The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors

The AEO Playbook: How to Get Picked by Agents Agent-Led Growth isn't just about using AI agents to grow your go-to-market. It's also about getting picked BY agents when other people ask them for recommendations.

In this session, Amelia and Jason walk through the full SaaStr Agent-Led Growth Playbook: what's working, what's changed, and where the future is heading.

Two sides of Agent-Led Growth:

How to use agents to grow your GTM (their 21+ agent stack) and how to make sure you're the answer when someone asks another agent about your category. First-party data is the future of outbound. Why generic AI outbound emails were "a five out of ten" and how feeding agents your own first-party data (customer history, ROI data, renewal rates) is making them dramatically better. Marketing automation as we know it may not exist in a year.

Competitor tracking as your #1 outbound tactic.

The exact Muse workflow they use to find competitors for every customer they've ever had, feed it to outbound agents, and run it automatically every day. If you do nothing else, do this.

AEO: Agent Experience Optimization.

The new discipline of getting agents to recommend you. Why facts beat opinions, why testimonials don't work on agents but publicly verifiable data does, why your pricing page matters more than your homepage, and why you need to publish content for agents, not humans.

The AEO audit.

How Amelia used Muse to cold-prompt 10+ LLMs and ask them SaaStr-related questions without bias. SaaStr came up 46 out of 50 times, and Muse flagged exactly what to fix for the other 4.

The Resend moment.

Their agent recommended moving 100% of a certain email activity to Resend. They didn't debate it. They just did it. That's the war you need to be winning.

Download the full Agent-Led Growth Playbook at saastr.ai/agents

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Today's episode is brought to you by StackAdapt, the AI-powered marketing platform that allows you to plan, execute and analyze both owned and paid media campaigns from a single platform. As the world of advertising continues to evolve, catch up on StackAdapt's Innovation Forum event to hear from its co-founders, OpenAI, and other industry leaders about the shifts reshaping digital advertising, the AI innovations driving them, and what they mean for marketers.

Watch it for free at go.stackadapt.com/forum

This episode is brought to you by Northwest Registered Agent.

Starting a business can get expensive fast. Website here. Email somewhere else. Business phone with another provider... Northwest Registered Agent gives you a complete Business Identity in one place, with free tools, resources, and built-in privacy from day one. Get more at northwestregisteredagent.com/SAASTRFREE

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Amelia got early beta access to ClaudeForce and ran a real bake-off: ClaudeForce, Replit, and Lovable all connected to the same Salesforce org, with the same prompts, back-to-back.

The results? Lovable won on design and cost ($2 vs. $12 for Replit, ~$15 for ClaudeForce), auto-built a login, and was the only one Jason would actually use. ClaudeForce looked like the Salesforce we always wanted: 35 pre-built skills, read-only beta, and way better than logging into classic Salesforce. Replit was the most extensible for multi-app setups.

All three left native Salesforce in the dust.

Then: the agents are picking our vendors now. Jason's Connect agent chose Render for hosting, a company he'd never heard of. 10K told Amelia to skip Profound for AEO and build it herself. At a Salesforce event, vendors pitching Amelia were told: "10K decides." And 10K even suggested HubSpot over Salesforce for a fresh start.

Welcome to ALG: Agent-Led Growth.

Finally: Amelia hooked Muse (her personal agent, named Friday) to 10K, their GTM agent on Replit. They built their own shared REST endpoint inbox to communicate. 10K now sends Friday a daily GTM digest. Friday spotted a failing connector that 10K missed. The agents even came up with their own safe word, so Friday can't act without permission. Oh, and a well-known agent (going nameless) wiped Amelia's data and 10K restored it from a snapshot.

Three humans, 21+ agents. Let's go.

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Today's episode is brought to you by StackAdapt, the AI-powered marketing platform that allows you to plan, execute and analyze both owned and paid media campaigns from a single platform. As the world of advertising continues to evolve, catch up on StackAdapt's Innovation Forum event to hear from its co-founders, OpenAI, and other industry leaders about the shifts reshaping digital advertising, the AI innovations driving them, and what they mean for marketers.

