I Sold My $800K/Year Agency to Go All-In on My SaaS

0:00We grew the agency to close to a million. Meet Youssef. He built an agency to almost a million a year, but he wasn't happy. It just sucks to have an agency. Honestly, I was tired. So, while it was still printing cash, he built a SaaS on the side as a completely non-technical founder. Our strength was as an agency, you see one specific problem throughout several

0:21companies, and you solve it. In this episode, Youssef shares how to turn an agency into a B2B SaaS, the exact playbook he followed to get 50% of his customer mail from YouTube. We started YouTube, which is now 50% of our acquisition. The best-performing video was a simple loom with the worst mic I have ever had in my life. And how to bounce back when your entire

0:42business collapse. We were at product-market fit really, like 15% of a month growth. It was amazing. We received the season visit from LinkedIn.

0:55Before we start, my name is Florian, and I'm building my SaaS this trip to 100K MRR. We automate SEO and AI visibility to get you customers on autopilot. I'm currently at 12K MRR, and to help me reach that goal of 100K a month, I interview founder who already made it on this channel. So, you and I can steal their playbook to make it. I'm also documenting the whole journey on my vlog. So, if you like this episode, please subscribe, and make sure to check the other videos. So, Youssef, what made you confident enough to attack such a

1:25red ocean? You mean as in our our SaaS like the agency? Well, I've my career has always been in tech and sales. So, I worked at Google as a salesperson. I worked at AWS as a salesperson. So, always been around the those spaces. And my first business that I started in 2019 was a lead generation agency doing cold emailing, cold calling, and LinkedIn lead generation as well, which I did with my like a very good friend of mine called Arno. We met in China actually over now 13 years ago. Super random. He was the only other guy who was non-Chinese who was on the plane from France to to

2:02China. So, we met up and we just like uh chatted. And fast forward say six six years later, we started Scale Lab, which was the agency itself. Um cuz that was both of our experiences. And so, we really for like few years, we really narrowed down that experience. We were like when you're an agency, you know, you're facing several problems of different companies and you just like narrow down on these problems and you

2:27understand how to solve them at scale. And so, tackling if you want the that industry as you said I got it so many competitors are already and it seems like it's taken, we needed to solve a problem that was not fully solved. For example, as an agency, we were always building contact lists for our clients to be able to get in touch with them whether that's on email, LinkedIn, or phone. And at the time, like you got to

2:49remember it's still like 2019, 2022. There's no AI. There's no like thought co-work and like okay, just you know those details out. You had to do it like people were still doing stuff manually. So, like when you are agencies, they were hiring people like in very low low-paying countries I would say to build lists with emails as well. Sometimes the emails were just guessed at the time and like they had no idea whether the email worked or not. People didn't really care about deliverability and so on. And so, we didn't have a solution at the time the top one was called Phantom Buster. They're still

3:20around now. They were allowing you to extract leads, yes. But one because we had a huge demand then like there was a cost alternative to be found. But then still after you have the leads from from LinkedIn, you still needed to find their emails and phone numbers. So, there's no solution actually was doing that for us. And we thought we should try at least building that internally. And so, we did. And as we built it internally, I mean obviously we were able to scale the agency thanks to that. And we thought we're not the only ones who actually need this. That's the problem like

3:49people ask us say how do you do this? What's your stack, you know? And we can't say we use this our internal tool. Can I use your internal tool? Well, at the moment not really cuz it's not productized, you know? And so, we decided let's do it. Problem that we had was Arnold and I were not technical, both of us. We're both true sales founders. Um I was the CEO, he's the chief growth officer of the of the agency. Um both running it, so we didn't have the technical background. And that was something that was always in my head because I started my career in tech. I

4:19always wanted to be in tech as well, but I'm not a developer. I like totally Yeah, non-technical founder if you want. But I have an agency, it's okay. Uh but I knew that if I wanted to build a a SaaS, and that's what I wanted to build because valuations are more interesting. Also, it's a type of business that I

4:35wanted to get into more than an agency. Um So, we had to find somebody. And for years, honestly for years, we've been talking to different developers. You know, you probably have friends who have friends who are developers as well. Who's been CTO here and querying around. We just like spoke to so many. I can't even tell like maybe over 50 or or so over the years, you know? Um and we never really had a match. I would say it never clicked because either the person is not from the industry or they're a little bit flaky. Yeah, I'm going to do that on the side of my job or I'm not so

5:05sure, etc. And one day actually, you can you can still find it. I made a post on Indie Hackers explaining where we were cuz I knew that our strength was as an agency, you see one specific problem throughout several companies and you solve that. So, I was like, we have the problem. We know what we need to solve. We've already got some level of solution

5:24internally to to do it. Uh but we're not technical. We don't know how to build it. So, if we have somebody who can build it, we can take care of the selling and you as a person who joins us can just build it. Uh and so, I did a post like this and we got several people during like reaching out. One guy in particular, his name is is Charlie. Um he knew the industry as as So, he was a founder and South of France somewhere. So, because I'm I I speak French, my founder my

