SaaStr 829: A Hands-On Guide to SaaStr's New AI Tools with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin

0:00Welcome to the official Sastr podcast where you can hear some of the best Sastr speakers. This is where the cloud meets. Up today on the Sastra podcast. And I find no matter what founders I talk to, they're all wrong. Like they're all wrong. They think they're doing better than they are. They think their cash will last longer. They think there's fewer issues. So I uploaded this investor update. They're growing 251 % at a million in ARR. It'll show you how good that is relative to other folks, how fundable they are, recommendations on what to do. and this is pretty cool down here. If you take your deck, it'll predict out your revenue and your cash burn.

0:40Founders do this all wrong, right? It'll take your trailing growth rate at 1.1 and it'll predict out where it thinks your revenue will be one year from now, 3.6 million. Pretty cool. I know you could do this yourself, but people do this wrong all the time. Hey everybody, it's Sastr. Connect data, automate busy work and empower teams like nobody's business with the one platform that grows with you. every step of the way. Learn how Salesforce works for startups at salesforce.com slash SMB. That's salesforce.com slash SMB. Hey, everybody. Get excited. Saster AI London is this December, December 1st and 2nd, and we're on track to completely sell out with the playbooks for AI and B2B.

1:25Join 2 ,000 plus BI and AI leaders for two days, two days of practical advice on scaling in the new year. We'll have speakers flying in from OpenAI, Wiz, Clay, Intercom, Fin, and all your favorite B2B companies, including yours truly with Harry Stebbins and more doing our live 20VC podcast. It'll be fun all in the heart of London. Don't miss out. Get your tickets. You can still go. Go to podcast.sasterlondon.com. That's podcast.sasterlondon.com for special discount just for you. Welcome to both our AI and humans attending from all across the globe. What I want to do today is we have built, some of you have probably seen it, some of you have played with it, others haven't, a lot of tools on the new Saster.ai.

2:13We have built particularly a lot of tools around helping for fundraising and startup valuations, which I mainly want to show you. I think a lot of you have used our digital JSON or AI mentor. I can quickly show you that. If you haven't, it's been used over 100 ,000 times. You can ask it any of your questions. And we've gotten a lot of folks using just our new pages on AI agents. A lot of folks ask, what AI SDRs do we use? What AI BDRs do we use? What is our stack of these 12 AI agents that Sastr uses to run Sastr? They're all here if you click on AI agents on Sastr.ai. So we can touch on all these so you understand what we do.

2:49But mostly I want to show you our tools. and uh to the extent we have time at the end all of these we've built live coding it has taken a lot of time but if folks want to ask questions behind it how we built it how it works what we did all the time we have at the end we can talk about that or these tools or anything else i'll try not to take up too much time on the tools but uh but enough to help you guys and listen the first one we built i want to talk about our ai vc tools but the first one we built is our digital jason if you click on AI mentor on Saster.ai, you'll see it will come up. This has been trained on all of our Saster content since inception.

3:27And you can ask any issues I haven't. And we, many folks spend almost their entire day on this. So for example, I'll, I'll talk for an issue of the week. Let's see if I can get a CFO. Our CFO has missed cash projections four times this year. Uh, we'll end the year with 4 million less cash, cash than projected. I'd actually don't know what the answer is. Zoom. Uh, what do we do?

4:05Okay. And essentially this will use our AI and it's basically incorporated every single speaker, every single section we've ever had. And what does he say? four misses on cash projections and four million less cash in plan. That's a huge red flag. You need to get crystal clear on why it's so bad. Is it poor forecasting discipline, lack of real-time visibility? You need to build a rigorous burn plan and burn rate budget review weekly with the team. Everyone needs to know runway. Get a rolling four-month forecast that's updated weekly or biweekly. It can't be so optimistic. You need to plan to either cup or miracle or raise more capital or both.

4:37How much runway do you have left? Should, okay, there's another question. Should we keep the C? Should we zoom? Yeah. Should we keep the CFO?

