Starting a SaaS: 7 Years From Consulting to $20M ARR

Omer Artun saw a massive opportunity in machine learning for B2C marketing, but he had no money and no product. So he chose starting a SaaS through the services route - launching a consulting practice and reinvesting every dollar into building his vision. In this episode, Omer reveals how it took seven years to transition from services to a real self-funded SaaS product, why he had to rebuild the platform twice, and the painful lesson of scaling sales before the product was ready.

AgilOne grew from zero to 35 people profitably on consulting revenue alone before raising $51M. But starting a SaaS while running services created a tension Omer could not resolve - saying yes to every client kept the lights on but delayed the transition to a bootstrapped SaaS product with repeatable revenue.

After raising venture capital, Omer made what he calls his biggest mistake: trying to scale sales while starting a SaaS platform rebuild simultaneously. The first build failed due to immature technology, forcing a complete redo in 2014. Today AgilOne employs 115 people and generates nearly $20M ARR.

🔑 Key Lessons

• 💰 Starting a SaaS through services works if every project feeds the product: Omer was profitable by month 10 and reinvested all consulting margin into building AgilOne's self-funded SaaS platform over seven years.
• 📉 Scaling sales before the product is ready forces a painful rebuild: AgilOne signed customers onto an immature platform, then had to migrate or lose them when the technology failed - a mistake every founder starting a SaaS should avoid.
• 🧠 Starting a SaaS from services requires learning to say no: Omer took two years after raising money to internalize the difference between a services mindset that says yes to everything and a product mindset that demands focus.
• 🎯 ROI calculator requests signal your market is not yet mainstream: When prospects need proof-of-concept pilots and multiple whiteboard sessions, the market needs education, not a scaled sales engine.
• 🚀 Being eight years early to a category means burning money to educate: AgilOne created the customer data platform category but spent years evangelizing a problem Gartner only formally recognized around 2017.

Chapters

• Introduction
• Meet Omer Artun and AgilOne
• What AgilOne does - predictive marketing for B2C brands
• Omer's background - PhD in physics to McKinsey consultant
• The machine learning insight that started AgilOne
• Starting a SaaS by bootstrapping from 2005 to 2011
• How long from services to shipping a real SaaS product
• Why the transition took seven years
• Hosted software disguised as SaaS explained
• The tension between services revenue and product focus
• Challenges of bootstrapping while building product
• Learning what "product" really means
• Building the platform twice - what went wrong
• Immature technologies and Java version conflicts
• Company today - 115 people and nearly $20M ARR
• Biggest lesson - do not scale sales before product is ready
• Signals that your market is not yet mainstream
• Being eight years early to a market category
• Lightning round begins
• Book recommendation - Nudge
• Fun fact - semi-professional potter for 30 years
• Where to find AgilOne and Omer Artun

Resources

• Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/203
• Join 5,000+ SaaS founders: https://saasclub.io/email