SaaStr 864: How to Build Your Own AI VP of Marketing Step-by-Step with SaaStr's Chief AI Officer

0:00Excited to have you guys see it. All together now, we are going to live build an AI VP of Marketing. So I hope you're ready. I see you have your laptop's out. So we're going to do a couple things to get you guys set up. And then I'm going to go to my laptop. We'll demo. We'll do it together so that hopefully, by the time you leave this session, you have your very own version of what we call 10K, who is our AI VP of Marketing. So you guys already know this. We have, I don't know, almost 30 agents now at Saskr that have been used almost a million times. But a few things to keep in mind as we're getting going and started with building your very own version of 10K.

0:35So 10K started as actually something that I was slightly lazy about. I was tired of taking all of our different dashboards across marketing, sales, go to market. Now, we don't have that very many people, but it was still a lot of tedious work every Sunday night to copy, paste, put it into Notion every Sunday night. And then every Monday morning, go through it every Monday. And so I didn't want to copy paste anymore.

1:00Amelia LeRutte:I thought to myself, you know what, let me just vibe code a dashboard to help me do this. But then that was back in January. And now 10k fast forward five months later has become our AI co-pilot in marketing. This is a screenshot of 10k. I'll show you him live as well. But all of that to say, he started as a dashboard. So if all you leave today is even a dashboard, just know we've been building with 10K literally every day between myself and Jason for the last five months. And so it might take you some time after the session, if you leave with a basic one, to build it to the full feature and functionality that we have at Saster.

1:38Also, keep in mind, you may want to add things that are more nuanced to your company. So there are things, you know, like you may not care about ticket sales in the way that I do. we've stair-stepped the whole thing to what 10k is now which i'll show you today where he is making some autonomous marketing decisions he helps us send campaigns he's literally our co-pilot he told me this morning hey don't forget to send the attendee newsletter i said oh yeah he helped me build it and he can do a lot of things on his own so but again i just want you guys to know he started as literally a dashboard so that i could just hook in my sales force and that even if my reps forgot to do something, if they if they remembered to do it in Salesforce, then at least it would be in 10K by the time we did our Monday morning team call.

2:22The other thing I want you guys to keep in mind, it's a little nuanced, so it's OK if you don't quite get the hang of this until later. But 10K, who is our AI VP of marketing, isn't just a chatbot. He's not a code generator. And also, it's kind of a niche uses of how we're using Vibe Coding, Replit in specific, that we talk to our agent and the agent is literally 10k and we have a lot of different agents we have the agent that is sastrianual we have got the agent that's powering 10k we've got qb who we talk about a lot on the podcast he's our um ai vp of customer success and and how these all have different personalities is we're actually using the agent as the entity so it's not that we built our own like other super agent or super connector i know it's a little nuance and niche, but just something to keep in mind that if you build one of these for your team, whoever is building the agent yourself or your head of AI, or if you hire an FDE, whoever is managing the agent eventually will be the one talking to the agent in the way that we talk to 10K.

3:22And there are pieces you can share outwardly, like we've got members of our sales team who interact with 10K, but they don't talk to 10K the same way that I do on a daily basis.

3:31Amelia LeRutte:So I'll explain that a little bit more, but just something nuanced to keep in mind. And if you want to live build with me, hopefully this code works, but you can use the code REPLITSASTER to get some free credits while I'm doing this so that you guys can build yours while you're out there in the audience. So, okay, a couple things here on what 10Key can do internally versus externally, because as I'm going through this, what I would love for you guys to do is take notes so that you you can incorporate all your notes into your own custom spec to deploy your AI VP of Marketing. So just as I'm talking through these use cases of things we have our agent do, write down what you want your agent to do in either a similar or same fashion, because then you're going to literally take it, put it into the spec in a few minutes, and give that to the agent to deploy.

4:21So I always like to start with a spec. The more detailed you are with your spec, the better. That means you'll get better inputs from the agents and also better outputs from the agents. So I'll walk you through how to do all that now. So a few things that our external facing 10K AI VP of Marketing does. Yes, he has dashboards. That part is pretty basic as you'll come to see, but that was his origination. That's what he does. Data. Biggest thing here, Close One Revenue Pipeline. So we gave him access to Salesforce via the API. You guys are also probably on Salesforce. so you can achieve this with a custom object to get all of your real-time and historical closed-run revenue and pipeline data.