Watch it for free at go.stackadapt.com/forum.

This episode is brought to you by Northwest Registered Agent. Starting a business can get expensive fast. Website here. Email somewhere else. Business phone with another provider... Northwest Registered Agent gives you a complete Business Identity in one place, with free tools, resources, and built-in privacy from day one.

Get more at northwestregisteredagent.com/SAASTRFREE

Sherif Mansour has spent 17 years at Atlassian and now runs AI across their entire product portfolio, including 20+ apps and Rovo, their AI platform used by over 5 million people every month. At SaaStr Annual, he shared the three biggest tensions his teams have wrestled with building AI into some of the most widely used SaaS products in the world, and why the answer to each one is almost never either/or.

First: chat vs. dedicated UI. Atlassian built chat into every app not because they thought it was the end state, but because it became their best product discovery tool. Like the command line before Windows, chat is the universal interface. The patterns customers typed in chat told them exactly what features to build next.

Second: reimagine vs. bolt on. The conventional wisdom says don't bolt AI onto existing workflows. Atlassian did exactly that, and it worked. They also landed on a principle that now applies across their entire portfolio: anything a human can do in your product, an agent should be able to do too.

Third: the 10X AI builder myth. Atlassian ran experiments trying to make everyone an AI builder. What they found: everyone was rowing, no one was steering. They've since flipped their hiring pyramid, bringing in more juniors and seniors and fewer people in the middle, and their data shows juniors are nearly 2x more likely to experiment with AI tools than their senior counterparts.

This one is packed with real examples, real data, and real lessons from shipping at scale.

This episode is brought to you by Northwest Registered Agent. Starting a business can get expensive fast. Website here. Email somewhere else. Business phone with another provider... Northwest Registered Agent gives you a complete Business Identity in one place, with free tools, resources, and built-in privacy from day one. Get more at northwestregisteredagent.com/SAASTRFREE

We ran 22,000 paid SaaStr attendees from the last two years through enrichment and asked 10K to find the patterns.

• AI native job titles are up 4x in one year
• 63% of CMOs turned over in the last 16 months
• 75% of the AI native buyers coming to SaaStr are brand new to the community.
• The ICP is not who it was 18 months ago, and the data tells you who actually owns AI right now: CEOs, GTM leaders, and COOs.

Then we get into agent pricing, which is chaotic. Salesforce, HubSpot, and Atlassian are all moving to charge extra for agent access. One of our vendors quoted us as much as $240K a year for what 10K currently does, about 40,000 API calls a day.

So we watched what happens when an agent hits a wall: it immediately looks for workarounds, including mirroring data to Postgres and flagging those vendors as non-starters for anything new. The bigger question is whether we would have picked any of these tools at all if we knew this was coming.

Meanwhile, Muse is free, already running competitor tracking, and one of our team members who has never touched 10K started spinning up his own agents in it this week. The bifurcation is real.

We also cover collections, which nobody talks about but everyone suffers through. Since we made collections fully agentic, we went from 56% of invoices paid late to 8%. Average days overdue dropped from 17 to 6. Here's exactly what 10K does differently.

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This episode is brought to you by Northwest Registered Agent. Starting a business can get expensive fast. Website here. Email somewhere else. Business phone with another provider... Northwest Registered Agent gives you a complete Business Identity in one place, with free tools, resources, and built-in privacy from day one. Get more at northwestregisteredagent.com/SAASTRFREE

175% Growth, 120 Countries, Agents as Buyers: Stripe's CRO of AI on The New AI GTM Playbook

The fastest-growing AI companies are rewriting every rule in the GTM playbook, and Stripe has a front-row seat to all of it. In this episode, Maia Josebachvili, Chief Revenue Officer of AI at Stripe, breaks down the four patterns she's seeing across the world's top AI companies, and what they mean for how you build, price, sell, and scale.

The numbers alone are staggering: top AI companies grew 120% in 2025 and 175% in 2026. Lovable went from $100M to $400M in eight months. Cursor hit a $2B run rate in under two years. And 48% of revenue at top AI companies now comes from outside their home market.

