Jason Lemkin: belief

Transcript context

…And this is an agent that is emailing with prospect selling them on a sponsorship. Well, it's literally, if you go to SaaStrAnnual.com, and anyone should buy a product like this, it doesn't have to be Qualified, and the bubble, the intercom-like bubble, is tuned to qualifying inbound prospects. Folks that say, "Hey, I want to sponsor Lenny's podcast." "Sorry, we're sold out through 2028, but if you want to be on the wait list, sign up here." Or even better for us, it would qualify folks out that weren't a good fit. It would save so much time, and it would do it 24 hours, then it would just set up the meeting. So the reason that was a great second one was because no one was willing to do that. No human was willing to pick up the phone and talk to these people. So it was such low-hanging fruit. But the key to the first two, and if you're going to pick an agent, is they offered to help the most. At the end of the day, Lenny, these are all running on Claude 4. They're all basically using a bunch of APIs mashed together. That's not new to software, mashing a bunch of APIs under the hood. But deep down, I don't want to trigger anybody, many of these, the leaders in AI GTM, they're more similar than different. They're more similar than different under the hood. It doesn't mean the features are parity. So because you have to train them, because it takes a month, the world's best software with no help training you is not one 99% of people should buy. In the old days, we would qualify the best software. We would make a matrix and we would do their thing and we would compare features and do it. You've got to do another column, which is your Forward Deployed Engineer or solution architect or your SE and talk to them and say, "Who is going to help me?" And before you write a check, get on the phone with Lenny and see if Lenny's really going to do deployment. And if Lenny rocks and the other vendor is better and won't help you, don't do it. And that's why we've had so much success is the first two we did, yeah, they were startups, so they worked harder, but Artisan and Qualified just did the work with us. And we're not stupid, but it was work. We needed help. And so that's what I learned is, you have this partner, the FDE and the vendor, and a lot of them actually might not take your business if they don't think they can help you. The best ones turn away a lot of business today, which is interesting. An interesting learning from this for folks is a lot of folks say, and they would say it to you if you use these, Lenny, they say, "You have too much data. SaaStr is not like us. We're a startup, we're tiny. You have 400,000 people in your database. Lenny has 1.2,000,000. I only have 300 customers or 200 customers." What I've learned is that's wrong. If you have 300 customers, how many folks have come to your website ever? How many leads do you have? How many folks in your database? How many folks have you tried to reach out before? More than a human's doing. And all of a sudden they have aha moment. "How many folks do you have in your HubSpot? e? How many folks in your database? How many folks have you tried to reach out before? More than a human's doing. And all of a sudden they have aha moment. "How many folks do you have in your HubSpot? How many folks do you have in your CRM?" They look it up. "Okay. How many folks do you have talking to them? Zero." You don't need the scale of numbers that you and I have to make these agents work. You need a little bit of scale and you need a little bit of traffic, but not as much as you think. So all the learnings, we have a lot of folks that honestly, they don't want to do the work. They're like, "Well, SaaStr has a lot of scale. They have a lot of years." It's not true. And it turns out to also be true with the training. I'm sure you've seen it with Lenny Bot. I thought having 12 years of content made the difference. Nah. It's having a couple months of really good content and a long tail beyond that, but you don't need as deep training and as much as you think. You just need a bit to be really good. So anyone that has any scale whatsoever, even a couple million of revenue and up, can benefit from these products. So we did horizontal general bot, got us to a certain place. Then we did SDR for outbound, then we did inbound, and then we did Agentforce really early with Salesforce. And we didn't know what to do with Agentforce at first, but we decided we would reactivate the folks that sales decide was not worth their time. Folks that reached out to sales, and this is true at every startup. We even just talked about some of the AI leaders where a human says, "You know what? I don't think this is enough commission. I'm kind of busy. I got a $4,000,000 deal with Meta going." We just took Agentforce just on those and we trained it on very similar prompt. It had 70% response rate. Those are people that were dying to interact with us. 70% is so good. And this is something humans were not willing to... it wasn't worth their time. And I know this sounds critical and maybe I'm going to trigger some sales folks, but the reality is if you're in a lead-rich environment, and I think that there's lead-rich and lead-poor environments for even big companies but startups. There's not enough, but eventually you become lead-rich. Reps just don't follow up with a lot of them. It's just human nature. Even you. I bet more folks want to sponsor the newsletter than you can let in, right? Do you pick up the phone with all of them?…

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