Sell verifiable results, not AI capabilities
Thesis of the week: the market has entered its AI hangover phase. And the ones who survive will be those who can prove results with numbers, not with narrative.
What I've been doing at VIVIO for the past two weeks, and what I'd recommend to any founder with an AI SaaS: stop selling the technology, start selling the delta.
A quick framework in three steps:
Identify the metric your customer already measures today (CAC, time per task, conversion, whatever it is). If they don't measure it, help them measure it BEFORE you sell them anything. Yes, for free.
Define an honest baseline. Before your product goes in, what is their current number? Document it in writing. This protects you and gives your sale credibility.
Commit to a specific delta in a specific timeframe. "You'll cut influencer analysis from 4 hours to 20 minutes within 30 days." If you don't deliver, you don't get paid (or you get paid less).
A founder who bets their invoice on a verifiable result communicates something no polished demo can match: that they believe their own product. And right now, that is the scarcest thing on the market.
What I learned
This week a prospect cut me off mid-demo. Literally. He said: "Alejandro, stop. I've spent six months watching AI demos. Tell me what happens if it doesn't work."
I went blank for 3 seconds. Nobody had ever put it to me like that. I answered with the truth: "If in 60 days we haven't saved your team X hours, I refund what you paid and you give us feedback to improve." He signed.
My lesson, and it stings a little: for months I had been optimising the pitch when what I should have been optimising was the guarantee. People don't want you to tell them how good you are. They want to know what you're risking if you're not.
It isn't just a sales technique. It's a brutal filter on yourself. If you don't dare guarantee the result, maybe the problem isn't the customer. Maybe your product isn't where you say it is yet.
On the radar
- Microsoft uses Copilot to dismantle two of the world's most widely used hacking tools, spotting connections in malicious code within hours. A real use case, measurable and with impact. Exactly what 95% of AI startups still don't have.
- Bernie Sanders proposes a 7 trillion sovereign AI fund financed by a 50% equity tax on the big AI companies. Populism aside, the underlying question is legitimate: who captures the value of AI? And it will shape the next regulatory decade.
- Apple and Xbox raise prices over the memory chip shortage being soaked up by AI data centres. The AI fever is already costing you money even if you never touch it. And this is only the first quarter of that effect.
- Growing debate about local SEO in the age of AI search: "either you show up where your customer is looking or you don't exist". SEO hasn't died, it has mutated. If your local business doesn't appear in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, you're invisible to 40% of your future customers.
The actionable advice
Today, before you close the laptop: identify one specific metric your product improves for your customers. Just one. Call (yes, call, don't email) three current customers and ask them what their number was before using you and what it is now. If they don't know, you have a positioning problem. If they do know, you have your next case study and your next acquisition campaign ready to go. Total time: 90 minutes. Impact: enormous.
Behind VIVIO
A real number from VIVIO this week: we changed our new customer onboarding to include a mandatory 30-minute session where we measure their current process BEFORE anyone touches the tool. Times, cost per campaign, influencer response rates.
Result: two new customers in 10 days, with shorter sales cycles than anything we had done before. Cost to us: 30 minutes per prospect. What we gain: the ability to sell the exact delta instead of a vague promise.
It doesn't scale infinitely, I know. But at this stage, selling from the customer's own data converts dramatically better than any perfect demo.
This is a version of what I send every week, unfiltered, in my newsletter "Eso no fue suerte". If you want the rest, subscribe for free.