SaaStr 846: 10 Things to Know Before You Deploy Your First AI SDR with SaaStr's CEO and CAIO
The Official AI SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
Release Date: 03/18/2026
SaaStr 858: Feature Differentiation Is Dead. Here's What Actually Wins Now with Lovable's Elena Verna
The Official AI SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
Feature Differentiation Is Dead. Here's What Actually Wins Now. When AI writes 80-plus percent of your code, the feature advantage you spent years building can be replicated in a day. Elena knows this better than most - she spent 15 years running growth at Dropbox, Miro, SurveyMonkey, and Amplitude, then joined Lovable and watched the old playbook stop working in real time. At Lovable, $400M ARR and 200 people, no titles, shipping multiple times a day, the rules are different. In this session, she breaks down what replaced feature moats, why she fired herself from her own VP job to go back to...
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SaaStr 857: The Agents #006 Inside SaaStr's 20+ AI Agent Stack: 2.25M Sessions, 614 Meetings, $2M in Revenue
The Official AI SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
20+ AI agents in daily production. 2.25M sessions. 614 meetings booked by a single agent. Millions of interactions across the stack. Amelia Lerutte, Chief AI Officer at SaaStr, and Jason Lemkin, Founder and CEO of SaaStr, take you behind the scenes of the AI agent stack running SaaStr every day, with live demos of the actual backends. In this session, they go deep on the top agents in production: 10K, SaaStr's AI VP of Marketing, built on Replit with 1,000+ commits in 4 months QB, the AI VP of Customer Success, managing 150+ customers end-to-end Annie, the AI Event Producer running...
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SaaStr 856: AI-Native GTM 101: The 5 Decisions Every Founder Has to Get Right with Owner's CRO
The Official AI SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
Owner.com is approaching $100M ARR selling to independent restaurants and their GTM team is producing numbers that shouldn't be possible. $150K AEs closing $2M+ ARR per year. Outbound BDRs generating $100K in closed-won ARR per BDR per month. 4X the ARR per rep compared to direct competitors. None of that happens by accident. In this session, Kyle Norton, CRO at Owner.com, breaks down the exact AI-driven GTM playbook that got them there, including 5 decisions he believes every SaaS company needs to make right now before the gap between AI-native and AI-curious companies becomes...
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SaaStr 855: How Anthropic Rebuilt Its Sales Org From Scratch When Demand Went Vertical with Eleanor Dorfman, Anthropic Head of Industries
The Official AI SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
SaaStr 855: How Anthropic Rebuilt Its Sales Org From Scratch When Demand Went Vertical with Eleanor Dorfman, Anthropic Head of Industries When Claude Opus 4.6 shipped in December 2025, Anthropic’s commercial team came back from winter break to find demand had gone vertical. They hadn’t hired for it. They hadn’t planned for it. As Eleanor Dorfman, Anthropic’s Head of Industries who runs the commercial and industries sales team, put it on the SaaStr AI Annual 2026 stage: even if they’d been ready to 3x or 4x or 5x the sales team, you can’t absorb that many bodies fast enough to...
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SaaStr 854: The Agents #005, Our AI is Hiring! Would You Work for One? And Are Autonomous Agents ... Safe?
The Official AI SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
The Agents #005, Our AI is Hiring! Would You Work for One? And Are Autonomous Agents ... Safe? Welcome to The Agents, where SaaStr's CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin and Chief AI Officer, Amelia LeRutte share the latest each week on running a company with more agents than humans. It costs $257 a month to run two AI VPs. Jason and Amelia open the books on what 10K (AI VP of Marketing) and QB (AI VP of Customer Success) actually cost to operate, and the number shocked both of them. Most of the heavy lifting is API calls to Salesforce, Bizzabo, and Marketo, which are basically free. The Postgres...
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SaaStr 853: The Agents #004: Tragedy Apps, Too Many AI SDRs, and Why Your Next Hire Should Report to an Agent
The Official AI SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
SaaStr 853: The Agents #004: Tragedy Apps, Too Many AI SDRs, and Why Your Next Hire Should Report to an Agent Your AI SDR pitches are getting better, but your AI PR pitches are getting you blocked. Jason and Amelia break down why the gap between good and great agents is the difference between pipeline and the spam folder. Then they introduce "tragedy apps," the term for products that had every advantage in the AI era and blew it. Descript had the customers, the product, and the timing, and froze. Replit waited 10 years for its moment and seized it. The lesson: catching up isn't enough if...
