I've brought seven apps into production used by tens of thousands of people a month. I've already totally changed everything that SaaStr does in less than 100 days. If you can already buy it, buy it. But if you need to dream it, then vibe it. Don't save $8 vibe coding, right? Do something you couldn't do before. Can you get pretty far in 30 minutes? Yes. Can you get into a production-grade app in 30 minutes? I mean, often not, right? There are great developers that aren't me, and then there are folks who don't have as much experience with software as me. Okay? But if I've built it, you can build it.
I am a two-time B2B founder myself. Sold my last company to Adobe. Have also invested in maybe 20 or 30 top B2B startups and then started sharing all of my learnings on a blog and a platform called SaaStr. We do global events. We have had over 50,000 founders and VCs come to our events. But ultimately a lot of things got stale in the age of AI. So I wanted to reboot things, remake things. The whole point of SaaStr is to help other founders. So I wanted to do things like automatically read pitch decks and tell you honestly how you're doing and tell you honestly how your funding is doing and use all the learnings of all the founders and executives over the years to help you do better. And I really didn't have a way. And you know, I wasn't the first person to use Replit or Vibe Code, but as I saw it take off, I'm like, okay, this is a platform that someone like me maybe could bring some of their dreams to do more for founders in particular to reality.
My first app was way too complicated. So that one was actually hard. But since then, I've brought seven apps into production used by tens of thousands of people a month. Probably the most popular one so far is one on SaaStr.ai called our VC valuation calculator where in seconds we tell you what you're worth. I built that on Replit. If I look right now on that, it's been used 334,835 times in 30 days. So that's something I could not have done without Replit.
These external apps for founders and executives are probably the most interesting to review VC pitches, to review valuations, to tell you how you're doing. We have an AI mentor that's been used over 100,000 times where folks can chat with the digital version of me and other SaaStr speakers and get advice on their startups. Another app we built, you know, Dharmesh Shah, CTO of HubSpot, who we've done a lot of stuff with, I think he talks about micro apps you could vibe code and others, apps that have very narrow but very high-value use cases. But we had another set of issues. So one, I wanted to do more for founders. The other issue though is I was getting burned out and I wanted to see on our own little team how much could we use AI agents for, not just with Replit but across lots of AI agents. We have four different AI sales executives now, three SDRs and one BDR. We have a general AI agent. We have an AI collateral creator. We have all these agents.
We had a very specific need also, which is we have over 4,000 people a year apply to speak at our events, whether they're digital or at our events or online. It's almost impossible to review 4,000 pitches. So for years, we had an agency that did it with us and we paid them about $200,000 or more a year, two to $300,000 a year to review all these pitches. And it was great pre-AI. It was great until it wasn't. But then their business model changed. They didn't really want to do it anymore and after many years they just said, hey, we're out, we're done reviewing 4,000, we're burned out, we don't want to review 4,000 pitches a year. And then I was like, heck, I'll build it in Replit. So we built a really, really cool feature. If you go to SaaStr Annual or SaaStr London, you can submit to speak and it used to go into a vacuum, it used to go nowhere and maybe if you're lucky in three months someone would send you an email and say no thanks. Now I built this on Replit, instantly you get a score and on a score 0 to 100, how is it graded across multiple criteria areas, right? How prominent a speaker are you? Is this a commercial for Replit or are you trying to help other founders? Are you on a speaking tour? Were you just on Joe Rogan? If you're on a speaking tour, we don't really want you because everyone sees everything. We go through five factors. We give you a score. We tell you the odds you're going to speak and then we reach out to me and our small little team and we tell you with AI whether you should be selected for the event or not. So now it automatically reviews all 4,000. We don't need the agency anymore. So we're saving over $200,000 a year. So it's worth it. And that one probably took me a full day to test and get working. But now it's on autopilot. It's great.
