Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin

Everyone has an AI strategy. Almost nobody has agents in production. That's the gap. 🚀Get ahead of the pack. Take 1 day our and join SaaStrDeploy.com '26 — our first-ever AI GTM Agent Summit inside of SaaStr AI 2026. May 12, SF. One day. One mission. Deploy your AI agents. No more excuses.

@tbpn @carl_eschenbach Hmmm

Sequoia’s @carl_eschenbach says the SaaSpocalypse narrative is "completely overblown," and that it's not a zero-sum game between incumbent SaaS and AI-native newcomers: "Incumbency is incredibly powerful in enterprise. Incumbency is even more powerful when a company like Workday has a 98% gross retention rate across 11,000 customers, with 65%+ of them being Fortune 500 companies. They’re not going anywhere." "That all being said, [with] the pace and rate of change that can happen outside of the big incumbents and big SaaS companies...[new companies] have an opportunity to start completely fresh, and start from scratch." "They get to leverage all the technologies and all the models that are out there, and build agents and agentic solutions faster than anyone else. And they're going to be able to go into the enterprise and provide value on day one, either on their own, or on top of and through some of these SaaS companies."

@YashPnke AI agents can work around any UX

@jasonlk The real crime here is expecting a team to fix a fundamental product problem. Is the core UX even ready for AI Agents?

Honestly if Meta paid $14B+ to get the Alex + Scale team to reboot their AI strategy ... Someone should pick me and Amelia up for a mere $140m or so to help them with their AI Agent strategy It would be cheap

Some founders are still treating AI as a product feature. The ones winning are treating it as a business model. That's the whole difference. SaaStr AI 2026. May 12-14. SF Bay.

@PhilipErik125 @emcross23 @HarryStebbings @rodriscoll Yes everyone not really growing is leading with gross profit

@emcross23 @HarryStebbings @rodriscoll @jasonlk @HarryStebbings need to hear this!

Just a flag for @HarryStebbings @rodriscoll @jasonlk that are referencing Block growing revenue 2-3%. We measure top line performance using gross profit. Gross revenue recognition of bitcoin trading skews revenue a lot. We grew gross profit 24% in Q4 and guided to growing gross profit 18% in 2026...

@tthierry_t Yes in many ways pretty easy And yet So hard for almost everyone

@jasonlk Depends on whether you need to fork a model from scratch. Playing with an AISDR for an event org is somehow easy.

@SMBderek Generally, either a great support agent (easy win) or a great inbound agent (we used Qualified) so EVERY potential leads gets help in real-time SaaStr.ai/agents

@jasonlk @jasonlk if you were starting from scratch with little budget, what would be the first agent you’d spent time building or invest in using?

@OnlyCFO I think deep down no one is sure the revenue is durable anymore

@jasonlk Do you think there should be more buying from other software or AI companies who are in a better position? Or is it not worth it?

@bwagy Yeah then 1000% we're in

@jasonlk More convincing if you add a zero, no?

@OnlyCFO I see zero demand for struggling B2B companies from $10M-$10B in market cap

What do you think of M&A going forward in 2026? Seems like volume could increase a lot with desperate fire sales but obviously outcomes would be much worse But it would all be overshadowed by a few mega deals. But sees like there could be some really good deals for some buyers

@Kedbranten it's quite ironic

@jasonlk the irony of an AI company's AI not knowing its own pricing. classic case of not eating your own dog food

The other day the AI Agent for a leading AI startup told us we had to pay 4x more than we had been paying to keep using it It tuns out we didn't have to -- but the AI Agent hadn't been properly trained on its own product You have to, have to, have to train all your own AI Agents too Or out comes garbage

@edsim This just used to take 4-5 years. Now it takes 4-5 weeks.

fantastic release! We now have The Law of Agent Cannibalism: Get super successful → raise at a huge valuation → now you must expand into everything. Lovable went from app builder to data science, marketing & decks. Everyone’s eating everyone else’s lunch. When shipping new features costs near zero, every company becomes every company. And when switching costs are also near zero - who wins? Next few months gonna be interesting.

@willcheung Yeah I think so

@jasonlk Managing agents will probably become one of the high-demand skillsets in 2027.

@jarehart @samtwtss Yeah Gemini does look better, and replit uses it for design mode But still outputs repeated similar artifacts in end, just better looking ones than Claude

@jasonlk @samtwtss Same with Claude, Lovable, etc. The defaults are the same everywhere and easy to spot. Gradients, em dashes, etc.

bro, it's so over for designers google stitch is insane. 🤯

@kodylow @samtwtss Yeah gotta pass that test in 2026

@jasonlk @samtwtss "make an upgraded design for saastr.ai" the ultimate test

@venkat_systems @camillenvargas If I had a billion dollar position? Absolutely

@jasonlk @camillenvargas would you?

I don’t understand how they’re not embarrassed

@eric_seufert I think most of the Shopify ecosystem sees it as pretty real, if nascent

Agentic commerce is a mirage.