5:51co-founder is is French. Um we get a good understanding culturally with with that founder. He's from South of France. He's like, "Okay, I can help you guys build this." Um and that's how we started. Really like a by pulling in a technical knowledge that we didn't have from somebody else. Um he left after a few months for say he had personal reasons. He wanted to grow his his family and he had already several projects as well. So, he decided to step down at at some point, which is absolutely fine. Then we need to find This is where we started of like, "Okay,

6:20do we want to continue or not?" Finding it like another developer to take over or not and then building out the team uh from there. It's interesting because a lot of people want to go into B2B SaaS because the money is there and that's really appealing, but I feel like if you don't have the skills or at least like you you don't have the agency before and you don't know the problem, you don't know the industry, it's pretty hard to start. Like, do you think that was an advantage for you to actually know the industry already have

6:49kind of customers around you? Yeah, I would say what 100%. Um interesting enough, I mean, none of our client agency clients turned into SaaS clients. So, the agency was called The Scale Lab and the SaaS Scalelist, two separate entities as well, but everything we do is about scale as you could you could tell. Um but yeah, none of the agency clients turned into a Scalelist clients, but for sure the SaaS itself started because we identified a problem at scale. Um and I would say like you you also have to contextualize as well. Like, today you know, you and I can sit after the this interview and be like, "Let's prompt

7:23something and get a like something out, some kind of product or a landing page of something and you distribute it." So, you can build and ship something much faster than we could three, four, five years ago. Um so, three, four, five years ago the bet of saying I'm going to start building something is a lot higher because uh you just like you're going to spend a lot more time in building something. So before you can actually build something, you need to validate even more the the problem phase. Today, you can just like ship and and test. Ship and test. If you have some budget to do ads as well, you

7:54can you can do that. But so yeah, absolutely at the time, having the agency was exactly what led us to building the the SaaS today. I think it's a bit of a classical founder story, you know, had an agency and switched to to SaaS. I know several agency founders who also are non-technical who would want to jump into into SaaS. But again, it's another business. It's like I'm not technical. I don't know this also is frightening to see lines of code that you don't understand or or else. I definitely advise if you are non-tech non-technical, there's definitely a timeline by which you can learn some basics. You don't need to know yourself

8:26how to code, but surround yourself with so many options like a different developers, freelance developer, CTO, an agency, whatever that is. Just get started, you know. If someone is an agency owner is looking is watching this video now, what is the mistake that he has to avoid when he actually turn into a SaaS? Because I know that a lot of agency founder and they see how easy it is now to actually write code anything. So they want to start a SaaS to get like this recurring revenue and you know, it's beautiful, but like what are the

9:00the things to avoid? Um well, as with any company any business, not everything succeeds. I think we got lucky at some point. It took us probably a year year and a half from launch. Actually, I was but year and 3 months from launch to start seeing growth in the SaaS. So you know, if you put yourself in a short timeline, they say by Q1 or like just one quarter, you assess whether you're going to continue this business or or not. I think it's probably too short especially if you're still running the the agency at the same time. So that is probably for me mistake number one is

9:36the time that you will put in this this new project. You know, if you're transitioning completely from one to another, you have more time to do things faster. But if you're doing a bit of both, it's like a side project. It's just like something. So you're not giving it a real chance. And if you're not giving it real chance, you cannot say, "Okay, I'm going to evaluate success within a short timeline which probably is just a quarter." Because you haven't really give it given it a chance. And I think that's the temptation. It's difficult, obviously, and I'm saying that that's exactly what we did as well. We had no choice. We

10:07didn't have capital, you know, like we didn't have cash to run to just say like, "You know what? We're going to stop the agency and now just jump in the in the SaaS fully." You like you spend already 100% of your time on the agency, maybe even 150% of your time, and now you're going to add another 100% on another project which is not really livable. We knew we would suffer through that. We thought it would be worthwhile doing it. There was some revenue coming in, but growth took, as I said, like it was probably stale for like 1K 1.5K MRR for about a year, a

10:37year and three months, and then only it picked up when we found the right channel. What made you continue? Because like 1.5K MRR, you're like, "Why do I even bother with that? I have an agency making money, cash flow." Like what made you actually continue and pursuing? I I think a lot of agency owners might

10:54relate to this point. It just sucks to have an agency. It's an honestly, I I was tired of the agency. It's it's really cool. Like you learn so much, but you do a lot of repeated work. It was also my first business. So it's not like I come in with 20, 30 years of entrepreneur experience. I've done a lot of mistakes in the agency. We grew the agency to close to a million. It was about at a highest like about 750, 800K. So pretty good. But as you scale an agency, often times you also scale agency problems which are usually your staff churn, clients, you know, like even though they

