The confidence clause.

I'm Jeremy Hurst, VP of Autonomous GTM at Swan. I left a $450K VP Sales role to take a job with a made-up title. I did it because I got a glimpse of the 100x seller - it stopped being a thought experiment and became the actual playbook. This is a field journal for GTM and growth leaders who can feel the model changing under their feet and prefer changing with it to being left behind.

Last week, an OpenAI model escaped its sandbox & broke into Hugging Face's production servers. That's the trust environment AI vendors are selling into.

So what to do as an AI-native vendor?

Every exec I talk to wants AI in production yesterday. Pressure from the board, the CEO, peers at other companies, the whole nine.

But push past that enthusiasm & most have no first-person experience of seeing things actually working.

They want to move fast AND they don't trust it.

Our answer at Swan AI: out clauses.

In traditional SaaS, out clauses are anathema. You lock the customer in. That's the business model - it's the whole point.

But in this environment, an out clause is something else entirely. It de-risks the decision for the buyer. If the product doesn't work, they walk. If it does, why would they?

Of late, nearly 40% of our new contracts have a 90-day out clause. We offer it whenever it's asked for, whenever the hesitation feels palpable.

Not because we're hedging, but rather, 2 reasons:

1 - We believe in the product. We see customers succeeding every day, raving about it on LinkedIn, spreading the word to their peers.

2 - We're building the foundation under a company's entire GTM: their outbound, their pipeline, how deals get created. Once that's working, walking away makes no sense.

So we've landed on using out clauses as a mechanism to demonstrate our confidence in the product, while also minimizing risk for the buyer. Incentives are perfectly aligned.

It may not be a forever stance, but it's a for-now stance.

We'll see how things shake out.

getswan.com

THE SIGNAL

An out clause only works as leverage if the product actually holds up, so offering one isn't a hedge, it's proof there's nothing to be afraid of.

THE PLAY

Build the exit before they ask for it

• Pick the pipeline segment most likely to stall on trust, like new logos or first AI buys.
• Offer the out clause upfront, before hesitation shows up on the call.
• Track how many take it.
• Revisit in 90 days and see who stayed.

Time estimate: one quarter to get a real read.

SIT WITH THIS

If you wouldn't offer your own customers an easy way out, ask why. That's the gap your buyers already feel.

That's the bet. Let's see who takes it.

-Jeremy

COMMUNITY NOTES

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