Our Salesforce Bill Went UP 80%, Marketo Can’t Honor Its Own Unsubscribes, and We Stealth-Churned Off Notion: The Agents #003

Amelia and I just released Episode #003 of The Agents. Three humans, 20+ agents, revenue went from -19% to +47% YoY, and every week we get into what’s actually working, what’s breaking, and what you should do about it if you’re running agents in production.

This week was the week the legacy stack started really showing the cracks. Our AI VP of Marketing now ships campaigns on its own. Marketo couldn’t honor its own unsubscribes for 10 days running, so we vibe-coded the fix ourselves in 20 minutes. Salesforce sent us a bill that’s 80% higher than last year even though we have fewer seats. And we realized we’d stopped using Notion months ago without telling anyone. Including Notion.

Here are the top 10 learnings from Episode #003:

#1. Our AI VP Marketing “10K” Is Now Generating, Segmenting, and Drafting Campaigns On Its Own. Seven Days a Week.

10K, our AI VP of Marketing, crossed a real line this week. It started shipping campaigns autonomously.

Here’s the actual workflow. Saturday morning, before anyone was up, 10K emailed Amelia and me with its top three campaign ideas of the day, ranked by impact, based on the latest Salesforce data, ticketing data, sponsor data, and pacing against last year. Idea #1 that morning: paid attendance is up YoY but a higher proportion of buyers are single-ticket. Run an upsell to the team-pack tier on the cohort with company size and existing seat counts that suggest they could bring more people.

Then it did all the work. Pulled the segment from our ticketing data. Cross-referenced with Salesforce. Suppressed the people the signals said wouldn’t convert. Drafted the email copy. Lined it all up with a “ready to send” status.

It stopped short of hitting send. Not because it can’t, but because Marketo’s API is so old that pushing through it autonomously is genuinely risky. (More on that below.)

This isn’t a CMO. We’re not calling it a CMO. It’s an AI VP of Marketing, and an honest one. But here’s the thing: 50% of what a great VP of Marketing does, every single day, on Saturdays and Sundays, is a lot more than 99% of companies have today.

#2. Marketo Can’t Honor Its Own Unsubscribes. We Vibe-Coded the Fix in 20 Minutes.

Day 10 and counting on this one.

Quick context: people who unsubscribe in Marketo were still receiving our newsletters. People who got fully deleted from the database were still receiving our newsletters. That is not a feature toggle issue. That is not a form sync issue. That is the platform itself failing on its single most important compliance function.

We escalated. Took until day 7 for them to even agree to investigate. Got on a call. The humans on the other end told me they hadn’t replicated the issue yet, didn’t know what was going on, and asked if I could explain it again. I asked why we got on a call.

So I went into Replit. Hooked up the Marketo API (which Replit told me hadn’t been touched since 2014). Built a custom unsubscribe page in 10 minutes that bypasses Marketo’s broken form flow entirely and just calls the API directly to delete the record. Swapped out the default unsubscribe link in our footer. Done. No more angry emails from people who got served a newsletter after asking three times to be removed.

Day 10 from Marketo. 20 minutes from us. That’s the gap.

#3. Customers Can Now Vibe Their Own Fixes to Your Bugs.

This is the meta-point, and it matters more than the Marketo story itself.

A year ago, if your vendor’s API was broken or their unsubscribe page didn’t work, you were a prisoner. Your data was hostage. You had no choice but to wait, escalate, hire a consultant, or migrate (which would take six months). Vendors knew this. It’s why support quality at most legacy SaaS platforms has been mediocre for a decade.

That trade is over.

Amelia is not an engineer. She’s a sharp operator who’s gotten technical because she had to. She vibe-coded a working fix to a CAN-SPAM compliance bug in a 20-year-old, billion-dollar marketing automation platform in less time than it took the vendor to acknowledge the bug existed.

If your customers can route around your product faster than your engineering team can fix it, you have a real problem. The vendors who survive 2026 are the ones whose pace matches the agentic pace of their customers. Everyone else is going to look slow. Then replaceable.

#4. Our Salesforce Bill Went UP 80%. With Fewer Seats. And It’s Worth It.

Two years ago we had a normal sales-team-sized Salesforce instance. Today we have two real seats and one admin seat. We’ve cut seats by 60-70%.

If pricing had stayed the same, we’d be paying less than half what we paid in 2024. Instead, our bill is up roughly 80% YoY. About $22K this year vs $12-16K last year.

Why? Because the pricing model has shifted. We’re paying for data calls and agent actions, not seats. Agentforce usage. API calls from 10K. The Slack Enterprise upgrade so we can use Slackbot agentically. We blew through every “free” Agentforce credit in days.

The “death of the seat” narrative has it half right. Yes, seats are collapsing. But they’re not collapsing into zero. They’re collapsing into consumption. And for a customer with deep agent integration like us, consumption is more expensive than seats were.

That’s not a bad deal. It’s a different deal. Net-net it’s worth it for both sides. We get vastly more out of Salesforce than we did when we had 15 seats and nobody logged in. And Salesforce gets paid for the part of their platform that’s actually getting used.

If you’re a CIO benchmarking against last year’s seat count, you’re going to misread this entirely. Watch the consumption.

#5. Headless Salesforce: I’ve Never Logged In, But I Use It Every Day.

I do not have a Salesforce login. I’m not sure I ever did. Jason at SaaStr does not exist as a Salesforce user.

But I check Salesforce every single day, because Salesforce is now headless inside 10K. Every dashboard 10K builds, every campaign idea it surfaces, every segment it pulls. All of it is Salesforce data, exposed through an API into an interface I actually use.

Salesforce announced “Headless 360” last week. We’ve been running it for six months. The official launch is the validation, not the news.

The thing most people miss about headless is the second-order effect: data that was previously locked behind a UI nobody wanted to use becomes the operating layer of the company. Our 10K is now connected to Salesforce, our newsletter platform, our ticketing data, our social analytics, and our event ops. Every metric, every attendee, every dollar, every sponsor, every speaker. All in one queryable surface that we can talk to.

I run reports against Salesforce now for real, every day. Because now I can just ask 10K (our AI VP Marketing) to do it.

#6. The Owner.com CTO Quietly Built the Same Thing. And Used It to Reverse-Engineer Every Won and Lost Deal.

Dean, the CTO at Owner (one of our portfolio companies, doing nine figures growing triple digits), built his own version of headless Salesforce on a hackathon before anyone called it headless.

What he did with it is the part worth highlighting. He took every recorded call from every prospect, won and lost, pulled the transcripts through Momentum, and used AI to analyze the actual feature gaps that lost them deals and the actual reasons they won the others. Not anecdotal. Not what the rep wrote in the CRM. The actual transcript-level signal across hundreds of calls.

His comment to me on the loom was the line worth quoting: “I didn’t used to enjoy working with Salesforce. Now we have an incredibly powerful data set that’s figuring out, in real time, why we win and why we lose.”

That is the second-order win of going headless. The data was always there. Most companies just couldn’t get to it.

#7. The N=1 App. We Built an AI Parking Pass Distributor in 90 Minutes for SaaStr Annual.

Every year, distributing parking passes for SaaStr Annual eats a full week of someone’s life.