Jason Lemkin Bought 30+ APIs This Year and Exactly One Vendor Asked How It Went

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In an August 6, 2026 SaaStr post, Jason Lemkin reports that of 30+ APIs he purchased this year, only Exa followed up — an email from a product-team member four days after his first real batch of API calls, asking for a one-liner and attaching $50 in credits with no strings. He replied within three hours with roughly 400 words, including production specs a sales org would never have surfaced: 145k B2B executives in the matching product, a 10 QPS throughput requirement, and 89% accuracy on an adversarial dataset. Lemkin's arithmetic is the actionable part — a PM running 20 of these a week hits 250 conversations a quarter, covering activation, product research, and expansion, work usually split across three organizations. Usage-triggered, not signup-triggered, is the whole trick.