He demoted his SaaS to sell a service and 4x'd revenue in 12 months

About this episode

Farzad Rashidi discusses how he pivoted Respona from a SaaS model to a service-as-software model, resulting in a 4x revenue increase in twelve months.

Six years of grinding, and SaaS churn kept capping his growth: win a customer, lose a customer, repeat. Then one pricing call flipped everything. Farzad Rashidi pivoted Respona to a done-for-you service-as-software model and 4x'd in twelve months the revenue it took six years to build. Farzad shares why adding features never fixed his SaaS churn, the agency CEO haggle that sparked the pivot, how he demoted his own SaaS on the homepage to lead with the service, and how he rebuilt a software layer on top so the business could scale. Respona helps brands get cited in AI answers across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Farzad first appeared in episode 323 as a self-serve outreach tool doing a few hundred thousand in ARR, before SaaS churn stalled it; today the first done-for-you customer alone spends around $65K to $70K a month. This episode is brought to you by: 🍎 Product Fruits → Book a demo tailored to your product 🔑 Key Lessons 🔄 Service-as-software beats pure SaaS when usage drives SaaS churn: Respona's customers canceled because they had no time to use the tool, not because it lacked features, so doing the work for them removed the real reason for churn. 💰 Price…

People in this episode

Host: Omer Khan

Guest: Farzad Rashidi

Topics covered

• SaaS
• revenue growth
• service-as-software
• business pivot
• customer retention

Keywords

• SaaS churn
• revenue growth
• service-as-software
• business model pivot
• customer retention
• pricing strategy
• agency CEO haggle

Sponsors

Product Fruits

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Respona

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