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SaaStr 852: The Agents #003, Our Agent Now Runs Campaigns on Weekends, Plus Why We Pay More for Salesforce Than Ever Before
The Official AI SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
SaaStr 852: The Agents #003, Our Agent Now Runs Campaigns on Weekends, Plus Why We Pay More for Salesforce Than Ever Before Here's the updated version: This week on The Agents, SaaStr CEO & Founder Jason Lemkin and SaaStr CAIO Amelia Le Rutte dig into what it actually looks like when your AI VP of Marketing starts running campaigns on its own, segmenting lists, writing copy, and asking if you've done the work yet. They also get into why SaaStr's Salesforce bill went up 80% after cutting seats by 60%, and why that's actually a good deal. Plus: Amelia vibed a fix to a critical Marketo...
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SaaStr 851: The Agents, Episode 002. Managing 20+ AI Agents: Lazy Agents, Stealth Churn & the Death of 60% Solutions
The Official AI SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
SaaStr 851: The Agents, Episode 002. Managing 20+ AI Agents: Lazy Agents, Stealth Churn & the Death of 60% Solutions In Episode 2 of The Agents, Amelia Lerutte, Chief AI Officer at SaaStr, and Jason Lemkin, Founder and CEO of SaaStr, share the trials, tribulations, victories, and minor defeats of managing 20+ AI agents in production. With three humans and 20+ AI agents now driving more revenue and output than SaaStr did with 20+ FTEs in 2020, this weekly series goes deep on what's actually working, breaking, and changing in the agentic era. This week's episode covers: 00:00 Welcome to...
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SaaStr 850: The Agents, Episode 1: Who Maintains All This?
The Official AI SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
SaaStr 850: The Agents, Episode 1: Who Maintains All This? Welcome to The Agents, a new weekly series where Amelia Lerutte, Chief AI Officer at SaaStr, and Jason Lemkin, Founder and CEO of SaaStr, pull back the curtain on everything happening across SaaStr's live agentic stack. Every week, all the bumps, breakthroughs, and real talk from running 20+ AI agents in production. In the debut episode: the meta question nobody talks about after you vibe code your first app, which is who actually maintains it? Amelia Lerutte and Jason Lemkin walk through three live examples from the week including...
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SaaStr 849: How We Built Our AI VP of Customer Success with SaaStr's CEO and CAIO
The Official AI SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
SaaStr 849: How We Built Our AI VP of Customer Success with SaaStr's CEO and CAIO Amelia and Jason walk through QB1, SaaStr's vibe-coded AI VP of Customer Success that started as a simple sponsor portal replacement and evolved into a fully agentic customer management system. The result: 70% fewer billable hours, 10x more customer engagement, and a hundred sponsors getting hyper-personalized weekly emails in minutes instead of days. They break down exactly how it was built, what broke, and how you can reverse-engineer it for your own business. . ---------------- Hey everybody - we are...
info_outlineSaaStr 846: 10 Things to Know Before You Deploy Your First AI SDR with SaaStr's CEO and CAIO
If you're about to roll out your first AI SDR, or you're on your second or third deployment and still not getting the results you want, this one's for you.
Amelia Lerutte, SaaStr Chief AI Officer, and Jason Lemkin, SaaStr CEO and Founder, walk through everything they've learned from running 20+ AI agents in production at SaaStr, including four AI SDRs spanning outbound, inbound, customer success, and sponsor engagement. After 10 months, 1.5 million inbound sessions, and over 200,000 outbound messages sent, they've made enough mistakes to save you a lot of time and money.
In this session they cover:
Why the tool doesn't matter as much as you think, and what actually does.
The single biggest mistake both early-stage startups and billion-dollar companies make when deploying their first AI SDR.
How to segment ruthlessly so your agent has the right context for every prospect instead of one big, generic brain.
Why consistency beats brilliance, and what "pretty good at scale" actually looks like in practice.
The minimum traffic and list size you need before an inbound or outbound AI SDR is worth deploying.
How many humans you actually need to run this well, and what happens when you don't have them.
What the first 30 days should look like, and why nothing is ever truly set and forget.
The real story behind Amelia AI, SaaStr's multimodal video agent, including what they'd do differently if starting over.
They also get into lookalike audiences as a list-building hack for early stage companies, when to build versus buy, and what it actually feels like when someone tries to prompt inject your agent at scale.
If you've been on the fence about deploying an AI SDR, or you've deployed one and it's underperforming, this is the most practical breakdown of what it takes to make one work.
Resources mentioned: SaaStr AI Agents directory: saastr.ai/agents SaaStr Annual 2026: May 12-14, SF Bay Area