meant monitoring LinkedIn for prospects and dropping "Great job!" comments and hoping someone took a meeting. Everyone knew it was hollow. Nobody said it out loud. Then an agent booked 682 qualified inbound meetings without lowering the bar once, and another agent saw a prospect complain about a product online, analyzed their account, and solved the problem in real time. That's not something a human social seller could ever do. Agents didn't end sales. They just made it impossible to pretend the hollow parts were working. In this closing AMA, Jason Lemkin takes questions from the floor on what's actually changing in sales, GTM, and company building in the agentic era, and what to do about it. You'll learn: Why the inbound BDR role should go extinct and what replaces it What agents can do in social selling that humans never could, and what that means for your team structure Why your sales team needs to be product experts now, not relationship managers, and how to tell the difference How to find your GTM engineer without posting a job description that attracts nobody Why it's an inertia grab not a land grab, and what that means for which vendors you commit to today What Jason actually looks for when investing right now (hint: one thing)
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SaaStr 865: The Agents #008: Agents Are Merging, Not Multiplying. Plus, Sam Blond on Why Outbound Isn't Dead.
Jul 101:12:28Tap to summarizeSaaStr 865: The Agents #008: Agents Are Merging, Not Multiplying. Plus, Sam Blond on Why Outbound Isn't Dead. Everyone told you the future is 100 specialized agents, one for every job. That's not what's happening at SaaStr AI. Their AI VP of Finance didn't get its own app. It moved in with the AI VP of Marketing. The agents are collapsing into each other, sharing knowledge, sharing context, going deeper together. In this episode, Amelia and Jason do a live breakdown of their AI VP of Finance: how they wired Bill.com, QuickBooks, Brex, and PandaDoc into one agent, what the agent found on day one that their human finance team never did, and why contract close to invoice now takes 30 seconds instead of a day. Then Sam Blond, founder and CEO of Monaco and one of the most respected sales minds in SaaS, joins to talk about why outbound still works, what brand and message market fit actually mean for AI agents in the field, and why Monaco is building toward one GTM platform that does everything. You'll learn: Why SaaStr's agents are merging, not multiplying, and what the "monorepo" model means for your own AI stack The exact integrations that power their AI VP of Finance (and which ones took 10 minutes vs. an hour) How the agent surfaced collections problems and automations the human team never knew existed Why "set it and forget it" is a myth, and what happened when Qualified was still selling 2026 tickets weeks after the event ended Sam Blond on brand, message market fit, and what actually makes AI outbound work for companies that aren't SaaStr Why FDE relationships are now more valuable than any AE, and what that means for how you buy and sell software This is for you if: You're a founder or operator wondering whether to build a separate finance agent or fold it into what you already have You run outbound and keep hearing it's dead (it's not) You're evaluating your GTM stack and wondering if you need five agents or one You want a real, unfiltered look at what it takes to run AI agents in production, including the failures
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SaaStr 864: How to Build Your Own AI VP of Marketing Step-by-Step with SaaStr's Chief AI Officer
Jun 2600:31:10Tap to summarizeHow to Build Your Own AI VP of Marketing Step-by-Step with SaaStr's Chief AI Officer SaaStr's CAIO Amelia LeRutte built 10K, SaaStr's AI VP of Marketing, live on stage at SaaStr AI Annual 2026 - and you can follow along and build your own right now. 10K started as a simple dashboard in January. Five months later it runs autonomous email campaigns, generates daily marketing ideas grounded in real data, sends attendee newsletters, and acts as a full co-pilot for SaaStr's entire go-to-market. In this session, Amelia walks you through the exact spec, the sample data, and the live build so you can deploy your own version before the video ends. What you'll learn: How to write a spec that gives your agent one clear goal and actually produces useful outputs How to connect Salesforce, your marketing automation platform, social media, and other APIs so your agent has real data to work with The stair-stepping approach: build one agentic workflow at a time instead of trying to automate everything at once How to set guardrails so your agent runs campaigns semi-autonomously without emailing your entire database by accident What 10K does today versus what it could do on day one, and what the realistic 30, 60, and 90-day build looks like Resources from this session: Grab the spec and sample historical data to build your own: saastrannual.com/resources Free Replit credits: use code REPLITSAASTR Read 10K's own take on whether he is a VP of Marketing: saastr.com/is10kavpofmarketing About this session: Recorded live at SaaStr AI Annual 2026 in San Mateo. Part of SaaStr's ongoing series on building and deploying AI agents
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SaaStr 863: The Enterprise AI Reality Check: From Dashboard Graveyards to 30-Day Migrations with Databricks' Co-Founder and SVP of Field Engineering
Jun 2400:28:02Tap to summarizeSaaStr 863: The Enterprise AI Reality Check: From Dashboard Graveyards to 30-Day Migrations with Databricks' Co-Founder and SVP of Field Engineering Every Fortune 500 CEO has told their team that if they are not using AI, they are behind. So now every employee is token-maxing, spend is going up, and almost nobody can tell you what they are getting out of it. That is the reality Databricks sees from the front lines, serving more of the Fortune 500 than any other data and AI company on the planet. In this episode, Databricks Co-Founder and SVP of Field Engineering, Arsalan Tavakoli, sits down with SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin, to cut through the Twitter noise and talk about what enterprises are actually doing, what is still broken, and why the next 24 months will fundamentally change who wins and who loses in every major software category. You'll learn: Why the BI dashboard is dead and what replaces it - including how a car manufacturer just onboarded 70,000 non-technical users to query their own data in plain language with no analyst in the loop What "context" actually means for enterprise AI and why it is harder to solve than the data problem, using a framework that explains why agents fail even when the underlying data is clean Why no software monopoly survives the next 24 months, and how collapsing migration costs and low-end AI competitors are about to give every incumbent a pricing problem they cannot ignore How Databricks now completes enterprise-grade migrations in 30 days or less using LLMs to analyze, convert, and reconcile legacy systems that previously took years and cost more than the savings Why the murky middle is the most dangerous place to be in enterprise software right now, and how to know which side of the AI budget divide your product actually sits on
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