4:51CFP, let's see if I can handle that error. Four misses? It's a serious problem. Sometimes what you need is a strong VP of finance or controller. You can keep on going on that, right? Let's see. We can try another one, and then we'll move on. So I'll try another one. We'll hit 20 million AR this year, 80 % from self-serve and 20 % from sales-led. but only one person on our sales team can close, and our VP of sales never worked out. What do we do? Let's see what Digital Jason says. This is a very anonymized version of a startup I know. And only one closer. It's a classic inflection point. You're scaling fast, but your sales team isn't scaling with you and your VP of sales didn't work out.

5:47You need a strong battle-tested VP of sales, potentially. Don't settle for one you don't love or trust. Start building out the sales team work structure now. Lean into your self-serve strength. And you can input resumes for folks. You can share their backgrounds, see if there's a good fit for you. So anyhow, this stuff's pretty good. And it's, frankly, if nothing else, it can be cathartic for you. So this was the first agent we built. It's cool. It's free. You can use it on sassr.ai. You can click here at the bottom. It's also on sassr.com. It's on all of our properties. So that's where we started.

6:16It's pretty cool. And then we built this AIVC. And I want to show you these tools because even if you're not fundraising or anything, there can be a lot of value for anyone. And so just click on AIVC and you'll come here. It's always at the top, even on mobile. And it's done a lot. And let me walk you through it. It now can connect you with over 400 top B2B and AIVCs. We're actually adding more. Amelia is reaching out to several hundred that are coming to Europa, AI London, which is better. You better come. It's December 1st and 2nd in London. We're going to do all agents all day, but we're going to add hundreds more this week.

6:52And they're here, folks that you know, Altos Ventures, Scale Ventures with N20VC with Rory, me on our pod, Point9, Bloomberg Beta, which did Replit and many others. They're all here and you can connect with them via AI. It's pretty cool. And I'm going to show you how that works. And there's basically four core tools started with one. And they're all kind of related to each other. As I'll show you, they all build on similar elements and core, but they're different insertion points depending on what you want to do around startups. And let me walk you through them and then I'll show them all to you.

7:24The first one we built is this seemingly simple startup valuation calculator. What's your startup worth? It's a question that lots of founders and executives have, and I'll show you that one in a second. That was the first one we launched a couple of months ago. as you can see, we've done 569 ,000 calculations on it. Now that's not valuations. Founders and executives will do more than one valuation per session, as I'll show you, but it's probably 50 or 60 ,000 folks have used this valuation calculator. It's fun. It shows you what you're probably worth, at least optimistically, and anyone can use that.

7:56You don't need to be fundraising. You don't even need to be the CEO or a founder. You can just try to figure out what your startup is worth. So everyone can have some fun with that. It's free. The next thing we launch, which I'll show you is a pitch deck analyzer. If you think you might want to raise from VCs, anytime, you can upload your pitch deck. You can do it anonymously if you want. You just update it. We'll score it for you, which I'll show you in a minute. We'll tell you the odds you can get funded and we'll even potentially introduce you to VCs if it's the right fit. So you got a pitch deck.

8:26Don't go in blind. Don't just send it around. Don't email it to random people first. Come here, upload it. We'll give you feedback. You might not like the feedback, but we'll tell you what to fix and you can do it again and again and again and keep getting your pitch better. The third one I'm going to show you is a variant, is what if you're not fundraising, but you want to know how well am I honestly doing, right? No one's really honest with folks. Everyone, most founders think they're doing better than they think. Some, I used to think I was doing worse than I thought. Now you can just upload an investor update, a pitch, a board pack, any of those things.

8:59That's what's different here, anything. And we'll show you how you're doing. I'll show you that in a minute. You can research VCs. And then the latest thing we've added, and you can see it's kind of a combination of these things. When you're ready to raise, when you're ready to fundraise, now we will send us your deck. Our AI will see if it's honestly good enough. And it's a tough grader. Realize it's tough. We've talked about this so much on Saster, on the blog, on our events, on our podcast with Harry and Rory. I mean, VCs are investing more than ever, but in fewer and fewer higher and higher growth companies, it's tough.