Honestly, I don't think the stories of 'I replaced Salesforce' are very interesting. Look, Salesforce is not that expensive or you could use HubSpot or you could use other apps. And I don't even think that's why they're doing it. I think they're doing it because they have a very specific need for their business where they cannot configure a CRM. I'm a super fan, but like if you can do it in Notion, do it in Notion, right? If you can do it in WordPress, don't vibe your own WordPress. Like you know how many man-hours went into WordPress, it's open source, like a trillion man-hours. But if you look at, we have two SaaStr sites, saastr.com, which is WordPress, and SaaStr.ai, we're migrating people over. I do on SaaStr.ai what I can't do in WordPress. That's the magic. So it's not like, oh, Salesforce is $200. I mean, we forget about the soft cost of software, right? You don't save $8 vibe coding, right? Do something you couldn't do before.
How can I go from ideation to production? Okay. And I didn't know. There were a lot of... And this is 100 days ago. I knew nothing when I started. And I intentionally did no research, but I actually didn't. I used... I asked X, I asked Twitter what I should use and then a million people gave different advice. 'Well, open up Terminal and use Claude Code and then run it through GPT-4 and then do this on Cursor and then...' And I'm like, no, no, no, you're not listening to me. Okay, I live that life. I don't want to do it again. The trade-off I'm willing to make, I will trade off things. I want something that is end-to-end. I want to go from ideation to production, is what I said. But most of the smart people said, look, at the end of the day, if you really want to go from ideation to production without leaving an environment, without hosting somewhere else, you should use Replit because it has an integrated database and it has integrated key store and it has integrated all this stuff. Is it perfect? No. These products are getting better. But if you use the others, you're going to have to hook up a database and you're going to have to figure out hosting. And if you're really dead set against that, if you want to go from ideation to production, you should use Replit. So that was it. I did no diligence. I did no bake-off. I immediately went into project one because I trusted the smart CTOs that told me this on X, right? But I think at the end of the day, these are the two most important things: what's the easiest and what's the safest. It's almost 100 days ago and in vibe time that's a long time, right? But now that I understand the power, I do appreciate the nerdiness of Replit. You got to go deep. You want to understand all the functionality of the platform. You don't want it all hidden from you at first. It is nice to be hidden from you, right, to be abstracted away. Come up with ideas, do ideation, have a very simple app. But the deeper you go, like you need to become an expert in the platform, like any platform. So nerdier is better, I think, as you scale.
Go to SaaStr.ai, look at our AI mentor, look at our AI tools, look at our AI startup valuation, look at our pitch analyzer, and then this is important, look at what I've built. There are great developers that aren't me and then there are folks who don't have as much experience with software as me. Okay? But if I've built it, you can build it.
We have all new, our whole website with, you know, a sub-segment 30,000 people watch. So it's SaaStr.ai. Okay. That actually has a lot of sub-apps on it. It has how the whole stock market's performing. It has AI-powered news just for B2B. Like it almost has like four little sub-apps in it. Okay. Then it's got a startup valuation calculator that's been used 330,000 times. Then two weeks ago I used Replit and AI to analyze how good your VC pitch is and it includes 800 VCs and a lot of other data. So that's been used 900, a thousand times. So AI pitch calculator. We have a SaaStr AI mentor that has incorporated 20 million words of SaaStr content. Thousands of people use it every month for advice on what to do with their startup. So that's an AI mentor. Then we rebuilt our event site. So SaaStr London is all built on Replit. And that was going from Squarespace to Replit, which is really interesting. I think I'm already up to seven, aren't I?
If you can already buy it, buy it. But if you need to dream it, then vibe it. To folks that are skeptical or don't believe, I would say make sure it's important to you and then start as simple as you can and build from there. But if it's important to you, it's the most powerful thing on planet Earth.
This is where I think the marketing and the whole industry is confusing. Can you get pretty far in 30 minutes? Yes. Can you get into a production-grade app in 30 minutes? I mean, often not, right? A Replit project will never be finished if you don't finish it. I think I can get something pretty good done in a couple of days now for real, not just for demo. In a couple of days, and then I like to push it into production as soon as I have something that works well, freeze it there, right, and then spend days more until I put another release out is my personal vibe.