11:29enjoy what what you do, they may churn as well. In early generation for sure like I know I know the stats. Um And so it was just like a a bit difficult. And you are with your co-founder Arnaud. You are both splitting your time with the SAS, I think. Yeah. If you had to start again, would you maybe like either give everything to Arnaud for the agency and then you focus 100% on the SAS or the opposite? But would you try to split to actually split focus but like one person taking care of

11:58one project? Yeah. Well, what we did was actually a combination of option two. Which is I initiated the the SAS. So I found like whoever worked with us like helped them build and know exactly what we were going to do. And I was the one also doing the sales for the SAS for an entire year. Because the reality was

12:17that the agency was the money maker. And we needed to live through that first. Arnaud was who was bringing the revenue in the agency. If he was splitting time on the the SAS, we'd fall a higher risk. This is like you know it's risk reward kind of kind of situation which shows that okay Arnaud, you continue focus bringing in money on this. I continue running the the business and the the team finding potentially even somebody to replace me as like COO CEO of the of the business while I also do the the marketing for the the SAS. Cuz if we both like if he splits his time and it's

12:54not succeeding, which wasn't for about a year or so, um we would have fallen the risk to actually close down the agency and not be able to continue the the SAS as well. Some people will say okay, I would I would still do it. My advice would be yes, definitely split the responsibilities for sure. The reality is always oftentimes different depending on what problems you have. You always get put what I said earlier like agency sucks. I exaggerate like of course it's it's cool in many ways and I would if I had to do it again, I would do it again because that allowed me to learn so much

13:22about business model, about the problem and so on. But you're you're struggling also with always like issues of of cash flow, so it's slowing you down for for other things. There is this kind of trend right now like I see um I always forget his name, Eric O'Easy, I think, on X. Yeah. He's often talking about the service as a software. So, instead of software as a service, service as a soft as a software, which means that you have an

13:50agency and you productize it with a SAS. It is something that you're building or you want to build to have a kind of a sales team for the agency that actually sell the SAS. We thought we may do that. In fact, we sold the agency last year on September, so I'm not involved in the agency anymore. The point of selling it was also we want to recover 100% of our time to focus on the on the SAS. We had hired last year a manager, so a MD, to run the the agency

14:19so we could focus on on the on the SAS. Um if I were, like if the question is if I had an agency that was still running and a SAS that was in the same industry, 100% we did actually do because like we were doing outbound sales. So, obviously the thought is like, man, we know how to sell already, we sell for others, we

14:37create any business, we can sell for it. In fact, um this is probably different for very different businesses. For the SAS that we that we run, outbound was not working at all cuz that's what that was the principle in the beginning. Man, we start any business, we can just blast emails, LinkedIn, do cold calls, and we're going to grow the business right away. It didn't work at all. Like that was not the the right channel actually

15:00for this business. Um I think it's um several things. Outbound, in my opinion, works well, like for example, email, LinkedIn, call, if what you're selling has a deal size of at least four or five figures. So, because then it's worth for people to take time maybe on a call or a conversation, what whatever that is, and to take a look at what you're sending

15:22them. Because as I said it's like a blue ocean. There's already like so many competitors. They've probably already received enough emails of other competitors as well. We still tried. Just didn't work. In another way like I can say that as a parallel for the agency even though it's an outbound lead generation agency, outbound lead generation was the worst channel for the agency itself. What worked for that at the time, today it will it will be different but at the time it was our LinkedIn content. That was generating most of our business

15:50leads for our agency. So you got to try. That's the that's the thing. Hypothesis versus you know like the other practical reality. And for the SaaS I mean we need we had to just try different channels in the end. So to your question, would we have a sales team doing that? We've done some of it but it was not the right channel. But in principle that's exactly what you should be doing. There's no

16:10reason for it to not work with you. Let's say you have an SEO agency. You start a SaaS. Possibly SEO will be your your first channel but you don't know until you have tried. Mhm. I don't think that there is a playbook that works for every company. Just like of course this is a SaaS in this industry. That's the channel that that works. Got to think about the deal size, what your competitors aren't doing, maybe what else you could be doing and and taking it. And that's why actually we started YouTube which is now 50% of our

16:37acquisition. Perfect transition. Let's talk about that. Yeah. So you had your Scale list. You launched it. You were like sitting at 1.5 K a month for a while. Yeah. What was the distribution strategy that made you grow? So we tried the thing I think the strategy or what worked is that we had tried so much. In the agency itself what worked for it was also doing LinkedIn content. We were doing now some LinkedIn content on for the agency. As in like a posting, explaining. Basically what we were doing

17:08the same thing but for the for the SaaS. It was okay. It was generating some traction. The issue with content on LinkedIn specifically for instance is that you have to renew it all the time. You know, like the shelf life is maybe 1 2 days max. So, you constantly get a post and often times you post the same thing. So, there's not that much you can you can

17:27invent. And um I was also a believer in YouTube. I mean, I had worked at Google like in my first job back in 2014. So, that's quite quite a while back. Um I was aware that SEO was a super important channel. We had not done much of it, but I could see that in YouTube uh there was not much competition for what we were doing, but

