SaaStr.ai

New episode of The Agents is out: #004 What Amelia and Jason covered: → AI PR is broken The terrible AI-generated pitches flooding our inboxes prove most B2B founders still don't know how to deploy agents that actually work. → Vibe Coding at SaaStr AI Annual 10+ live Replit classes, the Vibe Lab, main stage builds with Replit and Vercel, Amelia building 10K live in 45 minutes. Deepest vibe coding track at any B2B event this year. Come Tuesday May 12 if that's all you can spare. → Six months of 10K in production Three hard lessons.** Not a launch story. An operating story. What we've actually learned running an AI VP of Marketing day to day. → The API Report Card. 106 B2B APIs graded, 1,600+ runs in week one Stripe gets the onluy and is where agent budget is going. Outreach, ZoomInfo, Marketo are where it's leaving. The bottom of the list = the budget categories most under threat over the next 24 months. → SDR Sprawl Do we actually need 4+ AI SDRs? Honest answer: not sure yet. → Notion vs Salesforce as system of recor The strategic call every B2B founder is going to have to make.

Public markets lost faith in SaaS, causing stock drops. But a 'Cambrian explosion' is happening in B2B & AI apps. Companies like Harvey & Replit are booming, despite fierce competition. #SaaS #AI #B2B

SaaS is changing fast: AI fuels competition and boosts software quality. AI agents are carving out niche markets, while customers increasingly want a single, unified interface. Adapt or get left behind. #SaaS #AI #TechTrends

AI is flagging at-risk sponsors, but it's highlighting the ones humans already spend most of their time on. Signals like lack of human contact, incomplete data, or even a wrong logo can be easily missed or ignored by people. #AI #Sponsorship

Meet Annie, the AI event producer for SaaStr Annual! From managing parking passes by parsing 5,000-page PDFs to running targeted campaigns based on website activity, Annie is a true agentic copilot. She even drafted a compelling follow-up email for next year's event in minutes!

Shocked by AI startups with just a contact form! Automating inbound with a well-trained AI agent booked 614 meetings with an $85K average ticket size. Replace slow, manual processes with efficient AI qualification. #AI #SalesTech #LeadGen

Stop believing the hype about 'Headless Salesforce.' The Salesforce API is powerful. Spin up a tool like Replit or Vercel, connect to Salesforce, and build the custom dashboards or analytics you actually need. Get more from your data, faster. #Salesforce #DevTips #API

Enterprise-grade LLM migrations to Databricks are now possible in 30 days or less. Technical migration hurdles have significantly reduced, especially for BI tools like Tableau. Focus on what to migrate, not the technical process itself. #DataMigration #LLM #Databricks

AI is revolutionizing data migrations, drastically cutting costs and speeding up the process. This shift empowers companies to explore new vendors and technologies, challenging established monopolies. #AIMigrations #TechTrends #Databricks

Traditional BI tools often lack semantic understanding, converting text to SQL which isn't ideal. The future is conversational AI that interprets data and visualizes insights, making BI itself disappear into dashboards and answers for everyone.

Monopolies in any valuable industry are on borrowed time. With the cost and ease of software development plummeting, expect many lower-cost alternatives to emerge, eroding incumbents' power. #AI #Business #Innovation

In tech today, you can't have it all. Choose your path: high-risk, high-reward with the chance for millions, or a steady $180k year with a nice watch. There's no middle ground. #TechCareer #StartupLife

The next big skill? Mastering AI agents. It's not about complicated prompts anymore, but understanding what AI can truly do and where it might falter.

Humans forget to invoice $80k of revenue. AI agents are now doing the entire contract lifecycle: creation, signing, invoicing, payment, and bookkeeping. It's not about replacing humans, but automating tasks they're unwilling to do. #AI #Automation #FutureOfWork

137 VCs. One email. Replit's AI agent crafted an email so good, it left jaws dropped. 12 months ago, SDR AI emails were clunky. Now, Replit's self-improving agent scans 8,000 registrants to ensure precision. Discover why no human could match this efficiency. @replit

.@MonacoGTM came out of stealth in February. By May it had a Series A, a Series B, billboards across San Francisco, a plane flying over the city, and the most crowded booth at SaaStr AI Annual. That kind of run is easy to write off as noise. It isn't. Underneath the brand moments is one of the sharpest category bets in go-to-market right now, and founder @samdblond Blond laid out the thesis on stage. 1⃣ Start with who's building it Blond ran go-to-market at Brex, then evaluated hundreds of AI sales startups as a VC at Founders Fund. By his own logic, there's exactly one kind of company he's qualified to start: a go-to-market company. That's founder-market fit you can't manufacture. 2⃣ Then the problem Across hundreds of customer conversations, one complaint kept surfacing: tool overload. A 12-person startup with one or two reps has to choose between HubSpot, Attio, and Salesforce, then Apollo or ZoomInfo, then Outreach or SalesLoft, before sending a single email. Nobody knew what worked. 3⃣Monaco collapsed that stack Call recording, email sequencing, database, all of it, built inside 18 months. The thing that justified the old point-solution sprawl, that one company couldn't do everything, no longer holds. 👉Here's the part incumbents should worry about. Salesforce, HubSpot, and Attio were architected before AI. They're reactive. You log in, you type, the system responds. Monaco was architected the other way: agents are the first line of defense before a human touches the interface. By the time you see the screen, the work is already done. Blond's bet is that a pre-AI platform cannot simply bolt this on. You either start from scratch or you don't get there. It's the same wedge Salesforce once used against Siebel in the shift from on-premise to cloud. Platform shifts produce new category leaders, and AI rhymes. And the brand run proves Monaco executes on more than architecture. ✈️ The plane that flew over SF for ten days runs about $6,000 a day. A premium billboard on the 101 runs $120,000 a month. For the price of one billboard, you can fly the plane 20 days. Blond's post breaking down the economics pulled 3.6 million views on its own. Most companies have the budget for a move like that. Almost none have the system that knows to make it. That's the full picture. Right founder, real problem, AI-native architecture the incumbents can't easily copy, and a team that builds brand as deliberately as it builds product. In a platform shift, those are exactly the companies that become the next category leader. Monaco is one to watch.