5:00That will also give you historical comparisons. It'll help you with projection. The more you hook up, the more time you spend with it, the more you'll start to hook up to your AIV view marketing. Things like we just hooked up all of our life, all of sasser.com is hooked up to it now, all of our social media, all of our analytics. We actually just built a newsletter builder in it. There's a lot you could do in the agent. So again, things that we do that we're external facing, I just went through. And then there's internal things you can do with the agent. So yes, once your agent has all this data, things you'll be able to do is

5:31Amelia LeRutte:build ongoing features. So every day that Jason and I are like programming our agents, you know, we think of something new we want to do. We're like, hey, 10K, can you do a win-backed campaign to maybe folks that came to SaaS for annual last year, but hadn't yet bought a ticket for this year? He can run that whole list, see who hasn't come back yet. You can hook it up to something like of clay, find their new contact data, and then send an email campaign just like that. So projections is really great for revenue. Projections, we use it every Monday just to keep us on track and honest, honestly.

6:01Amelia LeRutte:And then marketing campaigns, this is one of my favorite things it does because it's all based in data. You know, I think sometimes, I know, marketing is pretty creative and people have different ideas of what they think will work. And then certain people have like certain agencies they want to bring in when they come to your company. But the nice thing about building something like an agent is any ideas it's going to give you is only based in data. Like that's all it has. It's got all your data. It's got your numbers. It's got a goal. Hopefully you give it a goal, maybe write down your goal as I'm chatting for your AI VP of marketing.

6:29And that's all it's going to focus on 24 seven all the time. So it's, it's kind of crazy because we've actually said on our podcast, like now we need people to report to our agent because it's gotten so advanced on how it does marketing. So that's a few things that it does.

6:46Amelia LeRutte:Again, what I want you guys to do, as you can see here, like this, these are the top five things our AI VP of marketing does. And I had it describe itself. I was like, well, I could think of the top three things that our AI VP of marketing does, but why not let him tell you? So the number one thing he does is own the number. So this is super important as you're writing your spec, as you guys are taking notes, make sure you give your agent one goal. So that's also why we have like multiple agents, between our AI VP of marketing, our AI VP of customer success, our AI Sash Reannual agent. Like they all have different brains.

7:19I don't like to overload them. I like to keep them specific. So we gave this guy one goal of what to do. Campaign performance, you know, sometimes the data you put in is what you get out. So I think that's super important. Content, yeah, I'll give it that. He ranked daily marketing ideas number four. I would have probably ranked it number one. But this is one of the funnest thing it does for me. And yes, honestly, it can write email copy. I know there's a lot of AI agents out there that can write email copy. But again, because ours is based and grounded and foundationally built upon the data that we have and the goal we're trying to achieve, it's more goal seeking to hit those outcomes specifically.

7:57So this is how our AI agent described himself.

8:02Amelia LeRutte:If you read Jason's post, he doesn't actually think of himself as a VP of marketing yet. He says he only does some of that functionality, but I would say outside of owning people, he does pretty good. So I'm going to go over to my laptop so we can do some live building together. While I'm doing that right now, you guys can go to sastranual.com slash resources. You can grab this very spec that I already built. So there's a screenshot of it. you'll be able to literally take this like 20 page long document that I already made and pop it into your favorite Vibe Coding Platform, Replit, whatever it is, and get your own agent.

8:39Amelia LeRutte:If you want to do it live, I did a recreation that I'll show you. And it took about 15, 20 minutes for the agent to build it. So if you do it now, I have like 40 minutes left in the session so that by the time I'm done, you'll have an agent. Okay. So hopefully you will grab the spec and I'm going to just drive here. So let me come out to where I am. Perfect. All right, cool. You guys are following along. Cool. Okay. All right. So hit this resources, sastranual.com, flash resources, grab these two things. So I'm going to grab it. That's the spec. What you're going to do with the spec. So take this.

9:16If you want to use it now in real time, you can use it as is to build your own version of an AI VP of marketing. What you really should do though after this session is take this and write a version that more so applies to your business. I wrote this as more of a generic AI VP of marketing, again, with goals that I thought were more prevalent to you guys. But the more specific you make it, the better the outputs

9:39Amelia LeRutte:of your agent will be. So I would take this later, make it more unique to you. If you haven't used Cowork yet, I use Cowork a lot. You can ask Claude what you should include in your spec when you're building out, you know, say the goal is that you want to have an AI VP of marketing agent. Say you want it to build, you know, marketing campaigns for you. I want to see your projections. I want to use it as a co-pilot. Like part of it, too, is honestly a mentality of how you treat your agent. Like we I treated it day one as a dashboard. I was like, you are a dashboard. But now he is very much a co-pilot and co-worker.