17:45there were keywords that were searched. Simple things like they when we started Skali list, it was a Chrome extension essentially that allowed you to pull contacts from from your LinkedIn. So, people were searching exact keyword, how to export leads from LinkedIn Sales Navigator. For instance, specific keyword. You search that, there was barely any video about it. So, I was like, "Okay, I mean, I can post something. I can do it. I can post several ones, give it a try for a month and see how it picks up." Uh cuz obviously like your first video is not going to work. So, it took it took some time. Um and it turned out that the best

18:17performing video, and this is, you know, like you're doing a lot of YouTube. I watch your channel. It's honestly it's a really cool production. I I like it. Uh I think I'm going to come in your space as well at some point. I have I have my own channel, but not as big as yours for for now. Um but the best performing video for Skali list like in 2024, for example, when when we had when we started grow to grow, was a simple Loom video with the worst mic I have ever had in my life. Really like I was actually at my at the time with his girlfriend. I was in her

18:48apartment. I forgot my mic back home in Oklahoma. She was in Taiwan. Uh so, I had just some shitty mic, you know, like the with the with the earphones. And we recorded 3 minutes. The thumbnail was okay. 10,000 views. I love that because now we are doing the same on this stream. We are doing like this kind of video. Can you explain like just uh for from who don't really know,

19:12what is the process for one video? Mhm. Currently or before? Um Cuz we have different processes. So Which one was the best? Um So I I can maybe talk like if we talk about YouTube specifically, we've seen it change uh over the the years. Uh reach has definitely plummeted uh I find in uh in our field. Uh the thing is that we're also not targeting necessarily high viewership because our viewership value is super high. Uh if we like we have a uh lifetime value of about 750. Okay, great. Like if we know that every time we make about 250 or 300 views, approximate, this is our conversion rate

19:50to one paid uh customer. Um so we're like that's fine. We can invest enough to reach those uh those views. We haven't done ads uh yet. Uh definitely no no promotions. Um but the process is simple. Uh you got to search what's uh like if you don't do any keyword search, you don't know what's what's going on in the in the market. That gives us some ideas about okay, how we can position ourselves. We always look at what else has been produced. Uh so we know what our take can be. There's also some good things we can pick from other other videos. Not in terms of things that we

20:19don't enjoy. I focus often times on shorter is better than uh longer. Same for like cold emails, people want to say everything. It's too much. Like don't just uh simplify, make it easy. Um And then we uh we record with making sure that we showed exactly the right steps to get the value. Uh so it's not promotional. It's not saying I do this, I do like as in my business does that, but it's I'm you basically. I'm the persona that I'm doing the video for. I like the starting point is for example, you have made this search on LinkedIn and there's just uh I don't know, 10,000 people. How do you

20:55pull them out to get their emails and phone phone numbers? So that was the videos we were doing before, but we're currently not positioned in LinkedIn anymore. Um something we can probably talk talk about cuz we pivoted uh last year to providing more data as in like uh email, phone numbers um through different platforms. So, MCP and so on. We could talk about it separately, but the process itself is a searching what keywords work, what other videos have been created so

21:20we can know also what we should produce. And it's about say one video a week as a rhythm. Like everything you have to have consistency as well, otherwise it doesn't doesn't pick up. Um what do you use for the keyword research? Uh VidIQ. VidIQ? Yeah. And how do you record it? You say it's a Loom, but do you use any tool like for

21:39example Miro or something? Yeah, we use Tella. Tella.tv. So, it's similar to to Loom. I think I like the way their app is done. You can split different sections in your videos so two different takes, you can move them around as well, which you can't really do on on Loom. Loom I think I think it's we still use Loom, but like

22:00for internal work. And Tella has been doing good. Our first every videos were not edited. Literally, it was a Loom video just posted. It worked. It just as we grew we thought, "Okay, maybe we should invest a bit more in the quality of our video cuz now that it makes sense." Then we got a

22:18an editor for that. We changed also from doing Loom to actually having same as just screen share videos mostly that that we have. So, one is sharing the screen and the other one is like a a face and the editor just moves things things around. I don't know if that answers your question. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Go perfectly. And all about SEO because I think your strategy was mainly YouTube plus SEO which combined work amazingly well. What

22:41was your strategy with SEO? So, SEO actually we took us some time until we started doing it. So, we our like say the way we approach it is as soon as we found a channel, let's double down on it. So, we found YouTube. We didn't know that we would find a channel. There was also a time frame with Scalez where like it's been almost a year, it's still the same. Like we you know, it's tempting to be like, I still have 1,500 US coming in and I don't do much about it as in like it's still