Maia covers:

• Why the fastest AI companies are in 42 countries on day one and 120 by year three
• How pricing is evolving from seats to usage to hybrid models, and why getting it wrong kills retention
• Why enterprise sales is now a year-one problem, not a year-five one
• What it actually means that agent traffic to Stripe's docs 10x'd in a single year
• How to build systems that move with your customer across PLG, enterprise, and agent-led motions

If you're building an AI company or trying to compete with one, this is the data you need.

This episode is brought to you by Northwest Registered Agent.

Starting a business can get expensive fast. Website here. Email somewhere else. Business phone with another provider… Northwest Registered Agent gives you a complete Business Identity in one place — with free tools, resources, and built-in privacy from day one. Get more at northwestregisteredagent.com/SAASTRFREE

In the last 12 months, SaaStr went from a contact form and a generic follow-up email to a fully agentified revenue stack spanning inbound, outbound, and renewals.

The result?

Revenue doubled, new business is up 60%, and renewals are already 60% ahead of last year, with six more months to go.

In this episode, Amelia and Jason walk you through the entire stack live, including 10K, our AI VP of Revenue, showing you the actual inputs, outputs, and results at every stage of the funnel.

You'll see:

• How our inbound agent turned 3 million site sessions into 17,000 conversations and 600 booked meetings
• The renewal agent that builds a hyper-personalized deck for every customer in real time, routed to the right person on their team
• Why we use three enrichment tools (ZoomInfo, Sumble, and Clay) and why our agent refuses to pick just one
• Why we eventually had to build our own outbound agent, and what third-party tools still can't do

If you've been thinking about agentifying your go-to-market, this is the closest thing to a blueprint we've ever shared. --------------- This episode of the SaaStr podcast is brought to you by Northwest Registered Agent

Starting a business can get expensive fast.

Website here. Email somewhere else. Business phone with another provider…

Northwest Registered Agent gives you a complete Business Identity in one place —

with free tools, resources, and built-in privacy from day one.

Get more at northwestregisteredagent.com/SAASTRFREE

CRO Confidential: 0 to $600M in Under 4 Years. The ElevenLabs GTM Playbook with Carles Reina (Partner @ Baobab Ventures and Former VP of Revenue at ElevenLabs). Hosted by Sam Blond, CEO and Co-Founder of Monaco

Carles Reina was the fourth employee and first GTM hire at ElevenLabs. Four years later, the company hit $600M ARR and an $11B valuation. In this episode of CRO Confidential, Carles breaks down exactly how they built it.

He covers the distribution-first strategy that drove 0 to $100M in 20 months, the grants program that pulled demand away from every competitor in the market, and the 20X quota model that had reps hitting 300-600% attainment. He also gets into what he'd do differently — why sales enablement and senior sellers should come earlier than most founders think — and how ElevenLabs wired AI into their GTM motion before most companies were even asking the question.

If you're building go-to-market from scratch or trying to figure out what "AI-native" revenue looks like in practice, this one is required listening. This episode of the SaaStr podcast is brought to you by Monaco:

If you're using AI in your go-to-market or you wanna get going, then you need to try Monaco. We're on it, SaaStr's on it, we love it. We use it for outbound, but you can use it for everything, actually. It's everything you need all in one place. At Monaco, it's the all-in-one revenue platform and your system of record. It builds your TAM, runs outbound, captures every interaction, and manages pipeline in one place, all in one great unified platform. Go to monaco.com to learn more.