10:13Literally, I was talking to 10K this morning and like we were bouncing ideas and I was like, these are great ideas, but I got to go do SaaS for now.

10:20Amelia LeRutte:So again, part of it is also a mind shift of how you use your agents and how you also think about incorporating them into your workflows. So what you'll do, you'll grab the spec. Again, you can use it as is if you want to right now. If you want to just make an agent right now, you can grab the spec that I made on SAS Reannual. The other thing you can do that you can grab from the resources section is download this sample historical data. So I'll walk you through what's in there. But basically what you want to do is give the agent some data to start off with. So when I started off building this as a dashboard, again, we had a bunch of stuff on CSVs.

11:00Amelia LeRutte:Like, don't be embarrassed by that. It's totally fine. Like, we still had stuff on CSVs that wasn't anywhere else. And then we had some stuff on CSVs that was somewhat in Salesforce, somewhat in Marketo, somewhere in like a million different places. And so I gave it some CSVs. It's okay to do that. If you're worried about the security aspect of that, you can always just, you know, hook up natively to your marketing automation platform via the APIs, hook up to your CRM, whatever you're using, some of your major tools. Again, you don't have to add those all day one. Eventually, you will need to, though, if you want to reach the same level of like semi-autonomy that our agent has.

11:36But you can definitely start simpler.

11:39Amelia LeRutte:The goal is honestly just to deploy an agent and keep building with it. So a few things to start revenue, even though some might argue that's kind of sales data. But if you know at all how much marketing source revenue has brought in or marketing touched revenue, however you measure it, if you have any sort of data around marketing's final goal on an impact on revenue, that's the very first thing you're going to want to give your agent. The second thing would be, obviously, this is the VP of marketing. Give it campaign data. So give it, you know, what campaigns are working. Give it everything that's not working.

12:13Amelia LeRutte:Give it everything in the middle, any ads that you've run, anything that you think didn't work, any agency spends, like I mentioned. The more you can give your agent, the better. Like, just trust that it will use that data to basically build a brain that is dedicated to marketing just for you. So that's a good way to think about it. Campaign data is great. Email data is really great. Like, just even exporting, like, how many people are reading our emails or not? What are people clicking in our emails or not? These are all really great things to give your agent so that it can give you better outputs.

12:46I like to give it like a progress tracker. So say you're building your agent today, you can start to give it, you know, what have you done so far through 2026? And it will give you some feedback of, hey, maybe that campaign you run that you thought was gangbusters didn't actually work.

13:02Amelia LeRutte:So that's a good thing to do with it as well.

13:08Amelia LeRutte:Hopefully you have that now. And then what you'll do, if you're literally doing this from scratch, you would do something like this. Now, this is our replet, so I already have one, but I'll do it from scratch with you guys. I'm going to say, you know, create a AI VP of marketing as a copilot. Here is the data and here is the spec. And then what you would do is you would take those two assets that I literally have up for download. here's my data and then I'm gonna give it the spec so I'm just gonna copy this paste this into the agent hopefully and then I'm gonna let that fire we will come back to that guy like I said last time I did this live it took about 15-20 minutes and we've got more than that so we'll come back to that guy I'm gonna let the agent percolate I am hardwired to the internet we'll see how long it takes for now I'll show you two things so this is the one that I rebuilt the other day.

14:07Amelia LeRutte:This was the one that I literally built in 15. I didn't do anything to it. I was like, I did the same thing you just saw me do. And then I said, make it purple to match the vibe. And that was it. So this is literally already what it spit me out. Even just with that spec, just with that sample data, this is what I got. So I'll walk you through it. Again, 10K started as a dashboard. Maybe you don't want your 10K to have a dashboard. I don't know. I like to have dashboards still as a person. You can also take that out of respect if you don't want a dashboard. I think most of you do, though. I think you probably want a dashboard of like, what's working in marketing, what's not?

14:41Amelia LeRutte:What are the campaigns I should run? What are the campaigns I shouldn't run? And that's what this does. This is obviously fake data for AcmeCorp, but it's giving me a dashboard. It's giving me, in this case, I just rebuilt the spec. So it's like attendee information. It's got pipeline. It's got our sponsors, right? Who are all of our sponsors that we should be checking in on? It's got invites. So this is all fake, obviously, because Pipe Piper was not a real company, but it's giving me things of like, okay, who should I personally? It says I should personally re-invite these people to a Saster.

