How He Built a $1M ARR SaaS in 19 Months by Selling to Agencies

Most SaaS founders chase individual customers one at a time. Zach Cherin found a smarter path: sell once to an agency, and instantly reach all of their clients. That single insight is what took Hiro Analytics from zero to over $1,000,000 in Annual Recurring Revenue in just 19 months — and they're still adding roughly $10,000 in new MRR every single month.

I sat down with Zach to break down the model, the origin story, the pricing, the tech stack, and why building for agencies is one of the most underrated distribution strategies in SaaS right now.

What Hiro Analytics Actually Does

Hiro Analytics is an analytics and reporting platform built specifically for email and SMS marketing agencies. These are the shops that manage Klaviyo, Postscript, Attentive, and Omnisend campaigns on behalf of their e-commerce clients.

The problem? If you're an agency running campaigns across 20 or 30 client brands, each on a slightly different platform, pulling together performance data is a nightmare. You're jumping between dashboards, exporting CSVs, building reports manually — it's a grind. Hiro pulls data from all those sources and gives the agency a single unified view across their entire client portfolio. It also includes agency-specific features like team pacing against goals, which is the kind of thing a brand would never need but an agency lives and dies by.

As of the time of this interview, they're sitting at $96,244 in MRR with a subscriber churn rate of just 3.8%. For a 19-month-old product, those are genuinely impressive numbers.

The Pricing Model

Hiro uses a tiered subscription model with a 30-day free trial to get agencies in the door. Pricing scales based on client count:

• ~$499/month for an agency with 10 clients
• ~$600–$700/month for an agency with 20 clients
• Custom pricing in the low thousands for larger agencies with hundreds of clients

The elegance here is that the pricing naturally scales with the value the customer is getting. A bigger agency has more clients, more complexity, more time saved — so charging them more makes complete sense. And because you're selling to the agency rather than each individual brand, you're capturing far more value per transaction than a typical per-seat or per-brand tool would.

The Origin: Solving Their Own Problem

Zach and his co-founder Brendan didn't stumble into this idea. They lived it. For about six years, they ran their own email marketing agency called Sidekick, working with around 30 clients. That made them their own ideal customer profile — which is about as good a starting point as you can get.

Brendan got fed up with the manual reporting work. The friction involved in pulling together client performance data every month was real and painful. So he started building a solution for their own agency. That firsthand experience meant they already understood the platforms, the metrics that mattered, the language agencies used, and the specific pain points that actually needed solving.

As Hiro gained traction, they were acquired by Simplistic, which gave them the runway to step away from Sidekick and focus on the SaaS full-time. It's a clean story: years of agency work that might have looked like a detour turned out to be the exact background they needed to build something genuinely useful.

The Tech Stack

Neither Zach nor Brendan came from deep app development backgrounds, but they did have experience with ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) processes — pulling data from one place, transforming it, and loading it somewhere useful. That turned out to be exactly the right skill set for what Hiro needed to do.

Their initial build used:

• AWS for cloud infrastructure
• Snowflake as the cloud data warehouse
• Retool for the front-end (an internal app builder that connects to your database)

Retool let them move fast without needing to build a custom front-end from scratch. It's not the sexiest solution, but it worked well enough to get them to $1M ARR. Over the last six to eight months, they've been rebuilding the application with custom code, using AI coding tools like Claude to accelerate the process. The lesson: don't let the perfect stack stop you from shipping. Start with what gets you moving.

The 'Build for Agencies' Model — And Why It's So Powerful

This is the real insight of the whole business, and it's worth spending some time on.

In the Shopify ecosystem, most analytics tools sell one subscription per brand. You need 500 customers to get 500 subscriptions. Hiro sells one subscription to an agency — and that agency brings 10, 20, or 30 brand clients with them. A single sale can unlock an entire portfolio.

But it gets better. Agencies have multiple internal users — strategists, account managers, analysts — who all need access. They also often extend access to their clients directly. So you're not just selling one seat per agency. You can build in per-client pricing, per-user seat pricing, or both. Multiple revenue streams from a single customer relationship.

And finding these customers? That part is shockingly easy. Both Shopify and Klaviyo maintain public partner directories of certified agencies. That's a ready-made prospecting list of exactly the kind of customer Hiro wants to reach. No guessing, no scraping, no cold outreach into the dark. You already know who they are and where to find them.

Zach puts it simply: agencies are easy to find, they have concentrated pain, and they all face the same problems because they all use the same platforms. That's a product founder's dream.

What About the Risk of Klaviyo Just... Building This?

It's a fair question. If your entire product depends on integrating with a platform like Klaviyo, what happens if they just build the feature themselves?

Zach's answer is pretty convincing. At $1M ARR, Hiro is a meaningful business for them — but it's a rounding error on the revenue of a publicly traded company like Klaviyo. It's not going to be their priority to build.

More importantly, Hiro is platform-agnostic. It integrates with Klaviyo's direct competitors: Postscript, Attentive, Omnisend. An agency with clients spread across multiple platforms needs a unified view — and Klaviyo is never going to build a dashboard that surfaces data from its own rivals. That's the moat. The cross-platform consolidation is exactly what Klaviyo can't and won't replicate.

The Takeaway: Success Isn't Linear

Zach's final piece of advice stuck with me. He was deliberate about this: the path to success is not a straight line. Six years running an agency might look like a slow road to nowhere. But without those six years, there's no Hiro Analytics. The ETL skills, the industry knowledge, the platform relationships, the understanding of what agencies actually suffer through — all of it came from what might have looked like the "long way around."

Every experience accumulates. Failed ventures teach you things that successful ones don't. Previous jobs give you skills that feel irrelevant until suddenly they're exactly what you need. The key is staying in the game long enough to connect the dots in hindsight.

The 'build for agencies' model isn't some secret hack. It's a clear-eyed answer to a distribution problem that kills most SaaS companies. Instead of grinding to acquire one customer at a time, you find the concentrated node in your market — the entity that already serves dozens or hundreds of your end users — and sell to them. One sale, massive leverage.

Zach and Brendan found their node in email and SMS agencies. The question worth asking yourself is: where's yours?