I gave up trying to build a "minimal" agency tool. Here's what I learned.
I'm running a SaaS for agencies, live since February. Three years of building, three months of real users, and I just had the most useful conversation I've had with a prospect who told me he wasn't going to sign up.
He runs a 12-person digital agency. Uses HubSpot, ClickUp, Slack, Drive, Harvest, and Copilot. I asked him what his biggest operational headache was. He listed four things, and all of them happened in the gaps between those tools, not inside any one of them.
Then I asked why he wasn't switching. He said: "Because switching six tools at once is scarier than the pain I already know."
That one sentence rewired how I think about the product. I'd been building features. He needed a migration story.
The pattern I kept hitting: every agency founder I talked to agreed the fragmentation was real and painful. Almost none of them were willing to fix it. Not because they didn't want to, but because consolidating five tools feels like surgery while running a live business.
So now I'm less focused on "here's everything we do better" and more focused on "here's the one workflow you'd move first, and here's how you'd do it in an afternoon."
Curious if anyone else running a SaaS in the ops space has hit this, where the product wasn't the problem but the switching cost narrative was?
This is a good insight.
“Switching six tools at once is scarier than the pain I already know” feels very true.
I’m seeing a similar thing: people don’t always need a whole new system, they need one painful workflow to become easier first.
The “move one workflow in an afternoon” angle sounds much stronger than “replace your stack.”
I think that's why "replace everything" messaging struggles. People don't buy platforms-they buy relief from a specific pain. If the first workflow saves them an hour every week, moving the second one becomes a much easier decision.