If you’re building or leading a SaaS company, this conversation explores how the AI SaaS playbook is changing traditional go-to-market models. Jacco, Founder of Winning by Design, explains why product-led growth, real-time systems, and growth loops vs. funnels are becoming the dominant approach to B2B growth in the AI era.

Together, Jacco and Manny discuss why the traditional SaaS funnel is losing effectiveness and how modern companies are building self-reinforcing growth engines instead. They explore the SaaS expansion strategy, the shift from logo acquisition to user adoption, and how AI-native organizations stack growth loops to maintain momentum.

For years, SaaS companies optimized for winning logos.

Get the company. Hang it on the wall. Put it on the deck.

AI-native companies think differently. They optimize for users.

Jacco argues that disruption doesn’t start with logo churn. It starts with user migration. AI-native tools land with users first. Once usage consolidates, the logo follows.

Traditional SaaS growth is an open-loop system. It requires constant external input: more leads, more SDRs, and more spend.

AI-native growth is closed-loop. When growth creates more growth, the system compounds.

Jacco explains that nearly every fast-growing company today operates on at least one growth loop:

If you have to pay for every dollar of growth, you will eventually hit a ceiling.

All growth follows an S-curve:

Every S-curve eventually becomes a bell curve unless you stack another one.

That’s why companies like Dropbox and DocuSign continuously launch adjacent products. When individual-user growth saturates (often around 200k–300k users in B2B), churn dampens the exponential curve.

To sustain momentum, companies must stack new growth loops on top of old ones.

What’s different now isn’t growth theory, but speed.

AI-native companies operate at a different clock speed. If win rates in Spain jump from 18% to 26%, a traditional SaaS company might respond next quarter. An AI-native company reacts in days.

The difference lies in infrastructure, real-time systems, automated feedback loops, and humans designing systems rather than manually steering every move.

Consider a  $100M SaaS company with:

If just 1% of users per month generate an opportunity signal, that’s 500 quality signals per month. 6,000 per year. Instead of sending SDRs to cold outbound lists, Jacco proposes redeploying them toward users: 

The growth engine is already inside the customer base. You just need to activate it.

The biggest misconception in SaaS today is that competition happens at the logo level.

It doesn’t.

AI-native tools enter at the user layer. They win individual adoption. They observe usage patterns in real time. They iterate faster. Then the logo shifts.

If you’re SaaS-native, you are not doomed. But you must:

Because in the AI era, velocity compresses the S-curve. And the companies that achieve irreversible time dominance don’t just win first. They become almost impossible to catch.