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We launched it about 19 months ago. Gone from zero to over a million in ARR over those 19 months. This is Zach. He built a million-dollar SAS in just over a year. But here's the crazy part. This is not your typical SAS model because he does something completely different. And it's the reason he's adding $10,000 in MR every single month. I think the reason it's easy and like why I think this kind of concept of selling to agencies is like a really good angle is agencies are really easy to find. I asked Zach to come on to the channel to reveal everything. And in this episode, we'll dive into the 1 million ARR SAS that he built, how he found this idea, and why almost nobody else is doing it, and how you can replicate this
new SAS model right now in 2026. All right, let's dive in. I'm Pat Walls and this is Starter Story. Zach, welcome to the channel. Tell me about who you are, what you built, and what's your story. Yeah, thanks for having me. My name is Zach and my partner Brendan and I built a analytics platform called Hero Analytics. We launched it about 19 months ago in October 2024. So, we've gone from zero to over a million in ARR. And today, I'm really excited to talk specifically about building SAS for agencies instead of brands. This is crazy. first of all and I think you have a unique kind of take on why this happened and why it grew so fast and we're going to talk about that but
before we do let's talk about what you built. Can you explain what your SAS does in a few sentences? So Hero is a analytics and reporting platform specifically focused on automation for agencies and really like a specific niche of agencies which are email and SMS marketing agencies. These are the agencies running platforms like Claio on behalf of their clients sending weekly emails. an agency can go into kind of every aspect of what they're running on behalf of their clients and pull a ton of data and then we have like agency specific features. So an agency can see all of their clients in one place. They can see how their team is pacing versus their goals. And this is Stripe for the last 4 weeks. We're at about 96.2K
in MR. We're currently pacing at adding close to 10K in MR every month. And then you can see churn is like extremely low as well. That is the best churn rate I've ever seen from anyone who's come on to Starter Story. So, this is the real deal. Can you explain your business model at a high level? Like, how much does it cost? And is it on subscription? How does it work? It's a subscription. We do a 30-day free trial for every agency that comes on. And so, we set the monthly fee kind of based on their client count. So, let's say you're an agency with 10 clients, you kind of pay 500, 20 clients, 600, etc., etc. And then larger
agencies, it's a little bit more bespoke cuz some of them have 200 clients and they might pay a couple thousand a month. Okay, cool. Well, we're going to be talking all about this sort of unique pricing model that you have and approach, which is to sell to agencies. But before we do, how do you get to the place where you've built a SAS that got to 90K MR in just over a year? How do you get here? I'll say the first business that actually worked out was an email marketing agency. So, we ran that for about 6 years. We had around 30 clients who were kind of like our ICP
for this app. And Brendan was so fed up with a lot of kind of the friction points that all of these agencies experience that he's like, I'm just going to figure out how to build something. And so it kind of just worked out where right as we were really getting momentum with Hero, we were able to step away from that agency full-time to focus on this. I love everything that Zach is breaking down right now. But I think one of the real secrets behind his success is this kind of overlooked category that he's building in. There are so many business ideas like this that are hiding in plain sight. They're just not being shared on places like X and Instagram. This is exactly why we launched this free database of 30 plus
business ideas in unsexy niches. When you download it, you will find real business ideas that are quietly making money while everybody else fights over these overcrowded markets. Every idea is grounded on real founders, real data, and numbers to back it up. So, if you've been looking for an idea, then head to that link in the description and you can download this database 100% for free. All right, I hope you enjoy. Let's get back to the episode. So, you guys kind of built this without deep technical experience, even though this is a pretty technical data heavy product. What were some of the early tools that you used to
allow you to build a SAS product and then what are you using nowadays? The funny thing is we like had this oddly specific old background in ETL. The funny thing is we had no idea about AWS as it relates to like app usage. So like our early day bills on like AWS and like the first time we set up Snowflake were like crazy high, but we knew how to set up the tables and then retool which is essentially like an internal app building tool and then we were just connecting it to kind of like our own database structure that we had set up and then over the last 6 to 8 months we've actually completely kind of
pivoted. It's all cloud code. So the main reason why I wanted to bring you on to the channel is to talk about this sort of unique business model that you have. So can you give me an overview of what this is and how it works. So there are a lot of analytics applications in the kind of like Shopify e-commerce space, but all of them go to individual brands, right? So every time I need to make a sale, I would have to go to brand A, brand B, brand C to sell one subscription to each of them to get to three subscriptions. with agencies. Each of the agencies have 10, 20, 30 brands as customers. And so in effect, I'm getting 30 brands onto the platform by going through one agency. And then the agencies have 10 users or 20 users.
