I ran a profitable B2B agency for 4 years. Then I launched a SaaS. Here's what I learnt:
1) The financial model is more different than I realised
A few weekends ago, our team sat down to discuss how expensive building a SaaS actually is. We're burning $1000s monthly all from founders' personal funds. The conversation quickly turned to "who has what loans" and "how much can each person bring in." This NEVER happened with the agency. Service businesses are profitable from day one. You take a pay cut, but you're never actively bleeding cash.
2) There's an "MVP trap" no one talks about
We did everything "by the book”: built an MVP, charged from day one, no free users. All the cool kid SaaS stuff. But here's what threw me: with services, you launch an MVP, then gradually build SOPs and systems around it while continuing to deliver. With SaaS, you build an MVP, get traction, then have to completely rebuild everything from scratch to make it scalable. This meant weeks where we couldn't ship any features or improvements. Right when we were starting to gain traction!
3) Client dependencies are a black box
In an agency, if clients don't do their part, you can follow up, nudge them, or just do it yourself. With SaaS, you have zero visibility into what users are doing, how they're using features or what happens after they use the product. They don't report back. They get stuck and disappear. We're still trying to build features to solve this, but the lack of visibility is jarring.
4) Feature requests become existential decisions
In agency, a client asks for an extra call? Sure, let's try it. Doesn't work? We roll it back. In SaaS, every small request becomes a feature decision that affects ALL users and adds product complexity. You can't just "undo" weeks of development work. So the cost of saying "yes" is exponentially higher.
But there are similarities too:
• Niching down works in both. My agency was niched down to work just for B2B SaaS companies and that worked really well for us. My SaaS is now niched down into B2B. It just works.
• Customer support expectations are surprisingly similar. We thought SaaS could be more hands-off, but we lost a client because we weren't proactive enough. So we went back to agency like support.
If you have any questions that I can answer, happy to share as much as I can!