Sam Shepler started his entrepreneurial journey by building a generalist agency. After it got acquired, he moved on to productized services and, more recently, tech-enabled services.
Now, Testimonial Hero is making more than $5M/yr. And Product Hype, which only launched a month ago, is already at $50k/mo.
Here's Sam on how he did it. 👇
Like many people, I originally got the entrepreneurship “bug” after reading Tim Ferriss’ book, The Four Hour Workweek, during my senior year of college. After reading that book I was hooked on the idea of entrepreneurship as something that could provide me freedom and flexibility, challenging and fun intellectual problems to solve, collaboration with a like-minded team, and a way to hit my financial goals.Â
At the time, I didn’t have a ton of marketable skills, but one thing I did have was decent video production skills and a knack for marketing — I was studying communications and film in school, so essentially, video production and advertising were what I was thinking about daily.Â
With a couple friends, I started a video production agency, Skyscope Creative, that peaked around $750k before we sold it to a national PR agency, Matter Communications, who was looking to expand into video production. It was a small acquisition, but still a cool win for our first real company.
After working at the acquiring company for several months, I pretty quickly had the itch to go out on my own again. Working in a 200+ person organization just wasn’t really for me.
The problem was, I didn’t really love everything about being a “generalist” video agency. It was quite hard to scale, since a lot of projects we were reinventing the wheel from scratch. What we had dealt with at Skyscope Creative was the typical “agency” issues of always having fires to deal with, feast and famine cycles, relying purely on referrals, and not being able to extract ourselves from working in the business.
The money was just okay, and the lifestyle was fun at the time but, ultimately, didn’t feel sustainable. So, after selling Skyscope — and after my 2 year non-compete was over — I asked myself, "What if I did this in a bit more of a productized way?"
After a small acquisition and having two business partners, I had left the acquirer and then tinkered with other potential business ideas for a year. So my acquisition funds were running out. I had a year of runway. So, I definitely had some urgency to start something that actually made money!
I first tried a more “scalable” pure software play, but it didn’t get traction and wasn’t validated. So, I needed to pay some bills and I asked myself, “What can I do that I know will at least generate some revenue relatively quickly” and “Can I take a part of what we did at our previous agency and productize it?
This meant identifying the repetitive, high-volume tasks that were consuming our team's time and building systems to handle that heavy lifting. The transition from "scrappy startup tools" to "scalable product infrastructure" happened gradually over about 5+ years, and honestly, it's still evolving as we continue to grow.
Essentially, I ended up “unbundling” one of the core most popular services of our agency — testimonial videos — and then set about productizing it. I knew there was demand and I saw a good path to productizing it. And, as a founder, I also just really appreciated and knew the power of a good testimonial.
As we grew Testimonial Hero, productization wasn’t quite enough to scale. We also had to become tech-enabled.
Tech-enabling wasn’t as big of a focus initially, just productization. It wasn’t until we got to a few million dollars in annual revenue that the need for tech-enablement became pressing if we wanted to achieve our vision of getting to and beyond 8-figures of annual revenue.
There are many flavors of tech-enabled services, but often, they center around combining the best of humans with software.
The software typically enhances the client experience through a portal where the clients can self serve on a number of tasks. The human team providing the services is also augmented by custom internal software that makes it easier and faster for them, and makes them able to do better work faster.
When everything goes well, all of these things combine to give you a service with higher, more software-like gross-margins, as well as much more scalability than the typical agency. When things don’t go well, however, you can end up with the worst of both worlds, basically you get the problems of running a service business AND the problems of running a software business! Twice the problems.
Thankfully, for us, things have gone well. In 2025, we surpassed $5M annual revenue with Testimonial Hero, completely bootstrapped, exceeding the rule of 40 — which means our YoY growth rate and profit combined exceeds 40 when added cumulatively.
None of this scale would have been possible for us without our transition to a tech-enabled service and the custom tech we’ve built. The tech-enabled side of our tech-enabled service has two categories. Our internal Project Management tool that we’ve built and the client portal.
Our internal PM tool — we call it "Totopo", but that's an inside joke — essentially makes our client services and fulfillment team superhuman. Since we are literally creating hundreds of videos and written case studies per month for clients, for us to be able to service the volume we do and keep a relatively lean team, we decided to build a custom tool to put everything on rails.
The initial version of our product, once we evolved beyond being a one-person agency, was refreshingly simple: Trello boards for project management, Frame.io for client video review, and Zapier to orchestrate workflows between these tools. This wasn't glamorous, but it worked. We could onboard clients quickly, deliver results, and most importantly, understand what our customers actually needed versus what we thought they needed. The beauty of this approach was that it required minimal upfront investment — mostly our time and a few monthly SaaS subscriptions.
