The Incognito Cry Test
Go through your own product as an anonymous customer, find what makes you cry, and buy an agent to fix that.
- Difficulty
- Starter
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 90%
A quarterly self-audit for founders: open an incognito browser with a fresh email and experience your own support, sales, and onboarding exactly as a cold prospect would. Whatever disappoints you most becomes the target for your next AI agent. Use it to find where AI will have the highest impact and to rebuild lost founder empathy.
Origin
Lemkin's closing advice for anyone not yet excited about AI GTM. He says founders get lost in the strategic and forget how bad their own support, contact-me, and onboarding flows are — so run the incognito test and let the most painful discovery pick your next agent.
Core principles
- 01You cannot judge your funnel from the inside — experience it as an anonymous stranger.
- 02The point of maximum pain is the point of maximum AI ROI.
- 03This is a recurring audit — ideally quarterly, at minimum yearly.
- 04The output is action (buy and deploy an agent), not a bug report to a PM.
How to run it
- 1
Open incognito with a fresh identity
Fire up your browser in incognito mode and use a brand-new Gmail address so you get the true stranger experience.
Pro tip Do it in a quiet moment — Lemkin frames it as a holiday exercise over mulled wine.
- 2
Do everything a customer does
Try support, contact sales, sign up for the newsletter, use the product, hit the contact-me form. Experience the whole journey end to end.
Watch out You will likely find flows you haven't touched since launch — dead pages, 404s, ignored inboxes.
- 3
Find what makes you cry the most
Notice the worst experiences — how bad support is, how long sales takes to reply, how broken onboarding feels. Pick the single most painful one.
Pro tip The emotional sting is the signal; it also gives you the motivation to actually fix it.
- 4
Buy an agent to fix that one thing
Rather than emailing a PM a bug list, go buy and deploy the agent that fixes your most painful discovery.
Pro tip You don't have to ship to production or get exec approval — prototype it and show what's possible.
In the wild
Before agents, SaaStr used Intercom but was so busy it answered support tickets two weeks late — 'terrible worst support ever.' The clone agent quietly took over and did it 24/7.
→ Support became instant and always-on, and it surfaced as the natural first agent to deploy.
Common mistakes
Auditing from the inside
Founders lost in strategy assume their funnel is fine; only the anonymous stranger's-eye view reveals the broken parts.
Turning findings into a bug ticket
The old move was to email a PM the bugs. The new move is to deploy an agent that permanently fixes the experience.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and operators who've lost touch with their own customer experience and want to prioritize AI investment
Not ideal for
Teams that have already systematically instrumented and monitored their full funnel
From the transcript
“go fire up your browser. Do it in incognito. Go to your app and do everything with a fresh Gmail address.”
“Pick the thing that makes you cry the most over your mold wine and go buy that agent and fix it.”
“once a year ideally once a quarter just do this incognito mode test”
From the episode
We replaced our sales team with 20 AI agents—here’s what happened
Jason Lemkin (SaaStr)