Demote Your Own Product and Sell the Outcome

What Everyone Says

"Don't become an agency." Every SaaS founder hears it. Services don't scale, the margins are thin, and you'll get trapped on client calls forever. Build the product. Add features. Keep the recurring revenue clean.

Farzad Rashidi heard it for years. So did his co-founder, who had actually run a web development agency before Visme and swore off services for life. The advice felt safe. Going backwards into done for you work looked like admitting the product had failed.

Why That's Wrong

The dogma assumes services always mean the old kind: humans doing slow, expensive, custom work you can never systematize.

But that advice was written before LLMs. "They didn't have AI back then," Farzad realized. The reason services don't scale is the human bottleneck. Humans are expensive and slow. If you build an assembly line where AI does most of the work, that bottleneck shrinks and the margin holds.

Meanwhile the safe path was killing the business. Respona had a mature do it yourself tool doing a few hundred K in ARR and it was stuck. Churn kept eating new business. Adding features didn't fix it, because customers weren't leaving over missing features.

What Farzad Did Instead

Respona sold its do it yourself outreach tool for about $800 a month. A marketing agency CEO tried to haggle it down to $500, then offered to just pay per result instead.

That flipped a switch. Farzad threw a Hail Mary: what if we do the work for you and you pay per deliverable? The CEO said, "let's start with seven or eight thousand a month."

That same customer is still around. Their spend ramped to $65,000 to $70,000 a month. Farzad then demoted the SaaS on his own homepage and led with the done for you service.

He delivered the first orders with nothing but a Google Sheet and one team member. No product, no process. But the result held. Over the following year, that one decision drove 4x revenue after a six year plateau.

The Principle Underneath

Customers don't want your tool. They want the outcome your tool is supposed to produce. Respona's churn said this plainly: people canceled saying "we're just not using it enough," not "the product is bad."

A SaaS tool asks the customer to supply the labor. A done for you service removes it. When you sell the outcome, you raise your contract value and you protect the customer from work they were never going to do.

The software doesn't disappear. It moves to the back end and runs the delivery. As Sequoia put it, the next big company is a software firm masquerading as a services company.

Should You Do This?

Do this if your churn reason is "we don't have time to use it" and customers are hiring agencies or freelancers to do what your tool does. That gap is your opening.

Skip it if customers leave because the product genuinely doesn't work yet. Fix the product first.

One question to ask: if you offered to do the work yourself for a real price, would customers pull out a credit card this week?