This has evolved over 5+ years. Our current tech stack reflects our pragmatic, "don't reinvent the wheel" philosophy. We use Bubble.io for full stack development and workflow orchestration, Airtable for reporting and data management, S3 for file storage, and a combination of Zapier, Pipedream, and custom code for various integrations. We also heavily leverage Zapier to orchestrate AI workflows and agents that utilize different LLMs including Claude, OpenAI, and Gemini. This setup gives us the flexibility to rapidly prototype and deploy new features while maintaining the reliability our customers expect.
Our stack has evolved dramatically over time, and we've learned to stay conservative and avoid overbuilding. We start with existing tools whenever possible and integrate them into our workflow. However, as you get more specialized, external tools inevitably fall short of your specific needs.
The key is only building custom solutions when you're certain about the requirements and the risk of failure is low.
As far as marketing, we do a little bit of everything: SEO, cold email, ads, partnerships, etc.
There are no silver bullets, just 100 golden BBs.
Initially, we did a lot with cold email and cold outreach. Over time, cold email has gotten much noisier and less effective, so now we have a more diversified marketing mix.Â
All that being said, I think until you get to about $1M in revenue, it’s generally good advice to pick one — maybe two — marketing channels, max. Don’t peanut butter your marketing budget and your resources around.
Focus on one or two areas and concentrate your efforts there! Just do more of what is working, and keep doing that, and don’t stop as long as it’s still working. Do more of what's working. Sometimes, it’s that simple.
For us, another big thing that works in our favor is word of mouth. Now that we’ve been at this for 7+ years, we’ve built up a great reputation and I would consider us very well known within our target markets.
Business is often simply a game of last man standing. If you can stay in the game, a lot of good benefits will accrue to you.
In hindsight, being so focused and niche in our brand name and positioning has been great.
But, it’s been a double edged sword too. So we also acquired two other companies in 2024 — Upshot and Case Study Buddy — that specialized in written case studies, and have been successfully expanding our services to include written case studies as well as video testimonials.
And now, we're launching additional tech-enabled service brands since Testimonial Hero is such a specific brand.
Specifically, we just launched Product Hype — focused on product marketing videos for B2B SaaS companies. It’s less than a month old and we did over $50k/mo in revenue in the month of launch. A huge part of that was being able to cross-sell Product Hype to our Testimonial Hero client base.
We sell packages of credits that correspond to the services we provide, video testimonials, and written case studies. The credits are on a 12-month term, and customers work against that credit balance and redeem as needed.
When we first started, and we only had one service line (on-site video testimonials), we just charged cash per item. However, as we grew and built out a ton of different service lines and service levels — remote video testimonials, event testimonials, employee testimonials, written case studies, and more — we wanted to provide the flexibility for customers to sign up without knowing exactly what they want.
So we gave them the flexibility to buy what felt like plenty of credits and then be agile and get done exactly what they needed throughout the year.
We like to keep our gross margins in the 50-60% range. Never lower than 50%. Net margins depend on reinvestments or capital allocation decisions.
You can always move things around in a tech-enabled service for certain net margin targets, but your gross margin is your fundamental unit economics. In the war for profitability, your gross margins are the front lines. If you lose that battle, you will lose the war. I always say that in a productized and tech-enabled service, gross margin is the most important line on the P&L!
Also, most people don’t calculate their gross margins correctly. You need to include all costs related to client work, everyone who is related to any client work, software and tech that is related to client work — everything.
And, in most cases, your cash accounting and your accrual accounting will look different. To get an accurate view on your books and your gross margin, you need to do your bookkeeping on an accrual basis! This is especially true if you collect payments up front, like an annual payment or project payment upfront. On a cash basis, this won’t properly align revenue with expenses, so you need to switch to accrual to get a good view of actual gross margin.
SaaS businesses are incredible, but tech-enabled services aren’t too bad either.
I started Testimonial Hero thinking it would be just an intermediate thing to help pay some bills. That was due to the stigma around service-based businesses. I was resistant to committing to something like this when I was hoping to find something more “scalable.” Thankfully I did commit, and in hindsight, I wish I would have committed sooner!
I think starting with a service is a great launching point, whether the end goal is a SaaS or you want to keep some service elements and tech-enable it like we did. You can start with a productized service, drive revenue, build customer relationships, learn about the market and the pain points, and then transition.
You also simply can’t replace the experience you get from running a business that is working — and often, a services business can get to revenue and start working faster than a pure SaaS business that you may need to validate the hypothesis much more.