We're sort of underestimating the impact on SaaS and business software because at SaaStr we're managing 12 autonomous AI agents in production, 12 AI agents. We've got a lot, we're kind of at the bleeding edge and not the most, but for B2B. And what's obvious after having to use Replit is you want every app to work that way. What I want is just to talk to Replit like I talk to Replit, which I'm not supposed to anthropomorphize or personify the agent, but I still call him or her Replit. And I want to go into Salesforce and say, give me a report on how David and Amelia are doing in sales. Show me how they're doing relative to the number of leads they have and time ahead and just show it to me. I don't want to figure out how to create a report. We shouldn't have to learn apps anymore. We should be able to vibe every app. So I'm just frustrated and I don't even want to buy most SaaS software anymore if I can't talk to it the way I talk to Replit. We don't log into those apps. We have our AI agents do it that we talk to. We talk to our AI SDR who then grabs the data and goes out to the prospects. All software should work something like Replit in the future.
We did this valuation calculator and then we did this VC pitch thing. Well, I'll launch within a week. It will just benchmark every single startup against our 300,000 pieces of data, against everything that ICONIQ, Bessemer, Carta, everybody has. It'll tell you exactly how you're doing, the odds that you get funded, how you benchmark against all your peers, and what you need to do better. I go to so many board meetings or talk to founders and 'how am I doing?' They just don't know. So this will kind of definitively answer it. So that I'm excited about. Once I do that, I'm getting back to my first project, which was the only one that wasn't successful, which is taking the 50,000 folks that are in our core community and matching them for real in a lot of ways, matching them with capital, finding a VP for every founder CEO in the world is trying to help executives. But then I just want it to be automatic if you're part of the SaaStr community and you need a VP of sales, we'll just find it for you.
Don't start with the most complicated thing on planet Earth, right? Start with the simplest thing and then build up from there. That's why I came to Replit because I wanted to build this app since 2013. And maybe that means a project that you thought you could do in an hour will take you six months. Not because you need those hours, but you need that creativity time. You need those lessons and those learnings. And that doesn't mean that Replit failed you if it takes you six months. Right? If you're doing something novel that you need to learn because you haven't done it before, you need to learn sometimes you need to learn the patience to go fast, right?
There are some products where like a six is good enough because it hasn't been done before. So like our startup valuation calculator, 342,343 uses. It's pretty great. Okay. But it's not that clever. But no one else offers this for free for anybody to use. Does this need to change the world like Replit? No. Like it's probably only a six or maybe it's a four. But in terms of utility, it's a 10. If it's a new paradigm, you don't know where the limits are. None of my apps built on Replit could exist if it wasn't goal-seeking. And so that means it, that's why you can vibe something one-shot. But it also means it might not all be correct and all the buttons might not work and there might be mockups and that drove me crazy in the beginning. Now I get it. Now I understand it's goal-seeking, right? I've got to figure out and that means it will, from a lay perspective, it will take shortcuts just like a human being will take shortcuts, right? You got to be zen about these things. And when you learn why the agent will take shortcuts, they won't drive you nuts anymore, right? And then you'll actually realize sometimes it'll take shortcuts and it will do magic.
Everyone's talking about autonomy. They should be talking about app testing, the new feature. Okay? Because listen, if you have a simple app, it's not going to help you. But if you go to SaaStr.ai and you play around, you'll actually see there's a lot of sub-apps and a lot going on here. Okay? I can only upload so many screenshots. Okay? And so now I can say, slow down, look at this benchmarking page and it will see why it's not working when it couldn't before, but sort of co-existing in real time as I'm building stuff, doing real functional testing in the browser. It's underappreciated how big a deal app testing is. So to me that is more useful than having autonomy on high. I think anything that you're building that is straightforward, you don't want a lot of autonomy. I'm going to use it for truly complicated things. I'm all in. I love the autonomy, but I'm being thoughtful because a lot of things that you might think are complicated, maybe they're not complicated. Replit knows when you want to go into max mode.
I genuinely think Replit is the coolest and most addictive application I've used in a decade that I can think of. It is as addicting as gaming is, except instead of wasting your life, you can bring new things into the world. It is. Despite my bumps, it's definitely the coolest thing I've done in a decade. And I've already totally changed everything that SaaStr does in less than 100 days. Totally changed it. This is pretty cool, right?
