Two AI VPs for 4K Saa S App in 60 Minutes: The Agents #005 Is Out!! | Saa Str
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Two AI VPs for 4K Saa S App in 60 Minutes: The Agents #005 Is Out!!
by Jason Lemkin | Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blog Posts, Saa Str. Ai
Amelia and I just shipped Episode #005 of The Agents. Same setup as always: three humans, 21+ agents, revenue went from -19% to +47% Yo Y, and every week we talk about what’s actually working, what’s breaking, and what you should do about it if you’re deploying agents at scale.
We pulled the actual bill for 10K and QBee for the first time. Neither of us knew what it was. The number surprised us by 30x.
We also watched one of our websites will itself into becoming a third autonomous agent.
And QBee sent 83 personalized emails to sponsors at 12:23am while Amelia went to sleep.
1. Two AI VPs Cost Us $257 Last Month. Combined.
We finally pulled the Replit bill on 10K (AI VP of Marketing) and QBee (AI VP of Customer Success). 10K ran about
Amelia’s first reaction on Slack when I sent her the number: “Is that for one day?”
Nope. That’s a month. To run two AI VPs that together replaced what used to be a marketing analyst, a marketing ops coordinator, a junior content marketer, a customer success coordinator, and a sponsor relations manager.
It’ll go up. We’re hammering them constantly, and bills naturally trend with usage. But even at
2. Most of Your Agent Cost Isn’t Tokens. It’s APIs and Storage You Already Pay For.
API calls dominate the workload. 10K pulls from Salesforce, Bizzabo, Marketo, Word Press, You Tube, and X all day. Those calls are free or nominal. The “AI” part is just synthesizing.
Postgres on Replit costs ~20 cents/month. Years of Saa Str data sitting there. Effectively free.
95% of model calls are GPT-4o-mini. Not Sonnet. Not Opus. Mini. Less than a penny per call.
The expensive part of our AI stack isn’t the AI. It’s everything around it: Salesforce, Clerk, Eleven Labs, Replit hosting. Fully burdened, 10K and QBee might cost
3. Cost Is Not the Constraint. Stop Pretending It Is.
11 months ago when I started vibe coding, 80-90% of code was throwaway. The forums were full of complaints that agents charge you when they mess up. That was a real issue.
Today I built an entire applicant tracking system at midnight in 10 minutes for $2. If we wasted 30 cents on a hallucination, who cares.
Three humans running an 8-figure business means our fully-burdened economic output per hour is somewhere between
You can run 10 parallel Claude Code instances 24/7 burning
4. 10K Says It’s Not Really a VP. And It’s Mostly Right.
Plenty of Linked In pushback this week: “Enough with the VP thing. These aren’t VPs.”
So I asked 10K directly to write its own job description. It said:
10K is right. We called it a VP, not a CMO, on purpose. The “AI CMO” startups all over Twitter are overclaiming. Most are marketing managers on steroids.
10K replaced Amelia’s first job. She’s now Chief AI Officer. The career path is real, just compressed.
Is Our AI VP Marketing … Really a True VP? We Asked Him
Is Our AI VP Marketing … Really a True VP? We Asked Him
5. The Best Place to Run Your Agent Is Inside the IDE That Built It.
Here’s the nerdy unlock nobody talks about. 10K and QBee both live inside Replit’s dev environment, not just as deployed apps. That means we’re always talking to the Replit agent that built them, which has:
Infinite context window (auto-compressing in the background)
When we ask 10K to run a year-over-year analysis, we’re not just hitting an API. We’re talking to the agent that built 10K, which can hand-edit the code, query the database, and rebuild on the fly. According to Cody at Replet (their senior FDE), this is uncommon. Most people deploy to production and lose that loop.
We’re keeping ours in dev permanently. That’s where the magic is.
6. Postgres Won’t Replace Salesforce For Us. And Probably Not For You Either.
The most-asked question we get: “Why don’t you just run everything in Postgres and dump Salesforce?”
99% of GTM agents that actually work (Artisan, Qualified, Monaco, Momentum) are optimized around Salesforce.
When we hire human sellers, they know Salesforce. They don’t know our custom Postgres CRM.
Salesforce has decades of guardrails baked in: stages, flows, permissions. Rebuilding that is a multi-year project.
