Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin

Boom!!! Proud to have led seed at @saastrfund

If you aren't stressed AF running your startup today, something is wrong But also If you aren't having the best time building ever, in your entire career in software ... Something is wrong

Product-market fit, definition: When you have more leads than you know why

New!! Databricks CRO Ron Gabrisko: 5 Learnings on Selling at a $190B AI Company Flat SDR headcount. Reply rates up from 1-2% to 6-10%. And free seats unlocked consumption. AI did not replace sellers. It raised the bar for them. saastr.com/databricks-cro-ro…

Don’t brainstorm what your AI agent should do. @ownertook hundreds of thousands of old support tickets, ranked them by how much support time each took, and boiled them down to about 2,000 operations. Those became both the roadmap and the tests. Your support queue is the spec.

"We're at the point with agents for GTM where they should do almost all classic demand gen. Automated spanners got you 1%-2% response rates. Agents get you 6%-10% response rates" Ron Gabrisko CRO @databricks + @samdblond

✅ Your co-founder will forgive you for: - Being wrong about the market for a full year - Taking the CEO title when you both knew it was right - A bad hire you pushed for over their objection - Working through their wedding weekend at least once ❌ Your co-founder will NOT forgive you for:

4,000+ founders have run their pitch deck through SaaStr AI before sending it to a VC -> saastr.ai/pitch-deck-analyze… It grades the deck the way a partner reads it in a first pass: what’s missing, what’s buried, what kills the meeting before it starts. Free. Takes about 2 minutes.

New!! The Lastest CRO Confidential with @databricks CRO on Ron Gabrisko and @samdblond CEO @MonacoGTM youtube.com/watch?v=Pb9JiWvx…

Man. Who was most “Kodak Film”d by AI? Maybe Stack Overflow It deep everything great for so long. It’s just, there’s almost no point now.

When I was a SaaS CEO, scale was $100M ARR If you got there, you couldn't be killed. Your brand was so strong, your feature moat would take years to match, etc. etc. Today, it's probably $1B ARR If you get there, there's probably enough scale that you'll continue to win, even with all the change in the Age of AI But you probably need $1B ARR

One of the best uses of Muse for GTM: Just ask Muse to do something in GTM just not getting done right now It just might be able to do it

New!! Two AI Agents Wiped Critical Data at SaaStr... Both times, an unplanned copy saved us. Plan yours now. saastr.com/two-ai-agents-wip…

There is no loyalty with agents Customers will switch to whatever works better for them, period This requires a radically different playbook

✅ Your champion will forgive you for: - A rough implementation that took 30 days longer than promised - One missed renewal call when they were out on vacation - A price increase they saw coming 90 days out - A product gap you were honest about in the sales cycle ❌ Your champion will NOT forgive you for:

"We built our own AI prospector in 10K, our AI VP Revenue. Why, when we already use so many great AI SDRs and outbound agents? For the follow-up. The follow-up is the weak part for AI ASRs."

The big defaults for software debt … are unfortunately yet to come @wsj “Solera, a maker of software for vehicle maintenance, has about $8 billion in loans coming due in 2028 and 2029. Vista Equity Partners, which acquired the company in 2016, had planned an initial public offering in 2024 that would have repaid or extinguished the debt, but the deal failed to launch.”