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Zach and his partner Brendan built Hero Analytics, an analytics and reporting platform purpose-built for email and SMS marketing agencies, reaching over $1M in ARR within 19 months of launch by targeting agencies rather than individual brands — a strategy that unlocks dozens of clients and multiple seat subscriptions through a single customer relationship.
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Products and Offerings
- Hero Analytics is an agency-focused analytics and reporting platform that automates data visualization and reporting for email and SMS marketing agencies
- It connects to multiple platforms including Klaviyo, Postscript, Attentive, and Omnisend, letting agencies see all clients and team performance in one place
- Agencies can provide seats to their own clients, adding a secondary revenue stream on top of internal team seats
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Metrics and Financials
- Surpassed $1M in ARR within 19 months of launching in October 2024
- Currently at approximately $96.2K in MRR, pacing near $10K in new MRR added per month
- Churn is described as extremely low
- Pricing is subscription-based and scaled by client count: around $500/month for 10 clients, $600 for 20, and bespoke pricing for larger agencies with up to 200 clients paying a couple thousand per month
- A 30-day free trial is offered to every agency
- Internal team seats are priced at approximately $10 per user per month, with client seats adding roughly $200/month for 20 customers
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Strategy and Growth
- The core strategy is selling to agencies instead of individual brands, which provides access to dozens of end-clients through a single sale
- Agencies are easy to find through platform partner directories such as the Shopify agency partner page and Klavio partner page directory, which rank agencies by size and influence
- Because agencies all use the same platforms, nearly every feature launched is relevant to every user, keeping product development focused
- The primary value proposition for agencies centers on two pain points: the ability to take on more clients without hiring more people and significant time savings on manual reporting work
- The risk of platforms like Klaviyo building a competing product is low because a $1M ARR product unit would not move the needle for a public company, and Hero connects to multiple platforms rather than just one
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Tech Stack and Infrastructure
- Early infrastructure relied on AWS and Snowflake, with initially high costs due to unfamiliarity with cloud setup for application usage
- Used Retool as an internal app-building tool connected to their own database structure
- Over the last 6 to 8 months, fully migrated to a cloud-native architecture
- The team’s background in ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) gave them a strong foundation for building the data-heavy product
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Lessons and Advice
- Look for the “agency layer” in any industry — most industries have agencies managing platforms on behalf of clients, and those agencies face the same pain points, making them an efficient market to sell into
- Use platform partner directories as a ready-made, force-ranked prospect list
- When selling to agencies, focus on how many more clients they can take on without hiring and how much time your product saves them
- The path to finding the right business is rarely linear — Zach’s journey included working at a data visualization startup (acquired by Amazon), a failed newsletter business, and 6 years running an email marketing agency before Hero succeeded
- Every experience along the way can become relevant to the business that eventually takes off, even a decade later
- Unsexy B2B niches can be highly profitable and are often overlooked in favor of trendier markets