Summary:
Running an agency can sometimes feel like a frustrating treadmill of winning work, doing the work and then winning more work to replace the work you recently completed..
By contrast, a SaaS business gives you a regular stream of revenue that is compounded as you add more subscribers every month. What's more, the long-term value of a subscription-based business can far outstrip that of an agency. What you might not realise is that as an agency-owner you already have superpowers that give you a head start when it comes to creating a SaaS offering.
This digital session will be hosted by David Hart, who in 2014 successfully pivoted his agency to launch a SaaS product, ScreenCloud taking his revenue from £1m to >£15m.
David will be sharing his first-hand experience as well as discussing:
- Which ‘Route to SaaS’ is right for you
- What to do with your current commitments if you make this leap
- Challenges that agency owners are likely to face
- The ‘funding gap’ during the transition and how to deal with it
Meet the speaker:
David Hart got his first taste of technology startups when he worked as Marketing Director for an early-stage tech investor, Brainspark. He then went on to co-found a digital design and build agency, Codegent in 2004 and In 2012 acquired another agency, Thin Martian. The agency was doing between £1 and £1.5m in Annual Revenue but it was struggling to grow.
In 2015, David and his co-founders decided that their future would be best served by being a product company and not an agency. And concluded that to do that they had to be able to focus full time on their product, ScreenCloud. They put all of their agency work into Thin Martian and sold the business, as well as selling other side projects to raise money for ScreenCloud.
ScreenCloud is well on its way to doing £20m in Annual Recurring Revenue, continuing to scale and was given a 9-figure valuation in 2021.
Having moved to California as the business scaled, in 2022 David took a step down from an executive role in order to follow his passion of working on early stage SaaS: with agencies looking to add SaaS to their offering as well as early stage start-ups.
He is currently writing a book: ‘Productize: Stop Selling your Time, Start Selling your Ideas’’ which is due to be published in Autumn 2023.