7 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building AI Agents That Actually Work

7 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building AI Agents That Actually Work

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Elad Ferber, CEO of Synthpop, shared hard-won insights from building and selling AI agents that autonomously resolve customer support tickets. Unlike most AI companies pitching vaporware, Synthpop ships agents that handle 93% of customer interactions end-to-end. Their GTM journey offers tactical lessons for any founder selling complex infrastructure software.

Lead with Quantified Outcomes, Not Technology

Synthpop learned early that talking about “AI agents” and “LLM architecture” doesn’t close deals. What closes deals is showing prospects exactly how many tickets they can automate and how much money they’ll save.

Elad describes their evolved sales approach: “We actually go through historical support tickets with customers and kind of go tag by tag and kind of map out, okay, how much of your support volume can we actually automate?” This data-driven discovery process transforms abstract technology into concrete business value.

The underlying principle: buyers don’t care about your technology stack. They care about whether you can solve their specific problem with measurable results. By analyzing actual ticket data upfront, Synthpop removes uncertainty from the buying decision. Prospects see their own data showing 60%, 70%, or 80%+ automation potential before they sign anything.

This approach also qualifying out bad-fit customers early. If a prospect’s ticket volume doesn’t match Synthpop’s automation capabilities, both sides know it before wasting cycles on implementation.

Price for Adoption First, Value Capture Later

Pricing AI products presents a unique challenge. Elad identified a critical insight about market maturity: “I think a lot of companies are still hesitant to pay a lot for AI agents because AI is so new.”

Rather than trying to capture the full economic value created—which could justify charging thousands per month—Synthpop initially priced more aggressively to accelerate adoption. The logic: get customers experiencing the value, let them see 93% automation in production, then expand revenue through usage growth and feature expansion.

This strategy recognizes a fundamental truth about selling emerging technology: you’re not just selling to overcome status quo bias, you’re selling against skepticism about the entire category. Pricing needs to account for that additional friction.

The lesson extends beyond AI: whenever you’re selling into an immature category where buyers lack reference points, pricing for adoption often beats pricing for maximum extraction. You can always expand revenue once you’ve proven the value.

Turn Integration Complexity into Your Moat

Most SaaS companies try to minimize integration complexity to accelerate time-to-value. Synthpop did the opposite—they embraced it as a competitive advantage.

Every Synthpop deployment requires deep integration into a customer’s tech stack. As Elad explains: “We give agents access to all the tools that your support agents have access to. So that means access to Stripe, access to your database, access to your own internal APIs, to Salesforce, to your CRM.”

This creates significant upfront work, but it also builds an enormous moat. Once Synthpop is integrated across a customer’s payment processor, database, CRM, and proprietary systems—and once their agents are trained on company-specific policies and edge cases—switching costs become prohibitive.

The principle: don’t always optimize for ease of implementation. Sometimes the hard work of deep integration creates the stickiness that protects your revenue. Shallow integrations are easy to deploy and easy to replace. Deep integrations are harder to sell but nearly impossible to rip out.

Target High-Volume Operations Where Unit Economics Shift Dramatically

Synthpop’s ICP targeting reveals sophisticated thinking about where AI agents create the most value. They focus on B2C and B2B2C companies with high support volumes—thousands or tens of thousands of tickets monthly.

The reason isn’t just that bigger customers pay more. It’s that high-volume operations reach an inflection point where automation fundamentally changes the business model. Elad notes that companies handling massive ticket volumes often struggle to scale their support teams profitably. Synthpop doesn’t just save them money on support agents—it removes a constraint on growth.

This targeting strategy also influences product development priorities. By focusing on high-volume scenarios, Synthpop encounters the full range of edge cases early. They build robustness faster than if they served low-volume customers where problems surface gradually.

The broader lesson: identify customer segments where your solution doesn’t just improve efficiency incrementally—it breaks through a ceiling that was limiting their business. Those customers will pay more, implement faster, and become your best advocates.

Build Reusable Components Without Pretending You’re Plug-and-Play

Synthpop navigates a tricky balance: every customer needs custom integration work, but building everything from scratch doesn’t scale. Their solution: invest heavily in reusable components for common integrations while being honest about customization requirements.

Elad acknowledges the reality: “Every company’s different and has a different tech stack, different tools.” Rather than over-promising on implementation speed, Synthpop has built libraries of pre-built integrations for systems like Stripe, Salesforce, and major e-commerce platforms. These accelerate deployment while still allowing for the custom work required to handle each company’s unique business logic.

This approach prevents two common mistakes: over-customizing everything (which kills margins) or over-standardizing everything (which kills value). The principle is about honest scoping—be clear about what’s standard and what’s custom, then build infrastructure that makes the custom work faster each time.

Use Per-Resolution Pricing to Align Incentives and De-Risk Adoption

Synthpop’s pricing model—charging per resolution rather than per seat or per ticket volume—elegantly solves several problems simultaneously.

First, it aligns incentives. Customers only pay when the AI agent successfully resolves an issue. This removes the risk of paying for a system that doesn’t perform. Second, it creates natural expansion revenue as customers route more tickets to the AI agents. Third, it focuses internal metrics on the outcome that actually matters: resolution rate.

The contrast with traditional chatbot pricing is stark. Most vendors charge based on usage or seats, regardless of whether they’re actually resolving issues or just deflecting them to human agents. Synthpop’s model forces them to optimize for true resolution.

The underlying principle: when possible, tie pricing directly to the value metric customers care about most. This de-risks adoption, aligns your engineering priorities with customer success, and creates expansion revenue that grows with realized value rather than arbitrary usage metrics.

Position Around Outcomes After You’ve Proven the Technology

Elad shared an important evolution in how Synthpop describes itself. Early on, they led with “AI agent platform”—a technology-first description. Now they lead with autonomous customer support that resolves issues end-to-end.

This positioning shift came after proving the technology works. The lesson: you earn the right to make outcome-based claims only after you can back them up with data. Claiming “we autonomously resolve 93% of tickets” when you haven’t actually done it is vaporware. Claiming it after you’ve done it repeatedly is powerful positioning.

This sequence matters for credibility. Technology companies often want to skip straight to outcome-based messaging because it’s more compelling. But sophisticated buyers see through unsupported claims. Prove it first, then position around it.

For founders building in AI or any emerging technology category, Synthpop’s journey demonstrates that successful GTM isn’t about having the best technology—it’s about understanding exactly where that technology creates measurable value, pricing to accelerate adoption in an immature market, and building moats through deep integration rather than shallow convenience.