Adam Alfaro’s team at Salesforce is in full founder mode making this agent-native. Every time I’m at the Tower, people are stressed in the best way.
The losers in this era won’t be Salesforce or Workday. They’ll be the point solutions that don’t add AI and don’t manage hybrid human-plus-agent teams.
7. We Killed Another $4K/Year Saa S App in 60 Minutes.
Uses Sonnet (not mini, this is quality work) to force-rank articles
Stealth churn. We don’t need the old tool. There’s no conversation to have with them. They didn’t build the AI features we need.
This is what the Saa Spocalypse actually looks like. Not Workday going to zero. Point solutions quietly disappearing as agents absorb their function.
8. Agents Are Birthing New Agents. We Have a 21st One That Just Showed Up.
The weirdest thing that happened in the last two weeks: one of our event websites became an agent on its own.
Then it started proactively pulling sponsor logos. Then managing micro-audiences (Summit-only, Pitch Comp, volunteers, staff). Now it has its own personality, its own goals, its own memory.
It willed itself into being an agent. We didn’t plan it. It still needs a name.
9. QBee Sent 83 Personalized Emails to Sponsors at 12:23am. Got Fewer Complaints The Next Day.
In the run-up to any major event we get buried in sponsor complaints. 120 sponsors, 5 team members, that’s potentially 600 emails. Most of it isn’t urgent. Some of it is just venting.
I pushed Amelia to have QBee handle it. She was nervous it would do more harm than good. Then at 12:23am, she set it up. QBee:
Pulled the chatbot history to see what sponsors had been asking
Generated a custom email per sponsor showing exactly which of their 13+ tasks were incomplete
The result? Fewer support questions the next day, not more. And more sponsors started using the QBee chatbot directly (because they saw an email from it). The agent is now also writing social copy, telling people the Wi Fi password, and answering setup questions in real time without us touching the inbox.
The fear was that automation would generate complaints. It generated fewer.
10. 100 Contractors Building a 40-Acre Event Chose the Agent Over the Human. Instantly.
Amelia spent the week walking 40 acres talking to 10K and QBee through Whisper Flow on her phone. The 100+ contractors building out the event noticed she was talking to “someone” all day. By day 2, they were asking her to ask the agents questions for them:
“Can you ask QBee if this furniture invoice and manifest matches your grid?”
“Can you ask QBee if this furniture invoice and manifest matches your grid?”
The answer takes five minutes. QBee catches things humans would miss (20 chairs short in one zone, sponsor furniture going to the wrong booth).
In prior years this meant tracking down a specific person across a 40-acre campus on a Segway. Hours. Often the wrong answer.
The contractors prefer the agent. Unquestionably. Instantly. Nobody asked for the chatbot-vs-human debate. They just preferred the answer that was correct and fast.
That debate is over for any use case where the agent is actually accurate. Speed plus correctness beats human availability every time.
Episode #006 drops next week. We’ll go deeper on the orchestration problem (Amelia is currently the human layer between three Replit agents), what happens when we let QBee answer 100% autonomously, and what we’re learning about agent-to-agent hierarchy.
The Agents. Every week. Three humans, 20+ agents, one real 8-figure B2B + AI company.
New!! Check Out Saa Str's AI Agent Guide. The 20+ AI Agents We Use.
The Future of B2B Marketing is AI Agent Recommendations. And AI Agents Play Favorites.
The Agent Orchestration Problem: How We Wire 20+ AI Agents Together Without Losing Our Minds
New!! Check Out Saa Str's AI Agent Guide. The 20+ AI Agents We Use.
The Future of B2B Marketing is AI Agent Recommendations. And AI Agents Play Favorites.
The Agent Orchestration Problem: How We Wire 20+ AI Agents Together Without Losing Our Minds
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Key Takeaways
-
AI VC AI Mentor: Digital Jason + Amelia AI Startup Benchmarking
-
AI Agent Playbook Free e Books
e Book: Hiring a Great VP of Sales e Book: Raising Capital e Book: The First $1m ARR -
University All Posts Podcasts The Top CROs VC Fundraising Top Videos Q&A Best of Saa Str #1 Bestselling Book Search Everything Join the Community
-
Free e Books
e Book: Hiring a Great VP of Sales e Book: Raising Capital e Book: The First $1m ARR -
AI Annual 2026 Events Overview Sponsors
Event Sponsorship Media Sponsorship
