Pivoting from product to tech-enabled productized service and growing to $50k/mo
Ryan Doyle built a product, got backed by Y Combinator's Calm Fund, and then pivoted into a tech-enabled service. Today, Sales.co is making $50k/mo.
Here's Ryan on how he did it. 👇
Moving back to the farm
I graduated from college and took a sales job with a tech company in Palo Alto. I knew that I wanted to build a company of my own, so I started building software on nights and weekends in 2020.
I just always liked building things. I grew up on a farm, and I liked being able to create and then see what I created. When I got into college, I played with entrepreneurship a bit and decided I might have the right disposition for it. I was curious enough to want to try things and stupid enough not to care about too many of the risks.
I think, overall, I looked at the path that was expected of me and saw that I could either go build something for somebody else and be a part of that journey, or focus on building a skill set and a base of assets that I controlled. I figured I'd rather take the risk of going out and learning this stuff myself.
So, I quit my sales job and moved back to my family's farm to build the tools that I wished I had as a salesman.
One eventually caught on. It was called Magic Sales Bot, and it was the first cold email writer built with GPT. It got backed by Y Combinator's Calm Fund, and that grew into what is now Sales.co, a lead generation service that we fulfill with the software we're building.
Building the "product"
Initially, it was a pure service. I really advocate for starting with services.
People are building all these different things without knowing what outcome they're actually trying to create for businesses. But when you go service-first and try selling that service, you really figure out what problems people actually have and what they're willing to pay you for. And from there, you'll find out what product to build.
So that's what went into building the initial product — working with a dozen different B2B companies and figuring out the commonalities between them all. And then building the infrastructure between them.
My partner, Jakob, and I built a lot of the infrastructure starting in Airtable with Python and JavaScript automations on top of that. And that has really never stopped. It's just become different layers of automation — things that we would do manually in the early days that we now automate through code that we've written.
And then, when we became the managers of this system, we started building automations into those levels as well. It never stops because as soon as we started doing really well with one service, we started branching out to other services.
As far as stack, Jakob's a big Python guy. I'm a big JavaScript guy. I like to do most of my backend work in Node and my frontend work in Next.js, but our website is just simple HTML. We've got a MongoDB database that we run all of our millions of cold emails' worth of data out of, and we've built all our own cold email infrastructure in Python on top of that.
Productized services
We run on a monthly subscription. We have businesses put the $3,000-$30,000 monthly subscription on a credit card.
It's just month-to-month. They put a dollar down to start, and we onboard them over the course of a week. Once they're ready, they see everything that we have prepared for them, and we begin their subscription in this way. It's really lowered the risk for them while providing an easy way to do cash collection for us.
Growth via dogfood
Cold email, cold email, cold email. That's how we grow.
Obviously, an advantage is being able to send thousands and thousands of cold emails a day — and do it well.
Any idea that we want to try, we can test on the market quite easily. That's something that, usually, only someone with an audience can do. And no one's really thinking of this. Or, if they are thinking of it, they're thinking about how hard it is or that it won't work instead of just trying.
Other marketing tactics we've tried:
Ads: This does well, but the leads are less qualified.
Partnerships: We reached out to other agencies and resellers but again, lower quality.
SEO: We started with programmatic SEO, with some success. We're leaning more into long term seo now
Beating a dead horse
Not to beat a dead horse, but here's my advice: Start as a service and then build your software around that.
If I had to start over, I would start with services instead of even going the Magic Sales Bot route. I suppose it was necessary. It helped me realize that I'm not the next Pieter Levels. And it also helped me find my niche.
It's the right niche for me. I've got the people skills for it. I've got the intuition for it. And it is fun in its own way.
What's next?
From here, world domination.
Generate cash to buy software businesses.
Use my hacking skills to bless the world in excess of how God has blessed me.
In no particular order.
You can learn more at Sales.co, CommunityMentions.com, JakobGreenfeld.com, and RpDoyle.com.
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Pivoting from a traditional product to a tech-enabled productized service can unlock scalable growth and recurring revenue. By systemizing delivery with technology, many founders streamline operations, attract high-value clients, and steadily grow to $50k per month through predictable pricing, automation, and performance-driven marketing.
