I Built A $90K/Month SaaS in 19 Months

Zac Cherin

• Co-founded Hiro Analytics with partner Brendan, launching in October 2024 and reaching over $1M ARR within 19 months
• Previously ran an email marketing agency for about 6 years with around 30 clients, which became the ideal customer profile for Hiro
• Earlier in his career, worked at a data visualization startup that was acquired by Amazon, then worked at Amazon before leaving to pursue entrepreneurship
• Also started a failed newsletter business that taught him email marketing, which eventually led to building the agency and then Hiro
• Stepped away from the agency full-time once Hiro gained momentum

Products and Offerings

• Hiro Analytics: An analytics and reporting platform built specifically for email and SMS marketing agencies
  • Automates data collection and reporting across platforms like Klaviyo, Postscript, Attentive, and Omnisend
  • Lets agencies view all clients in one place and track team pacing versus goals
  • Offers agency-specific features such as multi-client dashboards and seat-based access for both agency strategists and their end clients

Metrics and Financials

• Over $1M ARR achieved in 19 months
• Approximately $96.2K MRR at the time of recording, pacing at nearly $10K new MRR per month
• Extremely low churn rate
• Pricing is subscription-based with a 30-day free trial
• Monthly fee scales with client count: e.g., 10 clients ~$500/month, 20 clients ~$600/month, larger agencies with 200+ clients pay a few thousand per month on bespoke plans
• Additional seat revenue: agencies pay ~$10/month per seat for strategists, and can extend seats to end clients (e.g., 20 client seats = $200/month)

Strategy and Growth

• Core strategy is selling to agencies rather than individual brands, which provides access to dozens of end clients through a single sale
• Agencies are easy to find through platform partner directories (e.g., Shopify agency partner page, Klaviyo partner directory), which rank agencies by size and influence
• Because agencies all use the same underlying platforms, nearly every feature launched is relevant to every user
• Key value propositions for agencies: help them take on more clients without hiring more people, and save significant time on manual reporting
• Defensible against platform competition (e.g., Klaviyo building their own analytics) because Hiro connects to multiple platforms, and a $1M ARR product is too small for large public companies to prioritize

Tech Stack and Infrastructure

• Early stack included AWS and Snowflake, with initial cloud costs being very high due to inexperience with app-scale infrastructure
• Used Retool as an internal app-building tool connected to their own database structure
• Migrated entirely to cloud code over the last 6–8 months
• Founders had an oddly specific background in ETL (Extract, Transform, Load), which helped with data pipeline setup

Lessons and Advice

• The path to a successful business is never linear; it took roughly 10 years of varied experiences to build Hiro
• Every professional experience can become relevant later, so don’t discount any of them
• To replicate this model: identify the agency layer in whatever industry you work in, find the key platforms those agencies use, and locate their partner or agency directories for immediate access to prospects
• Agencies universally share the same core problems: scaling without hiring and reducing manual work
• Focus on unsexy B2B niches for faster growth and less competition