Everyone romanticizes the “agency to product” journey.
“Use your agency to fund your SaaS!” “Leverage client work for product ideas!” “Build the business that sets you free!”
It all sounds amazing. And in theory, it is.
But nobody talks about the brutal reality of trying to build a product while running a services business. Nobody mentions the 18-hour days. Nobody talks about the guilt of taking time away from paying clients to work on something that might never make money.
Nobody talks about the three failed attempts before you figure it out.
So let me tell you the truth. The real, messy, unglamorous truth about building SaaS while running an agency.
Why I Started Building SaaS (The Real Reasons)
Let me be honest about why I started down this path. It wasn’t some grand vision. It was a mix of ambition, frustration, and basic math.
The ambition part: I wanted to build something that could scale beyond my time. Agency revenue is fundamentally limited by hours and headcount. Product revenue isn’t. I wanted that leverage.
The frustration part: I was tired of selling the same hours over and over. Tired of starting every month at zero. Tired of the revenue rollercoaster that comes with services. I wanted recurring revenue. I wanted predictability.
The math part: I ran the numbers. Even if we doubled the agency, I’d still be trading time for money at a fundamental level. Product revenue changes the equation completely.
But here’s what I didn’t anticipate: how hard it would actually be to do both well simultaneously.
The Time Management Lie Everyone Tells
You’ve heard the advice: “Just wake up earlier!” “Work on your product before client work!” “Use your weekends!”
That’s bullshit.
Here’s what actually happens:
You wake up at 5 AM to work on your product. You get an hour in. Maybe two if you’re lucky. Then client work starts. A fire needs to be put out. A meeting runs long. Someone needs your input. By 6 PM, you’re exhausted. The last thing you want to do is open your laptop and work on the product.
But you force yourself anyway because you made a commitment to work on your product. You put in another two hours of mediocre work while your brain is fried. You go to bed at 11 PM. You wake up at 5 AM and do it again.
This works for about two weeks. Then you get sick. Or you snap at your team. Or you deliver subpar work to a client. Or you wake up one day and realize you haven’t had a real conversation with your partner in three weeks.
So you ease up. You tell yourself you’ll “find balance.” But what actually happens is the product work disappears because client work always feels more urgent. Always has a deadline. Always has someone waiting.
And six months later, you’re right back where you started, except now you also feel like a failure for not making progress on your product.
Three Failed Attempts Before Finding the Right Approach
Let me tell you about my failures. Maybe you’ll learn from them.
Attempt 1: The Weekend Warrior (Failed after 3 months)
I decided I’d work on my SaaS every Saturday and Sunday. Full days dedicated to product work. No client stuff.
This lasted exactly 11 weekends before I burned out completely. Turns out, never having a break isn’t sustainable. Who knew?
I was exhausted, irritable, and not doing good work on either the agency or the product. Something had to give.
Attempt 2: The Early Morning Hustle (Failed after 2 months)
Inspired by every productivity guru ever, I started waking up at 5 AM to work on my product before the day started.
This actually worked better. For about six weeks. Then I started getting sick more often. I was constantly tired. My decision-making suffered. I was running on coffee and willpower, and eventually, the willpower ran out.
Attempt 3: The “Just Hire More” Strategy (Failed after 4 months)
I thought, “If I just hire someone to handle more of the client work, I’ll have time for product work.”
So I hired. And trained. And managed. And realized I’d just created more work for myself, not less. I was spending all my “freed up” time managing people instead of building product.
This is the trap most agency owners fall into. More people = more management = less time for what you actually want to work on.
The Agency Clients Who Became Beta Users
Here’s where things finally started to click.
I stopped trying to build something separate from my agency work and started paying attention to what I was already building.
We had a client(a wordpress agency) that needed hyperlocal lead generation. Custom work, not in our usual scope. But were doing it. Was it hard? Yes. Time consuming? Very much.
Four months later, a different client asked for almost the exact same thing.
Then another client.
I was literally working on the same custom thing for multiple clients in six months. Each time slightly different. Each time starting from scratch. Each time billing hourly.
That’s when the lightbulb went off.
I wasn’t building four custom solutions. I was validating a product idea with paying customers who didn’t even know they were beta users.
So I stopped offering custom solutions and started building a proper product. I went back to those four clients and said, “Hey, what if instead of this service, you used this standardized tool I’m building? It’ll cost you less and work better. You will save a lot of time and effort”
Three of them said yes immediately. They became my first beta users. They were literally paying me to build a product they wanted to use.
That’s how leadsmint.com was born. Leadsmint is a local lead generation tool for web agencies and freelancers working with hyperlocal clients. With leadsmint.com , we cut the lead generation time from around 45-50 minutes per search, to less than 10 seconds.
Best part? It changed how we worked on the lead generation at the agency. Clients were happy since they could handle the lead generation with the existing workforce.