23:09ongoing. But, it's also not worth like repeating the same work cuz I'm not seeing any growth. So, if we try another channel, it's still not working, maybe we should stop at some point. We got lucky and I think luck is always a a factor in in business. YouTube uh worked. And so, for about a year and yeah, maybe a few months, we were doing YouTube only, no SEO at all. And as you said, like YouTube helps for your SEO as well. A lot of searches I consume personally content uh on video. Like, whatever I'm I have a problem with, I will also often look at videos. And I find them also in

23:42either now the Gemini overview or the Google overview or in suggested uh content, too. Um so, for SEO, we had hired an agency last year for 3 months until So, that was from February, March, April. Uh they were really good. They did a great job. They're based in uh in Portugal. So, they helped us uh I think it was, you know, we got to grow our top of the funnel cuz we we know our conversion rate, so we we got to go for that. Um they did a great job, but we had to stop with them. Not because of their work at all, but because uh we received a cease

24:11and desist from LinkedIn. Which forced us to stop any marketing activity, actually. And so, it was to your question about SEO, what what were we doing? We had to shift first our positioning. What are we going to be doing? What is our business going to uh going to be like? And it was I'd say 2025 from Q2 to Q4, it was really tough to not be able to grow cuz you were like we were product market fit really, like 15% month over month growth. It was amazing, so we didn't do much on SEO at that time. Um and Arnaud and I were in charge it as I said, since end of uh

24:46last year. Huge work uh done. We've used some uh AI geo type of uh SEO tools. Our approach is because we're a small team, we don't need yet a full-time SEO person, for example, but let's pull the knowledge from somebody who's more of an expert. So, he works with a SEO consultant who helps him understand what we need to do and guide him and build it cuz we still want to do things internally before we get a team

25:09for that. You just heard how powerful organic search is to get customer. The problem is doing SEO yourself takes months and most founders, like you, don't have the time for it. That's why we built this trip.io. We automate your SEO and AI visibility to get your project recommended by ChatGPT and Google. So, you get customers from free organic traffic on autopilot. If you want to give it a try, click on the link in the description to start your 3-day free trial. Now, back to the episode. And let's talk about the story. So, you were saying that you were teasing a bit. So, what happened because you were on the

25:43road to product market fit? Yeah. You thought you found it and then you lost it. Can you tell me more? Yeah, it's you know, it's an emotional roller coaster, really. Like where you start a business, you know, obviously you have good intentions. You're optimistic and you want to grow this. And so, you're pushing hard, you put the long hours. Any any business owner or entrepreneur can can relate to that. And as soon as you see some growth, you're excited and gives you validation about what you should be doing. When you don't have it,

26:08of course, you try more things as well. And so, when you find it, like when it was the first time I'd say we found in SAS, like in in the agency, we found some form of product market fit with our communication on on LinkedIn. But on the SAS, it's there's something beautiful about it, which is you wake up every day, you look at your Stripe or you look at your cuz we have a Slack channel with when people sign up. And you're like, "Wow, there was even more than yesterday and even more than

26:31yesterday and even more than yesterday." So, there's that adrenaline rush of like, "Wow, this is amazing. It's ongoing. I'm excited." I think we we didn't really get cocky even though with my friends I was joking about I can go for a 6-month meditation retreat and nothing's going to happen. Well, the universe heard me. Cuz yeah, like we you know, we started the business also without with solving a problem that sales people have. We didn't think about terms and conditions and privacy and uh and things like that cuz all businesses that we were competing against were much bigger than us and we know the MRRs are like sometimes seven,

27:04eight figures. Um ARR, I mean. They are doing exactly what we're doing. So, we're like, "Okay, we can we can tackle them." Um but in 2025, actually starting from late 2024, LinkedIn has hired a compliance team with the special officer to target most companies who are pulling data out of uh LinkedIn. Um the thing is that we understand them as well in their in their situation where where in their perspective, which is they have to protect themselves from LLMs who are just like pulling so much data. They are a listed company, they're part of Microsoft, so they need to show their shareholders that they're doing something against it, but also

27:41protecting the users' data in a way. Um so, they were I think they did a massive list of whoever was do pulling some form of data from LinkedIn, people primarily, companies as well. Um and just like take the AK-47 and just fired at everybody. Small like it's the same like for those who are in B2B SaaS and lead generation, there like large companies that got hit like Seamless.AI or Apollo.io, they got in there, but some much smaller companies got in the crossfire, which were probably doing 800 MRR. You know, we're talking about these companies that are doing millions. So, it's not the same, but it just we're like, "Okay, there's

28:21no mercy. We're just going to attack everybody." So, we received that and that meant 100% of our revenue was now all of a sudden threatened overnight. You know, really just you you wake up. Actually, I woke up. I received a call from Arnaud, that was on a Saturday. I was ready to go to a classical music concert with my uh girlfriend at the

28:38time, so that was my wife. It was before going Arnaud called me and was like, "Did you see the email we we received?" I was like, "What What is it?" And he's like, "Just go check a look." I look at it, like LinkedIn compliance enforcement, etc. Cease and desist. So, we're like, "Oh, shit." So,