So I'm selling seats to each of the users. They can give seats to their customers. So imagine the agency has 10 strategists. They're paying $10 a month for each of those seats. And then they have 20 customers. And each customer wants a seat. that's another $200 a month in seats. And so you're just getting a lot of access to users through one customer. And I think the reason it's easy and like why I think this concept of selling to agencies is like a really good angle is agencies are really easy to find. You can go to the Shopify agency partner page directory, the Clavio partner page directory, and they basically give you a force rank list of agencies by like size and influence. And because the agencies are all leveraging the same
platform, you can kind of safely assume they have the same problem. 99% of the features we launch is relevant to every single user every time. Okay, I just think this is super smart. Instead of having to go again to the end consumer and try to sell a $10 per month subscription, you're going to the agency that serves hundreds of those. And it just makes so much more sense. And it reminds me of two softwares that I paid for as a business, which is Gusto and QuickBooks. I didn't actually just go buy these on the website. My bookkeeper recommended them to me and actually sold them to me. And I didn't even have a choice in the matter. I just had to use
it. I imagine that the sales teams of those companies are doing something similar to you as they're going to the bookkeepers who manage hundreds of businesses. It's kind of a similar idea, right? Agency model. I have a question on this though. Are you worried at all that Claio, which is this app that you wrap around, or the agencies themselves, say, "Hey, I don't want to pay $500, $1,000 a month for something that I could just build on my own." What do you think about the future of this business? Yeah, that's a great question. Us having a $1 million ARR business unit is amazing because we're a couple people. A publicly traded company having a 1 AR business unit like isn't really going to move the needle for them. So, I just
think their sites are elsewhere. The other piece is we don't just connect to Claio. And so if you're an agency with 30 clients, you might have 20 clients using Claio, but you might have another 10 using Postcript or Attentive or Omnisend. And so even if Claio were to build a version, it's extremely unlikely they'd show the data from those other platforms where Claio isn't even involved with that brand. I think that's a great answer and a good point. Let's talk about how to replicate this. What would be your advice for anyone watching this that wants to build a SAS and potentially take some things from this model and implement it?
We had specific experience in this industry. So, we knew the platforms, we knew the players, we knew what mattered. So, I think I would kind of take a step back in whatever industry I'm currently working in and say like, oh, is there an agency layer here that I could do this with? Think of restaurants for example. Restaurants have agencies who are managing their Door Dash and Uber Eats ads and they have to report to the client on how that's performing. So now that you picked your industry, you kind of have a sense of what the key platforms are. Like most of those platforms are going to have a page on their site that is like agency directory or partner directory. Those directories
kind of give you that access right off the bat. And I think the key with agencies is they're all experiencing the same problem. Every agency owner is trying to take on more clients without hiring more people. And the second most impactful thing is how much time can you save the agency? And so in selling a product to agencies, you can just hit on those key points. And that's really how you get an agency owner to be like, "Okay, yeah, I'll take you seriously." Like, you understand what my key problems are. Let's see what this thing actually does. All right. Well, thanks for sharing that. I think it's just super cool model that you've come up with. I think people are going to love it. Last question that
we ask all founders who come on to the channel. What would be your advice to a younger Zach or for anyone watching this, maybe they're an agency operator or just anyone who wants to build a SAS that could make a million dollars a year. What would be your advice? The path to finding like the business that really works is never linear. We've talked about, oh, Hero got to a million in ARR in a year and a half, whatever. But really, like it took us like maybe 10 years to build hero, right? like we worked at this data visualization startup. Amazon bought that startup. We worked at Amazon. We left Amazon. We started a failed newsletter business. But through the newsletter business, we learned email marketing.
And then through email marketing, we built the agency. And then only then after running the agency for 5 6 years did we build hero. And so I wouldn't discount any of these experiences. every experience you have along the way. You never know which one might be super relevant to the business that finally takes off a decade later. That's a great advice. Thanks for coming on, Zach, and sharing million ARR in just over a year. It's awesome. Thanks for coming on and sharing everything. Yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. All right, producer of Starter Story. What do you think of this one? I think he mentioned at some point in the interview, every industry has like an agency layer. It's interesting to
think about how there's like sort of this business model out there for like all types of industries that you can maybe go create something like this for. So that's my first like initial thought. I have more things to say, but I'm just kind of impressed with this like the business model. I mean, I know what an agency is, so it's not like a hidden market or anything like that, but there's sort of this like really big market, I guess, of agencies that I'm maybe not like as aware of. Right. My favorite thing about this is that all of this is well documented on the internet, right? All these billion-dollar tools have ecosystems around them and they actually
document their agency layer on their site. What are the best agencies to work with because customers need this? Go to chat GPT right now or claude and ask it, hey, I learned about this business model. Can you tell me where I could apply it in other agency layers? It'll probably give you 20 ideas of where you could do it. And then hopefully in one of those ideas you'll see one that is actually interesting to you or maybe you have some experience in it that definitely helps. This I believe is a gold mine hiding in plain sight and I wouldn't just say that. Yeah. Really genius and I loved how he kind of explained it all and broke it all down. My question for you is like the whole like data visualization thing.
Do you think that's still like a good idea or good sort of like problem to solve? Is that kind of the main thing that these agencies want? Yes, but it goes a level deeper. The data visualization is something that the agencies serve to their customers. But the reason why this business does well is that it's a huge pain in the ass to visualize the data and send it to your client. And then you have to do that for 20 different clients. It's just a bunch of manual work that they have to do. And this software solves that problem and allows them to do that automated. So that's the secret there. The sauce is not the data visualization, it's the time saved in doing so.
Interesting. Yeah. No, I mean that makes a lot of sense. And I'm just a little bit like, wow, this is so unexpected uh to some degree. Like I would have never guessed this is like a layer of a business and it's pretty cool. And he seemed like a cool dude. I liked him. He was awesome. Yeah. And that's the thing, you know, we have a lot of people we bring on the channel that build apps. It's cool. It's consumer. You can understand like, oh, maybe I would use this. This is one of those examples that doesn't hit that. But it's also one of those examples of great market and kind of like an unsexy business. And if you really want to make money, if you want to build something and grow as fast as they did, I would
focus on unsexy niches, especially if you're doing something in B2B like this. So, I will put in the description our list of 30 plus unsexy niches or unsexy markets that you can build a business in. You can get it 100% for free. I'll put it in the description right there. Hope you guys enjoyed this one. We'll see you in the next one. Peace.
