I Bought 30+ APIs This Year. Only Exa Asked How It Went. Copy Them.

SaaStr's Jason Lemkin reports on a telling gap in API vendor customer engagement. He signed up for more than thirty APIs this year to power AI agents in production—search, enrichment, inference, storage, and more. Not one vendor checked in to see how the product was working, with a single exception. Four days after Lemkin ran his first batch, Exa's product team reached out with a short email from a named PM asking for just a one-liner of feedback, offering fifty dollars in credits. That minimal ask—fifteen seconds of effort—prompted a detailed four-hundred-word response from Lemkin with benchmarks, constraints, and feature requests. What Exa got right, Lemkin observes, was what the other twenty-nine missed: they asked a busy user for something small rather than a calendar meeting; they triggered on actual usage, not signup; and the response came from someone who knew the product cold enough to give a real answer rather than a placeholder. That single email handled onboarding, product research, and expansion all at once. The lesson: asking a simple question about how an API is actually being used has become rare enough to stand out.

Listen to this story

Hear this and more stories in a personalized audio briefing.

Open The Chonkerton