28:54I don't know if I can say that. No, of course you can. if I can say that, yeah. Um so, overnight that that's what happened. You know, like you're you're threatened. And I was like, "Okay, I mean, there's nothing I can do about it." Immediately, I still go to my concert. I'm not going to Nothing's

29:07going to be solved in the next hours. But then we had to figure out Not only, okay, legally, what is the the issue? Uh we didn't know we were infringing in something bad. Like, why are we in the crossfire? We were aware that at some point, if we grew too much, LinkedIn would had would have eyes on us. But we were too small at the time to be even considered, you know, like

29:26you're not even making noise to them. But they didn't matter. I think in a way we'll always see that as probably a blessing in disguise, cuz now we're finding another pivot, which is really good for for us and doesn't have the platform risk of a uh over LinkedIn. Um but if it had happened when we were at, let's say, 5 million ARR or plus, and your business is 100% reliant on this, now all of a sudden it's threatened. The platform risk is way too big. So, it happened to us when we were at 22.5 KMRR uh exactly. So,

29:57still it sucks. Like, we're like on track. That was That was amazing. Um and so, that happened. We decided to comply. You know, you have different choices to to take at that time. You can be like, "You know what? I don't care. Come get me, you know. I'm based in Hong Kong. What you going to do?" Uh but then they delete your uh LinkedIn account, they they personal LinkedIn account, business account. It makes it not sellable. Arno and I have a presence on LinkedIn. He's got about 40,000 followers. We got about 22, something uh followers. So, we have reach. You know, this is a distribution channel stuff for

30:29us, which which matters. And if we want to sell the business at some point, you can't say like, "Oh, by the way, the company account uh doesn't exist anymore, and this is what happened." So, we decided to comply. Uh and that's uh yeah, basically the revenue stabilized but tanked a little bit. We we managed actually to save some of the some of the revenue and we're just forced to actually do some do something else like rather pivot. Initially the business was pull data out of LinkedIn and find those people's emails and phone numbers. But all of our marketing and positioning was about how to export leads from LinkedIn

31:03Sales Navigator. And we were ranking super high for that whether it's SEO or YouTube. Now all of a sudden we had to shift to another another huge blue ocean market as you said, which is email finding. So many large players in in the industry. But the thing is we still did our research. I mean we saw that that market while it's it's big yes and it's already taken by so many players is growing

31:27actually. It's really growing a lot. Same for phone finding. And we're like we already do this so let's reposition ourselves in in that. Our vision initially when we started Scale list you can ask me a question because maybe I'm talking too much as well. But I have for anyone who's who's listening but our vision with Scale list when we started was not just okay, let's start a SaaS and see what's what's happening. Yes, there was a bit of that because we found a solution that we we sold but we're like okay, we're not just going to do a scraper or an email finder. Our vision is in the agency we

31:58know that the problem that people have when they do sale sales is that they always have to renew their contact list. You know, once you reach out to people was you reached out. But if you reach out to people 3 months ago maybe something has happened in their company. They've raised, they are somebody new, they will got promoted or whatever. But the process of you know, knowing that information comes with having to re-export that data and recheck it. So our vision with Scale list was to build the infrastructure or the foundation for any sales person like the number one tool where you log in or even when you

32:27wake up in the morning you want to check your notifications of what has changed in my total addressable market. These are all the contacts and all the the I could be targeting uh right now at any given moment and these are the reasons of why you should target them prioritized per day per week kind of like a Bloomberg like the people

32:45who are in finance but for sales people. So, we're going towards that now. And you started as a bootstrap SaaS um company. So, you started by injecting also money and time from your agency. Correct. And now something happened uh not long ago you got investors. Correct. Was that part of the reason because you were going in a red ocean or like what was the reason for

33:09that? So, we started looking at uh fundraising as an option because um if we rewind a little bit we were running Scale Up uh primarily main main business which was taking 100% of our time but we also said let's start Scale Up the the SaaS um but we don't know at the time you know like whether we can make it work whether with the time investment that I could put in whether it would pick up or not. We were very confident with okay with hourly generation efforts easy. We'll just uh blast uh several emails LinkedIn and so on and it's going to work. It didn't like for the first three four months

33:42like actually generating zero results. We probably had honestly one sale out of all of the outbound we've we've done. Um so, to transition from the agency to the SaaS was like okay, it's not like the the agency has hundreds of thousands in capital that we can just uh pour in there. We have to transition our time progressively from the agency to the SaaS and in order to do that you can do it immediately if you have cash because then okay, you just have the cash to to do it or as your revenue grows in the uh in the agency uh so, in the in the SaaS

34:15and you reduce your time on the agency you balance out kind of your your revenue. So, you have to do that progressively. That's what we did and we thought okay, if we want to accelerate that we should probably look at fundraising as well if we really want to give it give it a chance because we don't know whether the SaaS may not live another month or another 2 months. It'll be safer if we have cash and actually if we see already growth, we can go even faster. We raised before we got the