15:14I mean, that's even right there for 15 minutes. If all you get is one campaign where your agent told you people

15:20Amelia LeRutte:you should follow up with as customers, people you should win back, maybe it helped you identify some people on the website that you should email. That's a win. Like your agent does not need to be our full-blown AI VP of marketing like ours is. And it certainly won't be in a day. Again, ours has taken about five months to get to this point. So something important to keep in mind, even if you only use your new agent for something like daily ideas, I think it, again, because it's using data, because it wants to hit one goal for you, it's gonna give you some pretty good ideas of what you should be doing every day in marketing.

15:54Amelia LeRutte:So the top three things, because even three is too many, you can say, just give me the top one idea of what we should be doing in marketing to execute on the team today. And honestly, the ones our agent has given us, again, are pretty good. It's because we've put in some pretty good data. We gave it one goal. And you can also tell the agent and fine tune it. Like the first time we got the daily ideas, they were okay. And then we're like, hey, no offense, but that idea kind of sucked. Like we wouldn't do it. Or that other idea was going to cost a lot of money. Why would we do that? And so you can tell the agent, give it that feedback so that every day the ideas that it generates are getting better and better for you.

16:29Amelia LeRutte:So let me pop back to my slides for a sec so I can make sure I walk you guys through everything you need to do. So while that runs, I did build a, what is called a, survey says, Salesforce Connected app. Trust me, I had not done that. I am not, I mean, our friends at Salesforce are over there. I'm not Trailblazer certified. I have an Agent Blazer hoodie, which I very much love. I don't even think I'm agent blazer certified or anything. So I just asked, I asked quad how to do it. And it was honestly because I was like, Hey, how do I hook up this new agent I just built to my actual pipeline and revenue data so that I could hopefully read all that data.

17:10And now it can actually write back some of that data. So that was the very first thing I did for many of you, that will be the same first step. So even again, you could say maybe that's too sales related, but I think for something where it's still marketing and revenue and go to market related, It's important to have these things incorporated. The other thing you'll want to do next is hook up all your major APIs, right?

17:31Amelia LeRutte:So again, whatever you're using for CRM, marketing automation platform, you can hook up your social media. If you wanted to do posts for you, we still like to write ours manually. Slack is a nice hookup. Google Calendar, I actually use the Google Calendar hookup to send all of our speakers their speaker times and profile information. I was like, that was literally a whole person's job last year. and now an agent did it. So again, there's a lot of little things where you're like, that sounds minor and yes, it is. But that was literally a part of someone's job last year that the agent not only did perfectly, but did it in 10 minutes.

18:06We're like, that used to take a week to send our hundreds of speakers a personalized Google calendar invite saying, hey, please show up to not your address, a different address at the San Mateo County Event Center. Here's how our team will work. Here's how we'll take you to the green room. Here's how you come back. All those nuanced details. And also we told our agent, make sure you include anybody else that should be on the invite. So like any press teams, any marketing teams, any like executive teams. And it just did it for us in 20 minutes. So even if you think your victories are kind of small with an agent, they're still pretty big.

18:37So again, don't be, don't feel like your agent has to do everything all at once. Even if you give it super menial tasks, it's great at super menial tasks like that. Like that is something that it's your time is better used building the agent and deploying these campaigns that only you can deploy versus spending all the time doing nuanced things and marketing.

18:56Amelia LeRutte:So a few things you'll be able to automate while it's percolating. But one thing it does really well is something like triggered email. So this is one where we took a screenshot of something 10K did and said, OK, like Replit is a sponsor of Zaster. Here are all the great folks that are coming that are like them. And we sent this to a competitor and said, hey, you should probably be at Zaster too. So that was a really great use case of, you know, we ran a light, a light competitive campaign. It's a little bit of sales. I think it's a little bit of sales and marketing, something our agent could just autonomously do versus maybe you telling, you know, your SDRs, your sales team or your marketing team to go find out who your competitors are, then find the contact details at those companies, then figure out in your data, okay, what are those people doing with my company that I should highlight to those competitors?

19:40Amelia LeRutte:The agent can just do it for you. from the attending newsletters and reminders you guys got. So this is more of a universal email campaign you can do with your agent for running website action email. So when people take an action on the website. So for instance, when some of you came to the website, play a little agent hexes like briefcase game or other game or spin wheel, or I don't know, he had a bunch of games on the website. And you could get a code to get like a small discount on your SAS annual ticket. Well, 10K just emailed all of you your reminders. Again, that used to be my job. Like, hey, if somebody comes to the website and they don't buy a ticket, make sure, you know, every Friday you remember to send those persons an email to buy their ticket if they didn't buy it yet.