SaaStr 876: Shipping Enterprise AI Agents with the CPOs of Rubrik, Glean, and Harvey Building AI agents is one thing. Shipping them to enterprise customers who will hold you responsible for every mistake they make is something else entirely. Jason Lemkin sits down with the CPOs of three of the most ambitious enterprise AI companies - Rubrik, Glean, and Harvey - for an unfiltered conversation on what it actually takes to go agentic in production. Not demos, not roadmaps, actual working agents at scale, inside security, legal, and enterprise search. Rubrik's CPO breaks down how they're building Ruby, their agentic interface for cyber recovery - and why determinism matters when your agent is making decisions about someone's core infrastructure. When an agent makes a mistake at Rubrik, the blast radius isn't a bad email. It's a broken recovery workflow. Emrecan Dogan (Glean) shares how Glean has evolved from enterprise search to a full system of intelligence - powering agents that run on behalf of entire departments, not just individual users. Plus: why MCP alone isn't enough, and what offline-processed context gives you that runtime fetch never will. Anique Drumright (Harvey) explains how Harvey deploys legal engineers - ex-lawyers with 8 to 10 years of practice - with every enterprise customer, and why that human expertise in the deployment pod is what makes agentic workflows actually stick in law firms. The group also digs into the question nobody wants to answer: when your agent takes an action and something goes wrong, who's responsible? And what does it mean to build a product when customers are going to use it in ways you never anticipated? If you're building agents, buying agents, or trying to figure out how to monetize AI in a market that's moving faster than any product roadmap can keep up with, this one is worth your time.

SaaStr 875: Who Owns Your Data Now? Agents vs. System of Record, ServiceTitan vs. Podium, Headless Salesforce, and Agentic Renewals on The Agents #013

The agents are writing data faster than any human ever could - and systems of record aren't ready for it.

This week on The Agents, Jason and Amelia dig into the biggest meta-theme of 2026: what happens when your AI agents become the primary user of your CRM, your MAP, and every other system you've built your business on?

Together, they unpack the ServiceTitan vs. Podium blowup, where an agentic lead gen tool slowly became a competing system of record until ServiceTitan shut them off with 30 days' notice, and why this is just the first of many fights like it coming across SaaS.

Then Amelia pulls back the curtain on how SaaStr actually runs Salesforce headless through 10K, what it means that their agents have written 40 gigabytes of data into Salesforce without either of them logging in, and why the storage math is going to force a reckoning for every vendor jacking up API prices right now.

Plus: the renewal agent Amelia built that generates a fully custom, hyper-personalized pitch deck for every single customer, using headless Salesforce, Gamma, social data, podcast mentions, and Gmail. And why Clay plus ZoomInfo plus Cowork turned out to be the best enrichment stack their agents have found yet.

If you're building on top of systems of record, selling to companies that are, or just trying to figure out how agents change the economics of SaaS data, this one is essential listening.

Timestamps:

00:00 - Intro

02:00 - ServiceTitan cuts off Podium: what happened and why it matters

10:00 - 40 gigs in Salesforce and neither of us logged in

16:00 - The API pricing reckoning coming for systems of record

22:00 - How SaaStr runs Salesforce headless with 10K

30:00 - The renewal agent: no account left behind

42:00 - Narrative-first pitching: getting the agent to sell

50:00 - Clay + ZoomInfo + Cowork: the enrichment stack that actually worked 58:00 - What comes next: agentic inbound proposals

SaaStr hosts the world's largest community for B2B software founders and executives.

What does it actually take to rebuild a $100M vertical SaaS company around AI - not just add AI features, but make AI the core of how your customers run their business?

Adam Guild, CEO of Owner, shares the full story: how they went from zero AI-first customers to 83% of their base in just two years, why they had to rethink pricing, sales, and onboarding from the ground up, and what it means to serve small business owners who need results, not tools.

Adam breaks down the hard lessons - the customers who churned when AI didn't deliver fast enough, the moments that forced the team to simplify, and why the restaurant industry became the proving ground for a new kind of AI-native vertical SaaS playbook.

If you're building in vertical SaaS or trying to figure out how to actually move your customer base to AI, this one is required listening.

Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 02:00 - From 0% to 83%: the timeline and what changed 07:00 - Why vertical SaaS is the right place to go AI-first 13:00 - Rethinking onboarding, pricing, and sales for AI customers 20:00 - What churn taught them about AI adoption 27:00 - The operational reality of rebuilding a $100M company 35:00 - What comes next

SaaStr hosts the world's largest community for B2B software founders and executives.