SaaStr Runs Three AI Outbound Vendors and Still Built Its Own Top-Account Tool

SaaStr runs three third-party AI outbound vendors and still built its own tool for top accounts, according to Jason Lemkin. The split is the useful part for any team deciding what to buy and what to build.

The vendors earn their place. Monaco runs cold outbound and booked a meeting with the right buyer at Anthropic on day one. Artisan runs warm outbound and has booked millions in closed-won revenue over more than a year. Agentforce runs win-back campaigns with 72 percent open rates, and Qualified’s inbound agent has closed over $2M in the past year. Lemkin leaves volume to them because deliverability, sequencing, list hygiene, and domain protection across a 450K-contact database are not worth rebuilding.

The gap is data. Vendors mostly read Salesforce, while SaaStr’s knowledge of a company spans six systems, including event badge scans and newsletter engagement. So the team built a Pitch Generator inside its AI VP of Marketing, 10K, that takes a company name and drafts a custom sponsorship pitch. It grew from a renewal agent built in about half a day, and it let SaaStr send 20 to 30 custom decks instead of about five. Of that tool, Lemkin says: “It just can’t, today, it can’t be bought.”

Two rules carried over: a human approves the narrative before anything is built, and the first email stays short with the detailed deck in the follow-up.

This matches his earlier account of running 21 AI agents, where he argued no effective AI account executive exists yet. The takeaway for sellers: buy the commodity layer, build where your proprietary signal lives, and keep a human on the story.