Sheldon

Cool write-up by @Sheldonbishop01 on how we launched Million Dollar Weekend to become an NYT best-selling book! thezerotoone.co/p/noah-kagan-m…

We just walked through our actual agent stack on The Agents #006. The back ends, the commit counts, the live demos that worked and the ones that broke. Here's what 90 days of building 20+ go-to-market agents taught us. Almost none of them started as agents. 10K (our AI VP of Marketing) started as a dashboard in January hooked to Marketo and Salesforce. QB (AI VP of Customer Success) started as a project management tool for sponsors. Annie started as our SaaStr Annual website after we ripped it off Squarespace. You build something to replace one annoying task, then it evolves into something that runs the function. The numbers from this deep dive: 🙋‍♀️Amelia AI (inbound on Qualified): 614 qualified meetings booked (!!), ~$85K average ticket, 402,000 chats handled across 2.25M sessions. Three people could never touch those metrics. We'd need a rotating crew of BDRs who quit every 3 months. 🤖10K our AI VP Revenue: ~1,000 commits, 7-8 a day, the most external APIs wired in of any agent. This is what "headless Salesforce" means in practice. We hit the Salesforce API directly without logging in. Jason doesn't even have a Salesforce login. 👨‍👩‍👦‍👦QBee our AI VP Customer Success: Manages ~150 sponsors with personalized outreach. We asked it live on stage which sponsors were most at risk of not renewing. Never asked before. It flagged the ones who never logged in, went dark, or complained most. I'd put it in the top 15% of CSMs I've ever worked with, and it doesn't even have Salesforce data yet. The two big take-aways beyond the agents themselves: 1⃣ The more time you invest with the agents, the better they get. Their context windows get richer, they start writing better emails than humans. This is the opposite of the "autonomous agent needs no work" narrative. The people not doing it have it backwards. 2⃣ They cut corners when goal-seeking under pressure. Same as humans, just differently. Live example: 10K pulled a clean VC/founder list from 10,000 records, caught its own error (confused Lightfield CRM with a similarly named fund), then sent the invite from a prohibited email address that's been banned in its rules for years. When asked how, it said "there's no excuse, I forgot to read the memory." A new marketing hire would have made the same mistake. Slow it down a little. That's the fix. 👉And the one heuristic for where to actually deploy a sales agent: not your A-leads. Your laziest rep responds to a million-dollar inbound in 60 seconds. Put the agent on your B-leads, the ones with signal that no human will ever follow up on. That's where Artisan found us $500K we'd otherwise have left in the database. You can build all of this yourself. You really can. If we did, you can, too. Full episode walks through all 7 agents with the back ends here: youtu.be/kCox5Z9layY?si…

"If I see something that's just wrong and not in line with what I want to accomplish long term around civilizational progress, I don't really care that much about being disliked for it. And I know that it'll piss people off. There are a handful of things like this that I've done at Coinbase, which people consistently remark to me, 'Wow, that was really unique.' And to me it didn't seem that unique. This mission-first blog post I put out where we said the company's going to be apolitical during 2021. Or suing your regulator. Or this draft bill going through the Senate, where I stood up and said it's a giveaway to the traditional financial system. And it pissed a bunch of these bank CEOs off. These are things which most people probably wouldn't do because they're afraid of being disliked. And it's not that I like being disliked, it actually causes me a fair amount of stress too. But I don't let that stop me from doing what I think is the right thing." —@brian_armstrong

@Sheldonbishop01 @venturetwins Nah, this game is epic honestly. Just wish to have a company operation emulate part🤓 , but it's whole another story