$1M ARR in 19 Months — The SaaS That Sells to Agencies, Not Brands
What Hiro Analytics Does
Hiro Analytics is an analytics and reporting platform built for one very specific customer: email and SMS marketing agencies — the teams running Klaviyo, Postscript, Attentive and Omnisend on behalf of e-commerce brands. Instead of selling dashboards to individual brands, Hiro lets an agency pull every metric across all of their clients in one place, automate the weekly reports they'd otherwise build by hand, and track how their team is pacing against goals. The tagline says it plainly: "the only e-commerce analytics platform built specifically for retention marketing agencies." Co-founders Zach and Brendan launched it in October 2024 and crossed $1M ARR in 19 months — while adding roughly $10K in MRR every single month with churn Starter Story called the lowest it had ever seen.
The Problem They Solve
Zach and Brendan didn't guess at this pain — they lived it for six years running their own email marketing agency with around 30 clients. Every week, an agency has to log into each client's ESP, pull the numbers, format them, and send a report. Do that across 20 or 30 brands — many of them on different platforms — and reporting becomes hours of soul-crushing manual work. As Pat Walls put it on the show, the real product isn't the data visualization; it's the time saved. Agencies have two universal problems: taking on more clients without hiring more people, and saving time. Hiro hits both. And because every agency in the niche uses the same handful of platforms, you can safely assume they all share the same problem — which is exactly why the pitch lands so reliably.
Watch: I Built a $1M SaaS in a Hidden Niche (Starter Story)
The Growth Story
The 19-month sprint to $1M ARR was really a decade in the making. Zach and Brendan met at a data-visualization startup that was acquired by Amazon, where they both went on to work. They left, started a newsletter business that failed — but through it learned email marketing. That skill became an email marketing agency they ran for about six years, serving ~30 clients who were the exact ICP for the product they'd eventually build. When Brendan got fed up with the friction every agency feels, he set out to build the tool he wished existed. As Hiro gained momentum, they were able to step away from the agency full-time to focus on it.
Crucially, they had an oddly specific background in ETL — the data plumbing that powers a product like this. The early stack was scrappy: they stood up Snowflake and their own table structures (racking up some "crazy high" early AWS and Snowflake bills before they knew better), then used Retool as an internal app builder connected to their database. Over the last six to eight months they pivoted the entire build to Claude Code.
The growth itself comes from the business model. The Stripe dashboard shown on the episode sat at ~$96.2K MRR, pacing toward roughly $10K of new MRR per month, with extremely low churn. Pricing is a 30-day free trial, then a monthly fee scaled to client count — an agency with 10 clients pays ~$500, 20 clients ~$600, and larger agencies (some with 200 clients) get bespoke deals in the couple-thousand-a-month range. On top of that, agencies buy seats: ~$10/month per strategist and per client who wants access. A single agency might therefore bring 30 brands and dozens of paying seats through one deal.
And the moat is real. When Pat asked the obvious question — what if Klaviyo or the agencies themselves just build this? — Zach's answer was sharp: a $1M ARR business unit doesn't move the needle for a publicly traded company, so their attention is elsewhere. More importantly, Hiro connects to many platforms. An agency might run 20 clients on Klaviyo and another 10 on Postscript, Attentive or Omnisend — and Klaviyo would never show data from a brand it isn't even involved with. The cross-platform view is something no single vendor can replicate.
Key Growth Tactics
The headline tactic is selling to the agency layer instead of the end brand. Most analytics tools in the Shopify world go brand-by-brand — three subscriptions means three separate sales. Hiro sells once to an agency and instantly reaches the 10–30 brands and dozens of user seats underneath it. Zach compares it to how a bookkeeper sells you Gusto and QuickBooks: you don't shop for it, your trusted operator hands it to you.
The second tactic is that agencies are remarkably easy to find. Platforms like Klaviyo and Shopify publish partner directories that force-rank agencies by size and influence — a pre-built, prioritized lead list. And because every agency runs the same tools, they share the same problems, so ~99% of every feature Hiro ships is relevant to every user. The sales conversation writes itself: show an agency owner you understand their two real problems — scaling clients without scaling headcount, and saving time — and they take you seriously. Zach's advice for replicating it: look at whatever industry you know, find its agency layer (restaurants have agencies running their DoorDash and Uber Eats ads, for example), and build the tool that aggregates and automates their reporting.
Key Takeaways for Builders
- ✓Sell to the agency layer, not the end brand. One agency brings 10–30 brands and 10–30 user seats onto the platform — so a single sale delivers the reach of 30 direct-to-brand deals.
- ✓Agencies are the easiest customers to find. Platforms like Klaviyo and Shopify publish partner directories that force-rank agencies by size and influence — a ready-made, prioritized lead list.
- ✓Shared platform means shared problems. Because every agency runs the same tools, ~99% of every feature Hiro ships is relevant to every user, every time — making the roadmap and the sales pitch nearly universal.
- ✓Multi-platform integration is the moat. Connecting Klaviyo, Postscript, Attentive, Omnisend and more means no single platform can clone the product — none of them would show a competitor's data.
- ✓The path is never linear. A decade of "detours" — a data-viz startup acquired by Amazon, a failed newsletter, six years running an agency — became the exact expertise that made Hiro work.