I Built A $90K/Month SaaS in 19 Months

Key Concepts

• Agency-First SaaS Model: A B2B strategy where software is sold to agencies rather than individual end-users, allowing for rapid scaling through a single point of contact.
• ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue): A key performance indicator for subscription-based businesses, representing the yearly value of recurring revenue.
• MR (Monthly Revenue): The total amount of predictable revenue a business generates in a month.
• Churn Rate: The percentage of customers who stop using a service over a given period; low churn is critical for SaaS sustainability.
• ETL (Extract, Transform, Load): The process of combining data from multiple sources into a single, consistent data store.
• ICP (Ideal Customer Profile): A description of the type of company that would get the most value from a product.
• Unsexy Niches: Boring or overlooked industries that possess high demand for automation and efficiency, often ignored by mainstream tech startups.

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1. Main Topics and Key Points

• Hero Analytics Growth: Founded by Zach and Brendan 19 months ago, the platform reached $1 million in ARR, currently pacing at $96.2K MR with a growth rate of $10K MR per month.
• The "Agency Layer" Strategy: Instead of selling to individual brands (e.g., Shopify stores), the founders sell to agencies that manage dozens of brands. This creates a "force multiplier" effect where one sale grants access to multiple end-clients.
• Product Utility: Hero Analytics automates reporting for email and SMS marketing agencies. It aggregates data from platforms like Klaviyo, Postscript, Attentive, and Omnisend into a single dashboard, allowing agencies to track team performance and client goals.

2. Business Model and Pricing

• Subscription-Based: The platform uses a tiered subscription model based on the number of clients an agency manages.
• Bespoke Scaling: Smaller agencies pay a flat monthly fee (e.g., $500–$600), while larger agencies with hundreds of clients pay custom, higher rates.
• Seat-Based Revenue: The model charges for seats, allowing agencies to provide access to their internal strategists and their own end-clients, creating multiple revenue streams per agency account.

3. Methodology and Technical Evolution

• Early Development: The founders utilized Retool (an internal app-building tool) connected to their own database structure. They initially faced high costs due to inefficient use of AWS and Snowflake.
• Current Infrastructure: The platform has pivoted to "cloud code" to optimize performance and scalability.
• Market Identification: The founders leveraged their 6-year background running an email marketing agency to identify specific friction points—namely, the manual labor involved in data reporting.

4. Key Arguments and Perspectives

• The "Unsexy" Advantage: Zach argues that building for agencies is a "gold mine hiding in plain sight." Agencies are easy to find via partner directories (e.g., Shopify or Klaviyo partner pages), and they all share the same pain points: the need to scale client count without increasing headcount.
• Defensibility: When asked if platforms like Klaviyo might build a competing tool, Zach noted that large public companies are unlikely to prioritize a $1M ARR niche. Furthermore, Hero’s value lies in its platform-agnostic nature—it aggregates data from multiple competitors, which a single-platform provider would never do.
• The Value of Experience: Zach emphasizes that the success of Hero was not an overnight event but the result of a 10-year journey, including a failed newsletter business and agency work, which provided the necessary domain expertise.

5. Notable Quotes

• "The path to finding the business that really works is never linear." — Zach, on the importance of cumulative experience.
• "The sauce is not the data visualization, it's the time saved in doing so." — Pat Walls, summarizing why the product is successful.

6. Synthesis and Conclusion

The success of Hero Analytics demonstrates that the most effective way to scale a B2B SaaS is to identify an "agency layer" within an industry. By solving the manual, repetitive reporting tasks that plague agencies, founders can achieve high retention and rapid growth. The core takeaway is to look for industries where agencies act as intermediaries, use partner directories to find these agencies, and focus on saving them time rather than just providing "nice-to-have" features. Success in this model is rooted in deep domain expertise and targeting unsexy, high-friction workflows.