Most SaaS founders chase the same customer everyone else is chasing.
One brand. One $10/month subscription. Then you do it again. And again. And again, 3,000 more times, until you're either rich or burned out.
Zach did the opposite.
He built an analytics platform called Hero Analytics and went from $0 to over $1M ARR in 19 months — not by selling to brands, but by selling to the agencies that serve hundreds of brands.
One sale. Thirty customers. Multiple seats per customer.
He's at roughly $96K MRR right now, adding close to $10K MRR every single month, with the lowest churn Starter Story's Pat Walls says he's ever seen on the channel.
I watched the whole interview and took notes, because this is one of those models that's hiding in plain sight. Here's the breakdown.
The 10-year overnight success
Here's the part nobody puts in the thumbnail.
Hero hit $1M ARR in a year and a half. But it took Zach roughly a decade to get to Hero.
The path, in his words:
→ Worked at a data visualization startup.
→ Amazon bought the startup. He ended up at Amazon.
→ Left Amazon. Started a newsletter business. It failed.
→ But the failed newsletter taught him email marketing.
→ The email marketing turned into an agency he ran for ~6 years with around 30 clients.
→ Only then, sick of the same friction points every agency hits, did his partner Brendan say "I'm just going to build something."
That something was Hero.
"The path to finding the business that really works is never linear," Zach says. "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."
I felt that one. I paid $13,000 for a mastermind back when I was doing $15–20K/month, looked like a stupid decision at the time, and six months later I was at $75K/month. The dots only connect looking backward.
The model: sell to the agency, not the brand
This is the whole thing. Pay attention here.
There are a ton of analytics tools in the Shopify and e-commerce world. Every single one of them sells to individual brands.
So if you're a normal SaaS, to land 3 customers you have to go find brand A, brand B, brand C and sell each of them separately.
Zach goes to one agency — and that agency has 10, 20, 30 brands as clients.
His words: "In effect, I'm getting 30 brands onto the platform by going through one agency."
And it compounds, because agencies have teams. So you're also selling seats:
→ The agency has 10 strategists. Seats for each.
→ The agency has 20 clients who each want a login. More seats.
→ One customer = dozens of users on the platform.
Hero is specifically built for email and SMS marketing agencies — the ones running Klaviyo, Postscript, Attentive, and Omnisend on behalf of their clients. The platform pulls all that data into one place so an agency can see every client at a glance, track how the team is pacing against goals, and automate the weekly reporting they used to do by hand.
If you've ever run an agency, you know exactly how much of your week dies inside spreadsheets and client reports. That's the pain Hero kills.
That whole "turn the thing you're sick of into a product" move is one of the cleanest paths to a SaaS that already has product-market fit baked in. I broke down the playbook for it here: how to turn an agency into a B2B SaaS.
The pricing is stupidly simple
No 14-tier pricing page. No "contact sales for Enterprise." Zach prices on client count:
→ 10 clients → ~$500/month
→ 20 clients → ~$600/month
→ Big agencies (200+ clients) → a couple thousand a month, more bespoke
Plus a 30-day free trial for every agency that signs up.
Notice the math. A normal analytics SaaS sells a $10/month seat to a brand. Zach lands a single agency at $500–$2,000/month, and that account brings dozens of users with it. Same product, an order of magnitude more revenue per sale.
That's why he can add $10K MRR a month as a two-person team.
Why agencies are the cheat code for distribution
The part that made me sit up: agencies are easy to find.
"You can go to the Shopify agency partner directory, the Klaviyo partner directory, and they basically give you a force-ranked list of agencies by size and influence."
Read that again. The platforms publish a ranked list of your exact customers, sorted by how big they are.
And because every agency on that list uses the same underlying platform (Klaviyo, etc.), you can safely assume they all have the same problem. So roughly 99% of every feature Zach ships is relevant to every user — no scattered roadmap, no segment guessing.
Pat compared it to Gusto and QuickBooks. He didn't buy those off a website. His bookkeeper recommended them and basically sold them for the company. Same energy — go to the layer that serves hundreds of businesses instead of knocking on hundreds of doors yourself.
