SaaStr 874: From 0% to 83% AI-First Customers in 2 Years. How Owner's CEO Rebuilt a $100M Vertical SaaS Company

**Adam Guild** (0:00)
In order to benefit from agents, you've got to build an extremely opinionated product. Because the thing that makes agents magical from the perspective of the user is this idea that it is the first time that software is able to drive the outcome that that user wants, without them having to manually intervene and try and figure out how best to configure the software in order to get the outcome, the time savings and fewer expertise requiring insights are required to engage with the product.
Let me take you back to three years ago, because the past three years has been a huge roller coaster at Owner. Three years ago, Owner was crushing it. We were building this Shopify for restaurants thing that was working. It was a website builder, online ordering system, marketing automation system for restaurant owners, and from a growth perspective, it was going great. We were exceeding the triple, triple, double, double, double trajectory that the SaaS lore says. Eventually leads to building a unicorn. We'd raised more than $89 million in capital from all of these incredible investors. Things seemed great. But beneath the surface, we were facing an existential risk starting in early of 2023
That risk was the ChatGPT moment that was cascading throughout the tech industry and putting huge pressure on us in two different ways, each equally terrifying. The first way was all of the AI native startups that were being born in early 2023, doing things that previously weren't possible, like vibe coding website generation, and AI phone answering and ordering for restaurants. And the risk that they posed was that they were growing like wildfire and directly could disrupt our product.
The other risk was coming from maybe even more terrifying direction, because all of the massive companies in our space, publicly traded companies, had taken notice of our momentum and were as aggressively as they could trying to stop it. Throwing hundreds of engineers on trying to clone our product and then distributing it into their customer bases of hundreds of thousands of similar customers. It became obvious that unless we adapted in this moment and took advantage of it, that we were going to get crushed from both of these directions. That we were going to slowly bleed out and die and that we wouldn't have a business in a few years.
The hard part wasn't realizing that. The hard part was all of the smart people around the table that disagreed. Major investors saying, Adam, this is CEO Thrash. We can't just invest millions of dollars in this new product direction and take people off of this thing that is working. It's working well, it's growing efficiently. We can gradually layer these in over time. Or team members, product managers and engineers saying, Adam, I know a hundred customers personally that are asking for the product to do this thing. And if we're going to take people off of that to build this new thing that hasn't even worked, it's been proven it's just going with the AI fad. How could we possibly do that? Or the industry experts, the folks that had spent their lives and careers in our industry of restaurants, they were saying, Adam, if there's one thing I know, it's restaurant owners, and restaurant owners are terrified of AI. If you start to pivot your company in that direction, you're going to alienate your customer base.
It was brutally hard, but we pushed through all of those reasons not to. And if we hadn't, then this wouldn't have happened. This glorious tweet from the godfather of SaaS and the king of SaaS AI, Jason, one of our incredible early investors and board members, on the first of this year talking about how we grew faster in 2025 than we did in 2024, and how more than 83% of our new customers, up from 0% just two years prior, started their journey by using our AI products, talking about the caliber of talent and momentum that we've been able to accrue, that we wouldn't have otherwise. So that is what the next 30 minutes is going to be about. About all of the ways in which we had to re-imagine our product and our business, to adapt to be AI native in the way that we build product, the way that we operate, and the way that our whole customer journey works. I'll also touch on psychologically all of the challenges that came from making these sweeping changes across the business.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:30)
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