34:43LinkedIn issue. So, that was like we got the money in January 2025 and in April 2025 we got the LinkedIn season desist. What happened in this situation because they you kind of raise the money knowing that you are going in one market and then you have to shift? How did it work because we often say that you know raising money is nice but then you have kind of a responsibility to deliver as well. So, how does it work in

35:09this moment? You know it's it depends on the investors that you raise with and I think that was an important point for for us. I really convinced about bootstrapping and not having to report to to somebody. It was always the industry and field that we that we were in. I questioned it a little bit. I mean I I did a some work in the in VC. Arnold was in an accelerator also before so we understand that that world. Not every investor will you know require to take decisions on your business or change stuff. I mean yes we report every month but that's reporting this is even helpful for me to

35:44know where we are our growth. Okay, what has changed? How we planning? And you know like the truth is also like some investors for like smaller funds in terms of ticket size I mean early stage. They also have a portfolio of I don't know 300 400 500 maybe 1000 companies. They're not going to look in detail in every single company. So, we were looking for investors or ways of getting capital that was not involving us being like handcuffed by a group who tell us what to do. That was obviously what we were avoiding and often times you hear the negative stories and not necessarily the positive ones cuz they

36:17make better headlines and you hear often from founders oh that sucked. I mean that like I was working for the investors and I didn't like that etc. Yeah, that that happens. I'm not saying that doesn't happen, but if you're aware, right? Exactly the last podcast. Oh, yeah. So, that that happens, and I know founders for whom it it happened. But, I also know founders for whom the investors were super helpful, very available, invested half like one investor just says an angel invested half a million in this business that I that I know of. That investor was super available in many ways. They guys, I give you cash, but I also want to make

36:50sure that the investment works. I'm not going to tell you what to do, but if you tell me what I can do to help you, I will do that. So, there are investors who are also this way. And I think if I'm an investor, I'll definitely be that kind of investor. Obviously, you want to look at what's what's happening and be supportive of the of the business. So, that was a requirement. We raised from Tiny Seed, which is a B2B SaaS

37:11accelerator based in the in the States. They focus on early-stage businesses, usually two two founders, sometimes solo founder led, some other agency founders who turned into SaaS founders as well. And they're super helpful. Like, for example, when we had this season and this, they were the first people obviously we reached out to. Super helpful. The founder Rob Walling and our full set as well. Like, both of them took us on calls separately. Some

37:36of their mentors took our calls with us. They really put the time, and they gave us some real advice. Nobody was like, "Guys, what did you do? You should You should have known better." or whatever. They're like, "Okay, guys, this is a life situation for you right now. If you're continuing to do that, you can choose to do that, obviously, but it's going to be difficult to uh

37:55to go against uh LinkedIn. Now, you'll probably have to pivot in a certain way. And I remember Inar had the the second founder, he gave us a really good advice. He was like, "Guys, you've been building this business for 2 years. You've experienced growth at a great scale. That's amazing. Now, if you're shifting to something else, you're in it for at least another 5 years. Make sure that whatever you choose is something that you want to do for the next 5 years as well, not just like a chicken run out." And he said like, "If it's not something else you if it's not something you want to do,

38:25then fine, don't do it. Now, there's clauses with investors as well like giving back money whatever that that is like liquidation uh um clauses, but that's what I mean like whoever you choose to get money from Yeah. like will also impact how you report to them. And we were clear about how we wanted to operate with our investors. So, you got got kind of um big mentorship above like also having like the money, you also got mentorship that

38:52helps you in the way. Yeah. Um what happened since then? Because you So, January, you got the money, then you got the big problem with LinkedIn, you pivoted. And since you uh stable again kind of, what happened? Did you choose the same distribution channel? Did you change your mindset? Like what did you change? There is um simply chronologically there's several pieces that that happened as soon as I'll shorten it as much as possible. Just go to the to the juice. When LinkedIn happened, of course we're running around like headless

39:26chickens. What do we do? What do we do? We got to comply with them. Complying with that with them meant also changing our uh marketing. Marketing is you know, what we what we say and how people find us. Positioning that's when people land on our website, do they understand what we're doing? And does it match our marketing? And then the onboarding like

39:42do we guide the people to first value? Once as they land on like they sign up, do they get the value for what we're offering? Before we was super clear on our marketing how to export leads from Sales Navigator and find their emails. Uh videos super clear. Positioning they land on the website number one LinkedIn Sales Navigator data extractor with emails whatever super clear. And onboarding was guiding them straight to that. So, we had to pivot that around cuz we couldn't offer that anymore. We were changing it like an our marketing was still saying for best performing video was still how to export leads from LinkedIn Sales

40:14Navigator. So, people come to the website. Whatever we have on the website, you can say, I don't know if a burger restaurant, people will still sign up to say, "Okay, I saw the video. I'm going to just create an account." You know? And then we were like, "I can't do this stuff anymore. Like how like the stuff you told me on the video doesn't work." So, you can imagine our