This post hits close to home. I'm currently pivoting from a traditional "CEO role" to exactly this model — a tech-enabled service for building MVPs.
My "tech enablement" is heavy use of AI agents (Cursor/Windsurf stack) to replace the need for a large dev team. It allows me to ship complex backends (FastAPI/Redis) in days, not months, which makes the unit economics of a "productized service" much more viable.
Curious about your scaling phase: at $50k/mo, did you have to hire human operators to manage the "service" part, or did you manage to automate the delivery itself?
Really inspiring
Planned on chilling this Sunday. This post reminded me to go back to work.
Haha, I feel you!
There's so much to build and so little time! :)
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This was a really interesting perspective. Ideally, you can build something that generates revenue and build a enterprise software around that. Do you think it makes it easier or more difficult at scale?
Love this breakdown. The pattern here is something I’m seeing everywhere: founders who start with a service end up building far better products because they’re forced to solve the real problem, not the imagined one.
The other thing Ryan nailed is the “$1 to start” friction removal. It sounds simple, but lowering the activation cost flips the psychology entirely. Once someone sees the system working, the subscription becomes obvious.
Funny enough, we’ve been experimenting with something similar on the operations side —and giving businesses a way to activate a trained assistant or call rep for one dollar as part of our 2026 rollout. The early data validates exactly what Ryan talks about: remove the risk, prove the value fast, then scale the relationship.
Huge respect to Ryan. This is the exact kind of playbook more indie founders should study.
This is excellent validation for me. Recently quit my job and immediately went into services that can be fulfilled by skills I already have. Still figuring out the niche, but I can already sense the problems faced by potential clients.
Really inspiring. I'm just starting my founder journey and stories like this help a lot. Thanks for sharing.
Great post. Really appreciate you sharing this journey. Your approach of starting with services before building software is something more founders need to hear. It's easy to build in a vacuum, but you actually went out and figured out what people would pay for first.
Curious about the transition from Magic Sales Bot to the full service model. Was there a specific moment where you realized the service wrapper was the actual business?
'Start as a service and then build your software around that.'
This advice needs to be framed.
We often over-glamorize the 'SaaS Founder' and undervalue the 'Service Provider.' But starting with a service is the ultimate form of customer research. You get paid to learn exactly what features to build.
Moving from manual Airtable workflows to Python automation is exactly how a scalable operation should evolve. You aren't guessing the roadmap; you are living it. Great pivot.
The bit about "figuring out the commonalities between a dozen B2B companies" is where so many people bail too early. They work with 2-3 customers, think they've spotted the pattern, and rush to productize. Doing the boring service work longer than feels comfortable is probably the actual moat.
Curious about the $1 to start onboarding approach - how much tire kicking do you filter out versus legitimate customers who just needed the low friction entry point? Seems like it could go either way.
Nice content. Keep sharing more like this.
Congus， I'm just a beginner, long way for this.
Start with a service to learn what customers truly need. Sell the outcome first, automate repeatable parts, then build your product. Use tools like Airtable, scripts, and cold email to scale efficiently.
Great example of why “service → product” is such a powerful path. Selling the outcome first forces you to understand what B2B buyers actually want, then you automate the repeatable parts. Also love the Airtable → scripts → full infrastructure evolution… that’s the real behind-the-scenes of productized services. And using cold email as both the engine and the experiment loop is classic dogfooding done right.
Really liked this breakdown. The reminder to start with a service instead of jumping straight into building a product is spot on.
I frequently fall for that mistake. It’s so easy to think you know the problem until you actually work through it with real customers. I recently read 'Million dollar weekend' outlining the importance of a mailing list, interesting to see how you used cold email both for growth and for validating ideas quickly.
Love this breakdown. Starting with services to understand the real problem before building anything is the move most founders skip. Your path from manual work → automation → full product is exactly how durable systems are built. Also appreciate the honesty around using cold email as your first growth engine. Simple, clear, effective. Rooting for what you build next.