SaaS vs Agency; Lessons from Jess Chan

Hello and welcome to 1,2,3 Product Weekly - read by startup founders, creators, and product marketers looking to learn constantly. Support on Patreon and get weekly resources directly in your inbox.

To new subscribers, welcome onboard, and thank you.

Here is what to expect in this Saturday’s newsletter:

• Building on Shopify apps

• SaaS vs Agency

• Trust Keith, Clickup & Rocket .Net

1/

SidePanda’s two apps success on the Shopify marketplace

Before Mukul Chaware and Tarang Agarwal, two indie developers had any success, they failed in both Slack and Github marketplaces.

However, as Mukul puts it, their love for building products saw them through to building Depo and Appointo's success on the Shopify marketplace.

• Appointo - has been used to make over 20,000 bookings.

• Depo - has processed over $4 million worth of transactions

The go-to-market was simple - charging customers from Day One, instead of first growing the user base with a free solution.

As a startup founder iterating on your product, Tarang has the following advice;

2/

SaaS vs Agency; Lessons from Jess Chan

Jess Chan shares her experience working in both an agency and later building a SaaS tool. For 4+ years Jess built and ran Longplay - a retention marketing agency for DTC e-commerce brands.

Later, she embarked on building Backbone a B2B SaaS tool targeting DTC brands. Jess & team developed a hypothesis on building Backbone including;

• It’d be relatively easy to get to $1M within a year

• Backbone’s sales cycle would be at most 1 call (and none with self-serve) with maybe 1 follow-up email.

How reality hit hard, and here are the lessons when comparing to building an agency;

SaaS sales cycle - The B2B SaaS sales cycle has way more touchpoints & is longer than an agency.

Scaling SaaS vs Agency - Getting from $0 to $1M for SaaS is harder than an agency. But getting from $1M - $10M+ is (I think) easier for SaaS than an agency. And the ceiling for growth is much higher.

The upside of SaaS isn’t necessarily the speed/ease (and not the cost) of getting it off the ground, but the capacity for scale after that. 

SaaS PFM - Finding product-market fit is in some ways harder for SaaS & takes longer because you naturally have less face-to-face time with your ideal customers than an agency where you talk to them daily/weekly. And it’s way easier to iterate & adjust a service than a product.

CEO insight - The job of a CEO will always be sales & talking to customers. Especially early on. Which is no fun for an introvert like me.

Launching the first version - BetterLegal

Chad Sakonchick - the founder of BetterLegal, which uses automation to make it easy for entrepreneurs to form a business and open bank accounts, recently shared a history of building the startup at Hampton.

When Chad first launched BetterLegal, he patched up different services, with a landing page on a custom-coded Jekyll static website. The initial stack included: Typeform, WebMerge, Zapier, and Asana (switched to Salesforce).

To be competitive, Chad went with Google Ads, as it leveled the playing field against the larger rivals. In 2023, we launched programmatic SEO and created high-quality, highly researched pages for every state on how to start and maintain an LLC.

3/

Trust Keith, Clickup, Rocket .Net

ClickUp - The CEO Zeb Evans shared on outmaneuvering the competition. The one-word Zeb shared is Velocity- speed of execution makes all the difference in a competitive landscape.

Trust Keith - Founder Rory Codrington shared how they launched without a product team ( in-house). Here are my insights from the presentation;

Rocket .Net - Ben Gabler the founder and CEO shared how they scaled to $1m with only $30k. One insight that stood out for me is the partnership with influencers by offering free services to build credibility and gain exposure. I wrote a post about it on LinkedIn.

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Thanks for reading!

God’s speed.

Okerosi