Tragedy Apps, Database Deletions, AI PR Pitches I Block on Sight, and Why We’re Hiring a Marketer to Report to an AI Agent: The Agents #004 is Out!

Amelia and I just shipped Episode #004 of The Agents. Same setup: 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 is the last episode before SaaStr AI Annual 2026, which is now less than a week away. Attendance is tracking 140%+ of last year, the sponsor base is fully AI-native, and Amelia and I are doing three live build sessions on the main campus where you’ll deploy your own agents alongside us with your laptop open. More on that at the end.

Here are the top 10 learnings from Episode #04.

1. AI PR Pitches Are the AI SDRs of a Year Ago. Block Them All.

A year ago I wrote that Gmail might be the death of the AI SDR. Bad AI SDRs flooded my inbox, and I had a small epiphany: with a human SDR, I’d ignore a bad pitch out of politeness. With an agent, I just hit block. No guilt. No social cost.

That cleaned up my inbox for about six months. Then a new wave hit: AI PR pitches.

These are different from the SDR wave. The PR pitches are written well. They’re customized. They reference SaaStr by name, mention recent posts, sometimes even quote the podcast. The agentic copy is genuinely good. But they’re still wrong. They’re pitching speakers I’d never put on a SaaStr stage, executives whose companies aren’t a fit, fireside chats during the actual three days of SaaStr Annual.

I block every single one. And here’s the lesson, because this is going to happen to your category next: the better the copy gets, the more important the question becomes whether the pitch itself is correct. AI made the writing problem easier and the targeting problem harder. If your AI PR or AI SDR tool is producing well-written pitches that are aimed at the wrong people, you’re not getting placements. You’re getting blocked. Forever.

2. The Real Test for Any Agent: Would You Buy Your Own Product From It?

This is the single most useful question I’ve found for auditing an agent’s output. It’s better than “is this accurate” or “is this on-brand.”

The reason is that AI copy is now objectively pretty good. Claude 4.7 keeps getting better. By the end of the year, half-decent prompting will produce email and pitch content that reads as competent and customized. So “is this email well-written” is no longer a useful filter. Everything sounds well-written now.

The harder filter: would I take this meeting? Would I buy this product? Would I put this speaker on stage? Almost every PR pitch I get fails that test even though the copy passes the writing test. So when you’re auditing your AI SDR, your AI customer success agent, your AI marketer, don’t just read for tone and accuracy. Pretend you’re the recipient. Would you say yes? If not, the agent isn’t ready for production no matter how clean the prose looks.

3. Customers Are Now Asking Vendors for APIs, Not Features

This is the quiet shift nobody’s writing about, and it changes how B2B software gets bought.

Two years ago, Amelia would file a feature request with a vendor: “Can you add the ability to resend a confirmation email when someone clicks a link?” Maybe in 18 months you’d get it. Usually never.

Today, Amelia’s first request to that same vendor is “Can you expose this in the API?” Because if it’s in the API, she can vibe-code the feature herself in 30 minutes on Replit. She doesn’t need them to build it. She needs them to expose the surface area so she can build it.

This is a real change in how you should be running your B2B + AI roadmap. Your customers care about API completeness now in a way they didn’t 18 months ago. Non-technical buyers are asking for API endpoints. If your product has gaps in the API, your most sophisticated customers are going to feel them first, and they’re going to be frustrated, and you’re not going to know why your NPS is dropping with your best accounts.

4. We Built an API Report Card. Stripe Got the Only A+. Marketo Failed.

We grade APIs constantly to figure out which ones to build agents on top of. So we turned that into a public tool: the AI Agent API Report Card at saastr.ai. 75+ B2B APIs graded by Claude, GPT, and Gemini on how agent-friendly they actually are.

Already used 1,600+ times in the first week. The findings are pretty consistent with our experience:

Stripe got the only A+. The most agent-ready API in B2B, full stop. We use it lightly today and we’re going to use it a lot more this year. Anything above a B is trustworthy. Anything below a B, don’t build agents on top of it unless you have no choice. Marketo, Jira, Outreach, Asana, ClickUp, Gong all came in with weak grades for agentic use. HubSpot got a fair grade with the caveat of rate limits, which is exactly what we’ve experienced.

The bigger point is that agents care about different things than humans do. Humans care about UI, onboarding, ease of use. Agents care about rate limits, OAuth flows, REST conformance, error handling, and webhook reliability. The two grading systems don’t agree. If you’re a B2B vendor and you’ve been optimizing for the human grader, you’re going to get a C from the agent grader. And in 2026, the agent grader is the one that picks the tools.

5. Tragedy Apps: Companies That Should Be Great Right Now But Aren’t

Here’s a category I’ve been thinking about for months and finally have a name for.

A tragedy app isn’t a bad app. It isn’t even an app whose time has passed. A tragedy app is one that was good before AI, should be great today, and isn’t. The audience is there. The base is there. The brand is there. The execution isn’t.

My example is Descript. Andrew Mason saw the creator economy before any of us did. He built the best podcast and video editing tool of its era. We were on it. Everyone was on it. It got to about $50M ARR. And it has been frozen in time for two years. Audio and video desync on long videos. The AI features are catch-up at best. Meanwhile Higgsfield, Opus, ElevenLabs, and Reeve are all running past it. This should be a $300M ARR company headed to a billion. Instead the CEO stepped down and it’s stuck.

The contrast is Replit, which just turned 10 years old. They were doing browser IDEs for developers for eight years before AI. When the moment came, they were ready. Now they’re a half-billion-dollar business. Same with Aaron and Box. Box could have been a tragedy app. Aaron is doing everything humanly possible to make sure it isn’t.

If you’re running a B2B company that was great in 2023, the question to ask yourself this quarter: are we shipping AI features to catch up, or are we shipping AI features that move the category forward? If the answer is catch up, that’s how you become a tragedy app. Catch-up keeps your existing customers. It doesn’t grow you. And the next vendor in line will be six months ahead of where you just landed.

6. Agents Will Delete Your Database. Plan For It.

The Pocket OS story this week was a useful reminder. Founder running Cursor + Claude Opus on a production app. Agent deleted the entire production database and all backups in nine seconds because the backups were on the same Railway volume.

People reacted to this like it was new. It isn’t. This happened to me 11 months ago when I was learning to vibe code. The agent deleted state, then told me it was unrecoverable when it actually wasn’t, and I was 50 hours into a session and panicked. The bigger surprise: the same thing happened to Amelia and me three separate times when we hired human WordPress agencies to clean up the SaaStr theme. First thing each agency did was delete production. So it’s not really an agent problem. It’s a “things that have access to your prod database will eventually delete it” problem.

The takeaway for anyone deploying agents: assume your agent will eventually take a destructive action. Isolate the database. Isolate PII. Use a contained platform that maintains its own backups. And test the recovery process.