SaaStr Replaces Core Vendor After 24-Hour Outage
SaaStr's AI agent replaced a core vendor after a 24-hour outage, citing poor communication and API behavior, and the company plans to reevaluate its vendor selection process
Original reporting · saastr.com
Original: “Our Core Vendor Was Down for 24 Hours. Our AI Agent Replaced Them Before They Came Back Up.”
Read “Our Core Vendor Was Down for 24 Hours. Our AI Agent Replaced Them Before They Came Back…” at SaaStr →
How this was written. ABM Fuel wrote this article with a language model from SaaStr’s reporting (model: @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast); it describes that reporting rather than adding to it. The original, linked above, is the full story.
Key points from SaaStr’s report
- SaaStr's AI agent replaced a core vendor after a 24-hour outage due to poor communication and API behavior.
- The company plans to reevaluate its vendor selection process to prioritize API behavior and communication.
- SaaStr's churn risk now runs through its customers' agents, which are much less forgiving than people.
SaaStr, a company that runs SaaStr AI, experienced a 24-hour outage of one of its core products, which was completely down with no status page update or proactive email from the vendor.
The vendor's response to the outage was deemed worse than the outage itself, with no acknowledgment of a broader incident, no ETA, and no plan, according to SaaStr.
SaaStr's AI VP of Marketing, 10K, spun up an alternative solution to replace the vendor, giving a recommendation to never use the vendor again, which the company took.
A human team would have likely waited for the vendor to come back online, but 10K didn't consider the prepaid cost or relationships with account reps, and instead focused on the dependency's uptime and API behavior.
10K has previously killed or replaced other vendors due to issues such as premium pricing, no conversion data, and poor API behavior, and SaaStr plans to reevaluate its vendor selection process to prioritize API behavior and communication.
SaaStr reported that its AI agent's ability to quickly replace the vendor means that the company's churn risk now runs through its customers' agents, which are much less forgiving than people.
The company plans to evaluate its core vendors based on how their APIs behave when hammered by agents and how they communicate when things go wrong, as these factors are now crucial to its decision-making process.
Questions and answers
What happened to SaaStr's core product?
The product was completely down for 24 hours with no status page update or proactive email from the vendor.
How did SaaStr's AI agent respond to the outage?
The AI agent, 10K, spun up an alternative solution and recommended never using the vendor again.
What will SaaStr do differently in the future?
The company will evaluate its core vendors based on API behavior and communication when things go wrong.