I’m a huge fan of learning from other founders who are 3-5 years ahead of me, in formal or informal, paid, or unpaid relationships. I think the best coaches can often be people who aren’t full-time coaches, but either just sold their company or do some coaching “off the side of their desk" while currently running their business. More people do this than you might think because it keeps them exposed to new ideas, tests their thinking, and they often enjoy it.
I’ve been in group coaching and mastermind groups, but personally, the greatest benefit I’ve seen by far is 1-1 coaching sessions. There’s something about a 1-1 session, where especially after multiple sessions you can just go way deeper and be way more frank and candid than you might be in a group setting.
Also, you might only get a few minutes in a group setting to ask your questions, where 1-1 you can really go deep. I have read just about every business book, listened to all the podcasts, but without a doubt 1-1 coaching sessions with founders who are exactly where I want to be in 3-5 years has been the biggest force multiplier. The key is to find people that are far enough ahead of you to be able to deliver a ton of value, but not so far ahead of you they don’t remember what it’s like being where you are and how they solved the challenges there.
Our goal is to build an 8-figure portfolio of category-leading, tech-enabled services — initially, in the B2B video marketing space, but perhaps we’ll go broader than video over time.
Right now we have Testimonial Hero and we just launched Product Hype. Since we only launched Product Hype less than a month ago, I’m not sure what comes next, but I look forward to figuring that out.
We’re open to acquiring companies, as well as incubating them. So, if you want to sell an agency or productized service, drop me a line — we’re buying! We’re also always looking for operators who want to work with us in a future portfolio company.
I love to connect with other entrepreneurs, especially in the productized services, agency, and tech-enabled services space. Please don’t hesitate to reach out. Linkedin is probably the best place to reach me.
Again, we are also interested in buying agencies, productized services, and tech-enabled services. If you want to explore what a potential acquisition would look like or just get some expert advice on challenges you're facing, how to get unstuck, please give me a shout.
You can follow along on X and Linkedin. And check out Testimonial Hero and Product Hype.
Leave a Comment
Great one. What was your one marketing channel you focused on to get to $1M annual revenue?
Really loved the honest breakdown here. The shift from generalist agency to tech-enabled services hits home — especially the part about only building custom tools once you’re sure of the need. That lean, iterative approach is what keeps things scalable without adding unnecessary complexity. Great inspiration for anyone building in this space. 🙌
Incredibly real and insightful post, Sam. The journey from generalist agency to productized and now tech-enabled services is inspiring. Loved the bit about “100 golden BBs” — so true in today’s noisy marketing world. Also appreciate your lean approach to tech and gross margin mindset. Definitely following along from here! 👏
Impressive leap! Transitioning from productized to tech-enabled services is a game-changer—scalability meets smart execution. Your $5M/year milestone proves that innovation + efficiency = serious growth.
Impressive journey! Transitioning from productized services to tech-enabled offerings is a significant leap. In our experience at Touchlane, focusing on mobile-first solutions has been pivotal. For instance, integrating mobile applications into service models can enhance client engagement and streamline operations. Additionally, leveraging tools like React Native or Flutter has allowed us to develop cross-platform solutions efficiently, catering to diverse client needs. It's also crucial to maintain a balance between automation and personalized service to preserve the quality and trust established with clients.
Would love to hear more about the tech stack and tools you've adopted during this transition.
This is a fantastic achievement. What were the biggest operational hurdles you faced when transitioning from a pure service model to a tech-enabled one? I'm curious about the scaling challenges.
Thanks for sharing so openly — definitely bookmarking this.
Great great post and the simplicity behind the approach here.
Really appreciated the breakdown of how you moved from services to a tech-enabled product — the progression felt super relatable. The part about validating through real client pain before going full product especially hit home. We’re in the early stages of building something similar (lean team, niche problem), and this gave me a helpful mental model for staying focused without overbuilding. Thanks for sharing so openly — definitely bookmarking this.
Really solid breakdown on the evolution from services to product. Currently bootstrapping a personal finance app that automates expense categorization, and your point about staying focused on one core problem instead of trying to build everything at once is exactly what we needed to hear. The transparency around the pivot decisions is refreshing too.
Definitely bookmarking this for when we hit our next growth phase.
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This was an awesome read, especially the shift from generalist ..agency ..productized ..tech-enabled. Super relevant as we're building something in the same mindset: a privacy-first assistant that organizes people’s digital clutter in the background. Early days for us, but this gave me some serious clarity on how to stay lean and iterate fast.
Thanks for sharing all this so transparently, Sam. Inspiring stuff.
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Great insights here — gross margin focus and starting with services really resonate. At CompliAssistant, we’re building an AI-powered HIPAA compliance assistant that’s a tech-enabled service designed for SMBs. Like you said, combining tech with service to solve a real pain point and drive sustainable growth is key.