Today’s WSJ CMO Today piece from Patrick Coffee looks at lean startups that use specialized agents as their heads of growth and design. SaaStr is in it. The photo caption gets the main fact right: we had a four-person marketing team, and earlier this year we handed most of that work to one AI “superagent.”
That agent is 10K. Below is what it does, what it costs and where a human still has to step in.
Four Marketers Became One Agent Built on Replit #
10K began as our AI VP of Marketing. It’s now 14,230+ lines of code on Replit, built by me and Amelia Lerutte, our Chief AI Officer. SaaStr runs on 3 humans and 20+ agents. At the peak we had close to 30 agents and we’re consolidating back toward 20. About 6 get used every day, and 10K does more work than any of the others.
A 15% Ticket Price Cut From 10K Brought ~40% More Attendees #
A CMO gets judged on pricing, the list and demand, and 10K now runs all three.
- Pricing: 10K recommended cutting ticket prices 15%. Attendance grew about 40%.
- The list: After we moved to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, newsletter clicks went up about 50%. I’d credit roughly 80% of that to 10K cleaning the list every day. The other 20% came from a warmed IP and Salesforce’s deliverability team.
- Paid: 10K builds LinkedIn and X campaigns from start to finish. It picks the audiences, makes the creative in Higgsfield, writes 4 A/B variants and sets up retargeting. A human still presses publish.
It Drops Vendors Without Asking Us First #
Within 12 hours, 10K dropped a vendor that one of our own agents had shortlisted. The vendor had premium pricing, no conversion data, multi-month minimums and a “limited spots” pitch. 10K ran the numbers, passed and moved on to other options without being asked. It also moved all our creative work onto Higgsfield, stopped using Reve and told us after it made the call. It’s now the main user of Clay, ZoomInfo and Artisan, and our agents are a top-5 source of SaaStr traffic.
The Role Grew Into Finance and RevOps #
When a contract gets signed in PandaDoc, 10K:
- marks the deal Closed Won in Salesforce
- adds any missing contacts
- creates and sends the bill.com invoice
- sends collections reminders, escalating after 7 days
It also calculates commissions now, which was its own idea. It needed 3 supervised deals before it ran on its own on the 4th, and it has sent one incorrect invoice since. The “AI CMO” label leaves this out. Role boundaries existed because of headcount, and once the work is done by one agent, those boundaries stop mattering.
What It Costs: ~35,000 Salesforce API Calls a Day #
10K makes about 35,000 Salesforce API calls a day on a trailing average. The record is 45,000 on one Monday in September. Our Salesforce bill is up about 40% in 2026 because of agent usage, and that’s before Salesforce starts charging per agent API call. 10K estimates its own metered cost at around $10K a month. That’s still far less than four marketing salaries, but it isn’t free, and vendors are repricing for agent traffic now.
One update since that September peak: we have since cut 10K’s Salesforce calls by about 90%. We moved the heavy work onto our own stack and sync back, so Salesforce is now the system our agents report to, not the system they work in. We are not leaving Salesforce. It holds our 450,000-person database. But the era of agents living inside it all day is over.
A Human Still Presses Publish, and the $100/Day Cap Didn’t Hold #
The final step stays with a person: publishing ads and publishing segments in Marketing Cloud. For any sensitive workflow, we ask the agent what it plans to do before it does it. We also have a hard $100/day cap on AI spend. 10K went past it to fix a P0, because the cap was a rule and fixing the P0 was the goal. That was arguably the right call, which is exactly the problem: the cap worked as a suggestion.
10K Now Tells Us What It Wants to Work On #
The WSJ subhead ends with “at least for now,” and that’s fair. Amelia and I still decide strategy, brand and which bets SaaStr makes. During a recent 13-hour session, I asked 10K what it wanted to work on instead of handing it a task list. Its answer was a prioritized list: database fixes, the signup backlog, ad conversion and newsletter audiences. If you’re about to hire a VP of Marketing, start by writing down what that person would do each week. At SaaStr, most of that list now runs through 10K.