9:30So we're going to give you an honest grade. You might like not like, but if you do like it, you can check again, the VCs you want to meet with, with this new VC batch batch making this, this one we just launched, but we've already made 168 BC intros. So try it. It's pretty cool. So, so let me walk you through these, the startup valuation calculator. This is where we started with the vibrant seven evaluations. And, um, well, I'll just refresh this one. We'll go straight. So you come here. It's super easy. You don't even have to log in or do anything. Let me use a few examples from my portfolio.

10:00So I've got one investment I did. They're at Series B. They're sort of AI-enhanced SaaS. They're actually at about$25 ,000,$26 million ARR. Now, they're accelerating. So at the end of this year, they're going to be at just about$100 million and click valuation. Okay, if they're really an AI-enhanced SaaS, if they're in a hot space, they could be worth as much as$383 million or more. That's pretty accurate. But earlier in the year, they were at about$20 million. And you can see they'll dynamically change it. which is pretty fun. They're at about 20 and growth had slowed to about 70%. Look, still really good by most standards, but again, the bar has gone up adventure.

10:38So what would they have been worth? Only 166 million, which isn't much off the last round. Fundable, but it's going to be hard. And so not only do we tell you what you're worth, not only can you download a whole report and share it around, we'll tell you multiple, but we'll also tell you what the odds you're going to get funded based on all the top 5 ,000 deals and all the top benchmarks here. So 70%, still at a decent chance as you get 100%, the funding rate goes up. And, you know, boy, you push that up into the 150 and higher, then pretty high chance you're going to get funded. So that's one I could think of.

11:12Let's try another one to seed stage coming up on a million in revenue. Now the bar's gone up. Now, if you're growing 100%, a lot of founders think that's pretty good. Doubling's great, but, you know, even triple, triple, double, double isn't good enough for most VC firms, unfortunately, it's the reality. We've talked about it. You might be worth 20 million. You might be like, God, I'm only worth 20 million, but that's 20 times revenue. Okay, guys, but what happens if you're growing 200%, which is really 3X, okay? It's pretty tough to do. Now I'm in that 50 to 60 million. And what if I'm growing at an insane level?

11:46Well, you just might have that insane valuation. So it's pretty good. It tells you roughly what you're worth. It tells you why. It tells you the odds you'll get funded and it'll show you all the benchmarks. Okay, if I'm at 1 million and I want to be funded, and I know this sounds tough, what does a top quartile funded company look like? Not all startups on planet Earth, but the ones that have raised venture funding this year. The top quartile is 481 % growth. It's pretty tough. We'll tell you that. We'll tell you where you come, and that's kind of your odds of getting funded. We'll explain to you how it all works if you want to see it, and then we'll show you next steps.

12:16You can do that benchmarking, which we talked about, or you can just get your deck reviewed. This is free. It's fast. You can do it every day. You can let your team do it. But again, people have done it 470 ,000 times. So that's where we started this. Use it. It's fun. Go to saster.ai, click AIVC and have fun. And we're continually updating this with the latest data. It's not perfect. In fact, we just pushed some updates this morning that'll go out with more and more data. It may be too optimistic if your growth isn't that great. It definitely reflects Bay Area multiples, right? And the AI frenzy.

12:50But that's who's getting funded. It doesn't reflect who isn't getting funded. Like we don't have a lot of valuation data on deals that never happened. So there is a null set, which I am thinking a little bit about. How do you value something that can't get funded or can't get sold? Well, does it have any value if you can't sell it or fund it? Probably not. But so in a sense, these valuations are all inflated because they represent the ones that are getting funded. But on the other hand, it represents 5 ,000 rounds, 5 ,000 venture rounds. So that's pretty cool. Okay. So that's how to figure out what you're worth.

13:18And let's go back up here. the next thing you might do is get your pitch deck analyzed. And what you'll do is it'll go through all of it. It'll tell you your traction score, your quality score, and how good a grade you are. And really all you ultimately have to do is upload a pitch deck. So let's take one and let's see. Let's try this one. Human.ai. Okay, not quite a real company, but we'll upload it. It'll take a minute to go through Claude and extract all the data. If you want, you can give us your ARR, your growth rate, your funding stage, your company type, your name, email. It's great. But if you don't want to share anything on your pitch deck, it's okay.