That’s when I realized: the best SaaS ideas don’t come from brainstorming. They come from pattern recognition in your client work.
Why Domain Expertise Beats Market Research
I’ve tried the “find a market and build for it” approach. It failed spectacularly.
I spent weeks researching market sizes, reading competitor reviews, analyzing pricing strategies. I built something I thought the market wanted based on what the data told me.
Nobody cared.
Because I didn’t actually understand the problem deeply. I understood it academically. I could explain it. But I didn’t live it.
Contrast that with the product I’m building now. I know this problem intimately because I’ve been solving it manually for clients for two years. I know what works. I know what doesn’t. I know the edge cases. I know what users will pay for and what they consider nice-to-have.
That domain expertise is worth more than any amount of market research.
When you’re your own customer—or when your agency clients are your customers—you have an unfair advantage. You understand the problem at a level that someone reading market reports never will.
You know the real pain points, not the stated pain points. You know what users actually do, not what they say they do. You know what they’ll pay for because you’ve already been charging them for it.
The Unfair Advantage of Being Your Own Customer
Being your own customer changes everything about how you build.
When I’m building something for “the market,” every decision is a guess. Should this feature be here or there? Should I prioritize this or that? I don’t know. I’m guessing based on best practices and what competitors do.
When I’m building something I use daily? I know immediately if something is working or not. I know which features are critical and which are nice-to-have. I know where the friction is because I experience it myself.
This makes development faster. Way faster.
Instead of building, launching, getting feedback, and iterating, I’m iterating before I even launch. Every day I use my own tool is a chance to improve it.
Plus, there’s a psychological benefit. When you’re building something you need, you’re much more likely to actually finish it. Because you’re not just building for some theoretical user. You’re building for yourself.
From Side Project to Actual Users
Here’s what’s working for me now, after three failures and a lot of learning:
I protect around 20 hours per week for product work. Not mornings. Not weekends. Actual work hours. Four hours a day, Monday through Friday, from 2 PM to 6 PM. This is blocked on my calendar. My team knows. It’s non-negotiable.
I stopped taking on new agency clients. This was scary. But we’re not growing the agency right now. We’re maintaining it at a healthy, profitable level while we build the product. New revenue goes toward product development, not agency expansion.
I involve my team in the product. Some of my agency folks work on the SaaS product during their agency time. This keeps them engaged, gives them a stake in something new, and honestly, they’re often better at certain things than I am.
I use agency customers as beta testers. They’re already paying for a custom solution. They’re happy to test a better, cheaper standardized version. This gives me real feedback and real usage data without having to acquire users cold.
The product still isn’t launched publicly(to be launched soon). But it’s being used daily by 7 paying customers (and has 100+ trial users)who are actually happy to be testing it. That feels completely different from building in a vacuum.
And honestly? After 5 years of pure client work, working on something that could scale beyond my hours feels like breathing fresh air.
Questions to Ask Before Building Anything
If you’re thinking about building a SaaS while running your agency, ask yourself these questions honestly:
Can you protect real working hours for this? Not mornings. Not weekends. Actual work hours. If not, you’re setting yourself up to fail.
Have you built some version of this solution multiple times? If you’re constantly solving the same problem for different clients, that’s a signal. Pay attention to it.
Are you willing to stop growing your agency temporarily? You can’t go full steam on both. Something has to give. Are you okay with the agency staying flat while you build?
Do you have enough runway? Product development takes longer than you think. How long can you go without new product revenue? Be realistic.
Are you building this for yourself or for the market? The first one has a much higher chance of success. The second one is a gamble.
Should You Even Try This?
Honest answer? It depends.
If you love running your agency and want to keep growing it—don’t build a SaaS. You’ll half-ass both and succeed at neither. Just focus on the agency. Make it great. There’s nothing wrong with a successful services business.
If you’re burnt out on client work and desperate for something different—still don’t build a SaaS. Fix the agency burnout first. Building a product while burned out is a recipe for failure.
But if you’re genuinely excited about product work, if you’ve spotted a real pattern in your client work, if you have the runway and the discipline to protect time for it—then yes, it can work.
It’s just going to be harder than anyone tells you.
I’m still in the middle of this journey. The product isn’t launched publicly. I don’t have hockey stick growth to show you. I don’t have a triumphant success story yet.
What I have is a clearer path forward than I did a year ago. I have real users. I have proven demand. I have the agency funding development without needing to raise money.
And I have the time blocks protected to actually build this thing properly.
That’s progress. Slow, unglamorous progress. But progress nonetheless.
If you’re on this same path, or thinking about starting down it, just know: it’s harder than it looks. But it might also be more rewarding than you imagine.
Just don’t believe anyone who tells you it’s easy to do both well. They’re either lying or they haven’t actually done it.