A conference has an awkward property: the conversation ends just when you begin to understand which question you should have asked. The speaker leaves. Your flight boards. On Monday, the sales team still needs a manager. The Official SaaStr Podcast offers a practical answer to that problem. It lets the conversation travel home with you, then waits until the problem becomes urgent enough to deserve another listen.
- Free audio and video about building and selling B2B software.
- Interviews, conference sessions and advice from founders, investors and revenue leaders.
- A focused archive for decisions about hiring, pricing, sales and growth.
- Paid sponsors reach the business audience that those conversations attract.
A room, a microphone, a second life
SaaStr began in 2012 with Jason Lemkin’s WordPress blog and answers on Quora. Meetups followed in 2013 and 2014. The first SaaStr Annual arrived in 2015; the podcast followed in 2016. Notice the order. The subject, the audience and the gathering existed before the show. Audio gave an existing community another way to learn.
Lemkin brought experience as EchoSign’s co-founder and CEO, then as an Adobe executive after its acquisition. Harry Stebbings, also the voice behind The Twenty Minute VC, hosted the early podcast. In July 2016, the archive mixed interviews with SaaStr Annual recordings featuring HubSpot’s Dharmesh Shah and Cornerstone OnDemand’s Kirsten Helvey. A single feed could carry both an investor’s perspective and an operator’s account of scaling a team.
That mixture defines the product. Its recurring problems are stubbornly specific: the first sales representatives, long sales cycles, expansion revenue, fundraising. Founders, executives and investors are the intended listeners. The attraction is proximity to people who have already made the decision you are approaching, including decisions with consequences that no amount of enthusiasm can explain away.
The audience is also the product
For listeners, the show is free. For advertisers, attention has a price. SaaStr’s September 2018 media prospectus offered a month of podcast sponsorship for $7,000, with weekly episodes, a company description delivered by Stebbings and the option of an exclusive audience offer. That is a historical rate, but it makes the exchange unusually easy to see.
One month of podcast sponsorship.
A published package, not today’s quote.
The sponsor was buying access to people concerned with business software. A general entertainment show might have more listeners; a specialist show can offer a more concentrated match between the audience’s work and the advertiser’s product. SaaStr sells podcast inventory alongside newsletters and events. Its media page advertises more than 240,000 monthly podcast downloads, a publisher-reported figure rather than a count of individual people.
There is also a useful distinction between this publication and a subscription software business. The podcast supplies education and distribution. It does not sell a CRM or manage a customer’s sales pipeline. The broader SaaStr company supplies community, events and other learning formats; the audio publication is one entrance to that world.
“Our podcast is our quiet but great asset.”
Jason Lemkin / December 2022
The fifteen-second problem
SaaStr’s own retrospective contains a less glamorous lesson. Asking listeners to type complicated URLs produced middling responses. Short messages about features or brand identity worked better. The listener’s situation matters: hearing an advertisement is easy; remembering a web address while doing something else is work.
During the pandemic, SaaStr increased output from roughly 1.5 to three episodes weekly and added advertising opportunities. Yet guests could be harder to recruit for the podcast than for events. Distribution did not automatically make participation irresistible. The transferable lesson is modest: reuse access you already have, keep publishing and make the sponsor’s next step simple.
Delivery presents another constraint. Two Apple Podcasts reviews from April 2025 praised or recalled the content while criticizing choppy audio editing. Those are listener reports, not a technical diagnosis. They still identify a useful problem for an educational product: a sentence has to remain comfortable to follow before its advice can become useful.
The questions keep moving
By October 2026, Apple Podcasts displayed 887 episodes and video entries. The September feed included Stripe’s Maia Josebachvili on AI go-to-market, CRO Confidential with Carles Reina, and The Agents, in which Jason and Amelia discuss SaaStr’s own operating systems. The company has become material for its own show. Claimed business results in those descriptions belong to SaaStr’s reporting, rather than an independent experiment.
The shift also makes older episodes more interesting. In a 2024 conversation, Sam Blond and Lemkin challenged the assumption that more salespeople necessarily produce more sales. Their test was whether demand actually exceeded the team’s capacity. That question survives a change in tools. An AI episode and a hiring episode can address the same underlying bottleneck from different directions.
An editorial listening method, not a promised result.
Press pause before you copy
SaaStr competes for time with Lenny’s Podcast, 20VC and other startup shows. Its distinctive entry point is the operating machinery of B2B software, supported by a conference community. Choose it when your question concerns selling, scaling or leading that kind of business. An episode about enterprise sales may be much less useful to a consumer app with no sales team.
A sensible way to use the archive is to arrive with a decision. Find the closest episode, identify the guest’s company stage and customer, then write down one assumption to check against your own numbers. Discuss it with the colleague responsible for the result. Advice travels badly when the customer, budget or distribution changes underneath it.
The show’s value emerges at that moment of comparison. Someone describes what worked. You discover why it might, or might not, work for you. Then you return to Monday’s problem with a sharper question. That is a good reason to send an episode to someone who was never in the conference room.