If you want the deeper version of finding a market this clean before you write a line of code, I wrote this: how to validate a SaaS idea.
This is also why the agency layer is such a powerful distribution channel in the first place. Agencies live and die on retention, and a tool that helps them keep clients happy practically sells itself — the same reason a tight lead nurturing strategy is what separates the agencies that scale from the ones that stall.
"But won't Klaviyo just build this?"
This was Pat's question, and probably yours.
Zach's answer was sharp:
One — a $1M ARR business unit is amazing for a two-person team. For a publicly traded company, $1M doesn't move the needle. Their attention is elsewhere.
Two — Hero doesn't only connect to Klaviyo. An agency might have 20 clients on Klaviyo, 10 more on Postscript, Attentive, or Omnisend. Even if Klaviyo built a clone, it would never show the data from platforms it's not part of. The multi-platform aggregation is the moat.
That's the lesson: build on top of the giant, but make yourself the neutral layer the giant can't replicate without cannibalizing itself.
The build: no fancy stack, just shipping
Zach and Brendan didn't come in with deep app-building experience. They had an oddly specific ETL (data pipeline) background and figured the rest out.
Early on: Snowflake for the data, Retool for the internal app, connected to their own database structure. Their first AWS and Snowflake bills were "crazy high" because they had no idea how app usage translated to cloud cost. They ate it and kept going.
Over the last 6–8 months they pivoted the whole build to writing code with AI agents.
The takeaway isn't the tools. It's that two non-app-developers shipped a technical, data-heavy product to $1M ARR by leaning on what they already knew and learning the rest in production.
How to copy this model
Zach gave a clean replication framework. Steal it:
Step 1 — Look at the industry you're already in. Ask: is there an agency layer here? Restaurants have agencies managing their DoorDash and Uber Eats ads and reporting back to the owner. Almost every industry has a layer like this.
Step 2 — Find the key platforms that layer runs on. Whatever the agencies all use, that's your anchor.
Step 3 — Go to the partner/agency directory. Most of those platforms publish one. That's your pre-ranked lead list, free.
Step 4 — 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. Speak to those two things and the agency owner takes you seriously instantly, because it proves you understand their business.
That's it. Pick an industry, find the agency layer, find the platform, pull the directory, sell time savings.
FAQ
Who is Zach and what is Hero Analytics?
Zach, with his partner Brendan, built Hero Analytics — an analytics and reporting platform for email and SMS marketing agencies. It launched in October 2024 and crossed $1M ARR in about 19 months.
How much revenue does Hero Analytics make?
Around $96K MRR as of the interview, growing close to $10K MRR per month, with very low churn — over $1M ARR total.
What's the core idea behind Hero's growth?
Selling to agencies instead of individual brands. One agency brings 10–30 brands and multiple paid seats onto the platform, so each sale is worth far more than a single-brand subscription.
How does Hero price its product?
By client count: roughly $500/month for 10 clients, ~$600 for 20, and a couple thousand a month for large agencies with 200+ clients. Every agency gets a 30-day free trial.
Won't a platform like Klaviyo just build this?
Unlikely. A $1M business unit isn't worth a public company's attention, and Hero aggregates data across Klaviyo, Postscript, Attentive, and Omnisend — a multi-platform view no single platform would replicate.
How can I copy this model?
Find the agency layer in your industry, identify the platform those agencies run on, pull that platform's partner directory for a ranked lead list, and sell on the two pains every agency shares: more clients without more hires, and time saved.
The takeaway
Stop selling to one brand at a time.
Find the layer that already serves hundreds of them, prove you understand their pain, and sell time back to them. That's how two guys with a data background and a failed newsletter in their past built a $1M SaaS in 19 months.
If you're a bootstrapped SaaS founder and you want to be in the room where founders break down moves like this every week — pricing, distribution, the unsexy stuff that actually moves MRR — that's exactly what we do on the podcast.
