Most founders building a SaaS in the e-commerce analytics space do the obvious thing.
They go sell to brands. One brand, one $10 subscription. Then they do it again. And again. A thousand times over.
Zach didn't do that.
He and his partner Brendan built Hero Analytics and went from zero to over $1M ARR in about 19 months. They're sitting at roughly $96.2K MRR right now and adding close to $10K in new MRR every single month.
And the churn? Pat Walls said it was the best he'd ever seen from anyone on Starter Story.
The reason it grew this fast isn't a viral hook or a clever growth hack.
It's the customer they chose to sell to. And almost nobody else is doing it.
Here's the full breakdown.
What Hero actually does
Hero is an analytics and reporting platform built for one very specific customer: email and SMS marketing agencies.
You know the type. The agencies running Klaviyo, Postscript, Attentive, and Omnisend on behalf of dozens of e-commerce brands. Sending the weekly campaigns. Managing the flows. Reporting back to every client on how it's all performing.
That reporting part is a nightmare.
Pulling the data, visualizing it, packaging it up, sending it to one client. Then doing it again for the next 20 clients. Every week.
Hero automates the whole thing. An agency logs in, sees every client in one place, sees how the team is pacing against goals, and pulls every metric without the manual grind.
That's it. It's not sexy. It's not consumer. You'd never use it yourself.
And that's exactly why it works.
The math behind selling to agencies instead of brands
This is the part I want you to actually sit with, because it changed how I think about distribution.
When you sell analytics to individual e-commerce brands, every sale is a fresh grind. Brand A, brand B, brand C. Three subscriptions, three separate sales motions.
When you sell to an agency, the math flips.
Each agency has 10, 20, 30 brands as their clients. Close one agency, and you just got 30 brands onto your platform in a single sale.
It gets better. Agencies have teams. So Zach sells seats too.
Say an agency has 10 strategists paying $10/month per seat. Then they hand seats to their 20 customers, that's another $200/month. One customer, a stack of revenue.
The base pricing scales with client count. An agency with 10 clients pays around $500/month. Twenty clients, $600. The big agencies with 200 clients? A couple thousand a month, priced bespoke.
Thirty-day free trial to get them in the door, then it's a subscription.
One sale. Thirty brands. A dozen seats. That's the whole engine.
Why agencies are the easiest customers to find on earth
Here's the thing nobody tells you about agencies.
They're not hiding. They're listed.
Every billion-dollar platform documents its agency ecosystem. Go to the Shopify partner directory. The Klaviyo partner page. They literally give you a force-ranked list of agencies sorted by size and influence.
It's a target list, handed to you for free.
And because every agency on that list runs the same platforms, you can safely assume they all have the same problem. Zach said 99% of every feature they ship is relevant to every single user, every time.
Compare that to selling consumer apps where every user wants something different. This is the opposite. One homogeneous group, one shared pain, one product that fits all of them.
If you've ever tried to build a SaaS where half your roadmap is just chasing edge cases for different customer types, you know how rare that is.
The unsexy origin story (this took 10 years, not 19 months)
The headline says $1M ARR in a year and a half. The real story is longer, and this is the part I relate to most.
Zach and Brendan didn't appear out of nowhere with a perfect idea.
They worked at a data visualization startup. Amazon bought it. They worked at Amazon. They left. They started a newsletter business that failed.
But that failed newsletter taught them email marketing.
The email marketing led them to start an actual email marketing agency, which they ran for about six years with around 30 clients.
And only after living inside that agency for six years, feeling every ounce of the reporting friction firsthand, did they build Hero.
That's the move. They built the tool for the exact business they used to run.
They knew the platforms. They knew the players. They knew exactly what mattered and what was noise. That's an unfair advantage you can't fake with a survey.
If you're sitting on years of experience in some "boring" industry and thinking it's worthless, read that again. The thing that finally takes off might be built on an experience you had a decade ago. (I've been there. The SaaS I eventually sold was built on lessons from two earlier things that flopped.)
This is the same pattern I keep seeing with founders who turn their agency into a B2B SaaS. The agency isn't the dead end. It's the research lab.
How they built it without being "real" engineers
Hero is a technical, data-heavy product. But Zach and Brendan weren't deep app engineers going in.
They had an oddly specific old background in ETL, so they knew how to set up the data tables. What they didn't know was AWS for app usage, so their early Snowflake and AWS bills were, in his words, crazy high.
Early on they glued the product together with Retool, an internal app-building tool, connected to their own database structure.
Then over the last six to eight months they rebuilt the whole thing.
It's all Claude Code now.
That detail matters. The original duct-taped version got them to revenue. The proper version came after they already knew people would pay. Ship the scrappy thing, prove the demand, then go build it right.
The lead-nurturing layer most founders skip
One thing the interview only hints at but is worth saying out loud: selling to agencies is a relationship sale, not a self-serve checkout.