13:53The AI will do the best job it can, right? It might not be perfect, but it will attempt to extract all of the data that it can and figure out how good your pitch is. And I'll show you some data in a minute. I think it's pretty good. I've run all of the startups I work with that are raising money or not raising money. I've run it throughout. but they're pretty directionally correct over many years. Some folks don't like this. It'll come from in a second. It can be tough. We used to give a lot of F grades and that was a little triggering for folks. So I think we changed it to NF, not fundable or NR.

14:27But honestly, if you're not going to get funded, it's just going to tell you because there's few things that are, I think a worse waste of founders time than trying to go off and get funded and try to meet with a bunch of VCs if there's just no chance. A small chance, it's definitely worth it. You know, there's so many stories of, I met a hundred VCs and I only needed one. So here's, so here's human AI VC. Now look, this one's pretty good. Okay. This is a synthetic company. I made it up, but it's growing 900 % at one 920 K AR. So coming up on a million. Um, that's pretty good. That's top quartile, not that the top quartile is 521%.

15:03So it's well above it. You can actually click here and see what all the top quartiles are, um, across all startup stages based on Iconics data, one of the top growth funds, all of all the venture funded companies they track and B2B. Here's how quickly they were growing at these stages. So it judges that it'll tell you your traction score. You can click in and see why, how good your deck is. This is pretty good. So for these guys, they're track there. They've obviously they're crushing on traction. The deck's only pretty good. I made it up and then stuck it into gamma and made a really pretty deck out of it.

15:34But you know, maybe if it's real, we would have made it even better and it'll go even into more detail if you like. So down here, it'll tell you how disruptive the company is. Is this really changing the world with AI? Because this is what VCs are looking for. I mean, pretty good, not great. It actually, it will actually give you a little bit of hit for not being disruptive enough. We'll break down everything from your deck quality to your team size. Up at the top, we show you how good you are. But if you want to see how good you are across all different types of benchmarking, we'll show you how good you are across Carta, across Bessemer benchmarking, across our own, all the analysis we've run through this and across the iconic benchmarking.

16:11It's all here. And here's the cool part. And we reuse this element. If your grade is high enough, we'll automatically ask if you want to meet with VC funds right here in the pitch deck. You don't have to do it. You can come back later. There's no pressure, but if you want, you literally can come in. There may be some you've heard of like Sastra fund. You can click on it. You can learn about who is the fund. How much do they fund? Who are their top companies? What's their philosophy? You know, here's Harry Stebbins and 20VC. Here's others. And you can click into them. You can learn more about them.

16:43And if you're ready, you can click and we will go out and introduce you to them. We'll go out and introduce them. And right now we've got about 20 top funds and emerging funds in there, but soon there'll be hundreds of folks. And we, as I'll show you later, maybe in the next time we do this, it'll dynamically pick the best ones for you, but it's pretty cool. It works. We've done maybe 500 intros through this and 150 directly through VC matchmaking. So this will automatically come up. You don't have to do it. But if we think you are fundable, we will do this and show you some funds where we think you're a good fit.

17:13Are you good fit for Rory at scale? Well, he's A and B,$900 million fund, HubSpot bill, DocuSign box. I mean, pretty good. It's all here and you can play with it and there's nothing you need to do. Keep going down. The richest one we do is this pitch deck. We'll show you things you need to fix. and if you log in here we'll show you exactly how vcs see you and we'll even show you how vcs will write up their investment memo which is pretty cool so that's how it all works here's how all the benchmarking works and down here we'll show you how you fit in this one's a b plus b plus is good enough to get funded again remember we're tough grader guys don't take it personally here here's the distribution you can see there's a lot of apps um which just means they're not fundable a lot of d's but b plus is pretty good and we've done 1822 decks so far so this is fun you will learn a lot.