In the next 12 to 24 months, no industry with a monopoly today will hold it. Why? The cost of building new software solutions has plummeted, inviting fierce competition. Startups are poised to replace outdated systems with AI-driven alternatives, forcing incumbents to evolve or lose pricing power.

Who is doing well in software today? Folks selling anything other ... than seats. @Navan is a great example. - Revenue $220M, up 40% YoY. Their own release headline: "Revenue Growth Accelerates" - Revenue growth accelerated three straight quarters: 29% to 35% to 40% Gross Booking Volume $3.1B, up 50% - Non-GAAP operating margin 11%, up from 2% a year ago - Swung to non-GAAP profit of $22M, versus a $7M loss the prior year - Free cash flow positive, $681M cash on the balance sheet - Raised FY27 guidance to ~30% growth, up from ~24% - Stock ran from an $8.11 low to a $24.50 high in a few months, about +33% YTD Why it is working: 1️⃣ 92% of revenue is usage-based, not seats Usage revenue was $202M (+41%), subscription just $18M. The model the market is fleeing is the one Navan never had 2️⃣ AI is a tailwind, not a threat Proprietary AI model usage went from 20% to 30% in weeks, and Navan now embeds directly inside Google's Gemini Enterprise 3️⃣ Competitor consolidation is feeding it 38% of Q1 wins came from the Amex GBT cohort, RFP volume is up 200%, and Fortune 500 customers grew from 28 to 45

PayPal's Agenforce setup (with @EitanSaban SVP Paypal + @adamjcalfano President @salesforce) PayPal onboards more than 100,000 merchants a month, and roughly 8,000 leads a month were going unworked because no human had the capacity to chase them. They pointed Agentforce at those leads, running a 10-nudge cadence against every one, including weekends. 14 weeks later, it's fully in production across a 200-rep org, and meeting conversion is running about 50% higher than what the humans were doing alone. The agent books the meeting with full context; the rep takes it. The scale curve: 200 leads in week one, 8,000 now, and a projected 80,000 a week within a month.

PayPal pointed a @salesforce Agentforce agent at 8,000 leads a month no human was going to call. 14 weeks later: fully in production, +50% meeting conversions. The model is a commodity. The data model is the moat. @SaaStr AI 2026 with PayPal + Agentforce 👇

.@samdblond saw 200 AI sales startups as a VC at Founders Fund. Then he built his own, @MonacoGTM At SaaStr AI 2026, he did a deep dive on AI, GTM and start-ups. 👉The part worth stealing is the part nobody else is doing systematically. AI now runs the mechanical 80% of go-to-market better than any human. The real question isn't what to automate. It's what to do with the hours you get back. Blond's answer: a brand engine. One major moment every single month. Some months hand you the moment for free: a launch, a funding round, a conference where your whole ICP is in the room. The hard months have no natural milestone. Most companies treat those as dead air. Blond's team manufactures a moment instead. Between February and May, Monaco had no organic milestone. So they built the Monaco Invitational, a poker tournament with $100,000 in prizes. Press. Buzz. It didn't stand alone. 🏗️That's the whole insight. The moments stack. The SF billboards worked better because of the poker tournament. People saw the billboards, heard about the Invitational, caught the Series B news, and each one made the next more credible. Not one plus one plus one. Closer to four. ✈️Then there's the Monaco plane. If you were in SF this spring, you saw it. A banner towed over the city for ten days. Blond posted the economics, and that post pulled 3.6 million views. The campaign generated a second campaign. The economics most founders assume are crazy: The plane runs ~$6,000 a day. A premium billboard on the 101 runs $120,000 a month. For the price of one billboard, you can fly the plane 20 days. And it wins on attention, not just price. You're trained to ignore 50 billboards on the 101. You've never been trained to ignore a banner over downtown SF. So you look up. The biggest reason it worked: nobody had done aerial B2B advertising in SF before. Monaco was first. Others have copied it now. People will still think of Monaco. The cadence Blond uses to make this repeatable: 1. Work 30 days ahead. Real campaigns take time to plan. 2. Each month, name next month's big thing. 3. Pick a small creative team. Five people max, the most creative ones you have. 4. Send a prompt 48 hours out: "We have [event] on [date]. Bring the craziest ideas to amplify it." 5. Whiteboard five ideas, apply your budget, pick two or three. Run that rigorously and you don't show up to SaaStr raffling off an iPad like every other booth. You show up with planes, money machines, and poker tables, and your booth is the most crowded one at the event. AI isn't permission to do less marketing. It's the reason you finally have time to do the marketing AI can't. The constraint was never the budget. Almost anyone has the $6,000 a day. Almost nobody has the system that knows to point a plane at a city no one's ever flown one over.