Scaling Self-Serve and Onboarding at Volume

Richard Hollingsworth bootstrapped an executive assistant agency to $5M ARR before pivoting to an AI SaaS. In this episode, early-stage B2B SaaS founders will learn the "Agency to SaaS" playbook that drove Fyxer from $1M to $18M ARR in just 9 months.

Richard breaks down their "Data Moat"—how they used six years of manual agency logs to train GPT-3, creating a product far superior to generic wrappers. You will learn how a single Facebook ad led to a $1.2M enterprise deal closed in just 7 days, and why targeting "Professional Services" instead of tech companies unlocked massive growth.

In this episode, Richard also shares the brutal reality of hypergrowth (like when support response times collapsed), the "Unreasonable Effort" mantra that aligns his team, and how living in a hacker house in San Francisco shifted their ambition from "What if Google builds this?" to "This will be huge."

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🔑 Key Lessons

• 💡 The Data Moat: How they used 6 years of manual agency data to train GPT-3, creating a product better than generic AI wrappers.
• 📈 Hypergrowth Reality: Scaling from $1M to $18M ARR in under a year and the specific things that broke (like support response times).
• 🏢 The $1.2M Deal: How they turned a single Facebook Ad signup into a 5,000-seat enterprise contract in just 7 days.
• 🎯 Contrarian Targeting: Why they explicitly ignore the "Tech" market to target Real Estate and Professional Services instead.
• 🧠 Culture of Intensity: The "Unreasonable Effort" mantra used to align a team during a period of extreme scaling.

📖 Chapters

• Introduction & The "Unreasonable Effort" Mantra
• Rich's Background: From Farming to Tech
• Transition to SaaS: Bootstrapping an Agency to $5M
• Early Product Lessons: Why Tech-Enabled Services Failed
• Launching the First Product with GPT-3
• Building the Team: Pitching Technical Co-Founders
• Scaling Challenges: The "Build or Talk to Customers" Rule
• Product-Market Fit: Leveraging LinkedIn Influencers
• Sales & Customer Acquisition: The Move to San Francisco
• Partnerships: The $1.2M Real Estate Deal
• Key SaaS Metrics: Moving from Single Player to Multiplayer
• Tough Lessons: When Support Broke During Hypergrowth
• Company Culture: Hiring for Intensity
• SaaS Trends: AI Agents & Future of Work

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Resources

• Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/454
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