17:58You can get a lot of feedback on your deck. I really don't think of there's a better everyone. You know, you should always share your decks with other founders and other executives before you go fundraising. I can't think of a service that is better than this, where you can do it with AI and online. It's, it's pretty cool. So that's the pitch deck one. The next one I can show you. Let's try this one is benchmarking and it's, it's, they're similar, but different. Um, let's see if we can try, uh, I think I did human test. Company name, Jim at Human. He's a good guy. Jim Larkin. Jim. Now let's see.

18:34I think I've got one for Human. Here's their investor update. So what's neat about benchmarking is you don't have to have a pitch deck. It's okay. This is literally an investor update that you send out every month. If you just have a board pack, like people usually make board packs. You don't have to edit it. You don't have to update. You don't have to turn to a venture pick. You can just take your board pack when you do a board meeting and throw it in here or take an investor update when you've sent it out and get honest feedback on how am I really doing? And it'll give you pretty similar results to the pitch deck and the benchmarking, but it has a few other cool features there.

19:06And again, the point of benchmarking is benchmark yourself every week, if you want all the time, no one does this. And I find no matter what founders I talk to, they're all wrong. Like they're all wrong. They think they're doing better than they are. They think their cash will last longer. They think there's fewer issues. So I uploaded this investor update. They're growing 251 % at a million in ARR. It'll show you how good that is relative to other folks, how fundable they are, recommendations on what to do. And this is pretty cool down here. If you take your deck, it'll predict out your revenue and your cash burn.

19:40Founders do this all wrong, right? It'll take your trailing growth rates at 1.1 and it'll predict out where it thinks your revenue will be one year from now, 3.6 million. Pretty cool. I know you could do this yourself, but people do this wrong all the time. It'll also take your burn, which is at minus 200K a month for this startup, and it will predict how that burn will grow and where your cash position will be. So you're out at saying you're only going to have 600K left in the bank. Maybe we want to do a little fundraising, but everyone gets this stuff wrong. And we're actually going to do even more here, but it's pretty cool that it'll project out your revenue and your burn rate just so you can see.

20:15And again, it'll also bring in this benchmarking for this startup. How am I doing compared to all the card of startups, everyone that Bessemer tracks the shooting stars, everyone that sat, everyone that's ever uploaded something to Sastr, which is probably the largest data set now. And again, this iconic for the top quartile. So, you know, being, this isn't being in 52 % of the top quartile, it's good. It's, it's very good. Uh, but it's not off the charts, as you can see for all, all the bars down and below. So that that's benchmarking. It's a version of the same thing. It's pretty cool. And then, um, I'll just show you the fourth version.

20:48if you upload your deck to vc matchmaking let me show you this one hold on they're all pretty cool and you can see they're similar but different here's the newest one find the right vcs for your startup it'll basically take you through the same flow but a little bit different we get a little bit more data when are you fundraising so look if you don't want the pressure if you just want to take coffee meetings and get to know vcs it's okay if your phone ready is this second and you want meetings this week, click that. If you just want to learn that's okay. And even if like, you don't want to talk to any VCs today, but maybe later you can be kept in the loop.

21:23You fill that in what stage you're at, whether you want to meet with angels or just VCs, how much you're raising and just upload your deck. And you just go from there. Um, it's really, it's really quite similar and. Oh, okay. Hold on.

21:41data test get good old good old jim back and that was uploaded and it does it for you hey jason while you're doing this there's a question in the chat if you retain the data from the pitch decks that have been uploaded we only retain it if you want to retain it um it's a really good question and if you get a high enough score that you want funding from vcs we have to retain the data and the pitch deck for a period of time. And I think it's 30 days so that the VCs you reach out to can get the pitch and get the summary of it. And they will receive not only the deck, they will receive the summary analysis that you've seen on their side, a summary version.

22:22So we do, if you think about it, we have to retain it for that. Anything else, we don't retain it. And it's a good question. It says it on the site and it's something I've thought a lot about, but when, you know, Obviously, we have to retain the bare minimum. So if you share it with VCs, they have the deck to share. But that's all that we retain. Other than some high-level aggregate data, we do have some very aggregate data. What are all the grades on the aggregate basis so you can see it? But we don't retain anything that doesn't get a B or a B plus or higher. That's the minimum threshold to share to VCs that you want to share with VCs.