You're not going to win a 200-client agency with a Stripe link and a hopeful email.
The agencies that close are the ones you actually nurture. You show them you understand their core problem, which is taking on more clients without hiring more people, and you keep showing up until they take you seriously.
That's a sequence, not a single pitch. If you're building a B2B SaaS for a finite, findable list of buyers like this, getting your lead-nurturing strategy dialed in is the difference between a directory of 500 agency names and 500 actual conversations.
One pitch closes nobody. A patient sequence closes the whole directory.
Won't Klaviyo just build this and kill them?
This is the question everyone asks about a "wrapper" business. Pat asked it too.
Zach's answer was sharp.
First, a $1M ARR business unit is amazing for a two-person team. For a publicly traded company like Klaviyo, a $1M line item doesn't move the needle. Their attention is elsewhere.
Second, and this is the real moat: Hero doesn't only connect to Klaviyo.
An agency with 30 clients might run 20 on Klaviyo, 10 on Postscript or Attentive or Omnisend. Even if Klaviyo built a reporting tool, it would never show the data from the platforms it doesn't own.
Hero sits above all of them. That cross-platform view is the product. No single platform can replicate it without becoming a neutral aggregator of its own competitors, which it never will.
How to steal this model for your own SaaS
Zach's advice for anyone who wants to copy this was refreshingly concrete. Here's the playbook.
Step 1 — Find the agency layer in your industry. Take whatever space you already work in and ask: is there a layer of agencies sitting between the platforms and the end customers? Think restaurants, where agencies manage DoorDash and Uber Eats ads and have to report performance back to the restaurant. That agency layer is everywhere once you start looking.
Step 2 — Find the directories. Once you've picked the industry, identify the key platforms. Almost every one has an "agency directory" or "partner directory" page. That's your ranked customer list, free.
Step 3 — Hit the two pains every agency owner shares. They all want to take on more clients without hiring more people. And they all want to save time. Build for those two things and lead your pitch with them. The moment an agency owner feels you understand their actual problems, they'll give you the meeting.
The producer of Starter Story put it well: go ask ChatGPT or Claude "where else could I apply this agency-layer model?" and you'll get 20 ideas back. Pick the one you have real experience in.
What I'd take away from this one
Three things stuck with me.
One, the best customer isn't always the end user. Sometimes it's the layer above them that serves a hundred of them at once. Distribution beats the product almost every time.
Two, unsexy wins. A consumer app you'd personally use feels good to build. A reporting tool for email agencies feels like nothing. But the boring one had the best churn rate on the channel and grew faster. If you want to make money, look at the markets nobody's posting about on X.
Three, your "wasted" years aren't wasted. A failed newsletter taught Zach email marketing, which built an agency, which built a million-dollar SaaS. The path is never linear, and you never know which old experience becomes the foundation a decade later.
That last one is why I started recording founder conversations in the first place. The real lessons are buried in the messy backstory, not the highlight reel.
If this model has you fired up, I'd also read the deeper dive on selling SaaS to agencies — it's the single highest-leverage distribution wedge I keep seeing work.
FAQ
How much does Hero Analytics make?
Hero went from zero to over $1M ARR in roughly 19 months after launching in October 2024. It's currently around $96.2K MRR and adding close to $10K in new MRR per month, with extremely low churn.
What does Hero Analytics do?
It's an analytics and reporting platform built specifically for email and SMS marketing agencies, the ones running Klaviyo, Postscript, Attentive, and Omnisend for their clients. It lets an agency see all clients in one place, track team pacing, and automate the reporting work that's normally done by hand.
Why does Hero sell to agencies instead of brands?
Because one agency brings 10 to 30 brands onto the platform in a single sale, plus paid seats for the agency's team and clients. It's far more efficient than selling one subscription to one brand at a time, and agencies are easy to find through public partner directories.
How much does Hero cost?
Pricing scales with client count after a 30-day free trial. Roughly $500/month for an agency with 10 clients, $600 for 20, and a few thousand a month for large agencies with 200+ clients. Team seats are billed on top, around $10/user/month.
Could Klaviyo just build this and put Hero out of business?
Unlikely. A $1M business is too small to matter to a public company, and Hero connects to multiple platforms at once. Even if Klaviyo built reporting, it would never surface data from competing platforms, which is the whole point of Hero's cross-platform view.
How do I find an agency layer in my own industry?
Look at the space you already work in and ask whether agencies sit between the major platforms and the end customers. Then check those platforms for an agency or partner directory, which gives you a ranked list of potential customers who all share the same problems.
Want more breakdowns like this?
Stories like Zach's are exactly what I dig into on the Profitable Founder Podcast. Real bootstrapped founders, real revenue numbers, and the unsexy decisions that actually got them there.
No fluff, no $0-to-$10M-overnight fantasies. Just the playbooks.