40:30support chat was just like going crazy. Arno was in charge of it at the time. So, it's like we got to find ways to to go around that and pivot uh faster. And so, after like changing our positioning just to be able to adjust to remove everything that was like named in the region, we went into the second phase of like, "Okay, now how do we actually position ourselves?" We tried several things. It was a bit of a back and forth until we committed of, "Okay, first phase for us is we want to be a data provider cuz that's already what we are. Um providing emails and phone

41:00numbers is already something that we do. We have a presence in Asia. So, the business is uh registered in Singapore uh and I'm based in Hong Kong, Arno in Singapore, and our team is in is in Asia as well. Um and that's also our background in in the agency. There are no providers in in Asia at the scale of an Apollo uh Hunter in France or or whatever. So, that was our positioning for for some time. We have very good data in in Asia. I mean, obviously we have also top-level data in the US and in Europe, which is also where most of our market is actually. Um and we

41:30shifted towards this and we started seeing actually good signs with that, including um better uh better churn uh than than previously. Exactly. You know, when you extract a list, you don't do it once and then you don't need to do it more. Um as a data provider this is where the interesting opportunity comes uh comes in. You mentioned what channel did we use? We continued doing YouTube cuz that's the the channel that worked for us. And since now 3 weeks, we hired a full-time head of YouTube to manage completely our channel. She's a uh YouTube marketing expert. It turns out

42:02that she's actually my wife as well. Really? Which is fun to work with with her. She's like Yeah, it was an opportunity that came actually because we Arno had less time to do YouTube videos. I had less time to do YouTube as well cuz we're pushing now our positioning is we're primarily a sales API provider. So larger companies, some of the outbound tools that people use that provide email finding as well use some of our data for instance. Large agencies, large sales teams, they use our API to find contact details but also now with with AI we have an MCP server. So for those who don't know MCP just simply is

42:41your connection between your LLM so accessing from Cloud or ChatGPT to our database or infrastructure to get emails. So you don't even need to log in to our our Scale list account or whatever. You can find you can just drop your list of 10,000 people if you want to on Cloud and Cloud will find the emails but through our infrastructure cuz otherwise they they like an LLM cannot do do that on their own. So we're positioning ourselves in this way sales led is API product led is AI related stuff so you can see now since 3 weeks maybe the face on the

43:15video on the channel has has changed. Yeah, so and it came through because like she was available at that very time where we were looking for either an agency or somebody to come in. And I just went on a walk on my on my own one day like I go on this little nature so I I love to hike and and think. And I thought I should live with the person we need to

43:35hire. So I I spoke to her. I spoke to Arno. Arno was super stoked cuz I was eager cuz she had helped us a little bit before with with some YouTube like just thinking about our content strategy and so on. And now we said okay, let's go let's let's do that. So now your strategy is YouTube. You changed your position and your positioning. Is there something else that you want to do or you want to do this like YouTube and SEO and keep doing that for a while or you want to start ads

44:01maybe? No, we So it's very good question. We think we want to put all of our resources in in this. People will have different ideas and strategies about okay, what you should be doing. Ads we've done we've done some. We may do some again, but we want to because we're shifting our positioning as well. We want to keep doing what we're doing well and do it better rather than distract ourselves with resources until we reach a certain certain stage where like okay, this is running so well that why not help it for example ads we consider doing ads to promote some of our videos and not just

44:36like Google Ads or whatever cuz that's where we get our traffic from and that's where we are we're also that's a moat in a way this way of distribution because it's really difficult to get your on YouTube. It's really difficult to uh to get success out of out of YouTube like whether that's recording, editing, the time it takes to to do it, come up with the right video. You know, you put

44:57so much time and then okay, 64 views. Great. You're like wow. First it doesn't matter that much I'll say cuz the viewership is has high value, but if we can now push to even more yeah, we'll we'll go for it. So it was a long long roller coaster. You had some success sometimes well bad

45:15thing happen. If you had to start over, what would you do different and what yeah maybe mistake would you avoid? Yeah, I think um I would think a lot more and this is something that I I share also with friends who want to shift for example my agency to to SAS or just want to get started with SAS cuz now you can just

45:35like a vibe code anything in a in a way. Um I would say spend a lot of time because building now is easy, but spend a lot of time thinking about what business am I creating in the sense of SAS okay, is it subscription, one-time fees, what whatever that is. What are the valuations and as in like what how can I exit? And is it a market that I

45:54see myself really doing something in? Will I enjoy uh doing that? Um the part of enjoying I think is super important. You know, for a lot of people talking about emails and phone is super boring. It is to me sometimes, as well, but because I come from the space, I know it so well, I still get really excited about it. And now, for example, with wow, actually people can use Skylist, our email finding and our phone finding and probably other data points that we're going to have in the future, but not from there, but they can do it from AI. So, I can entire sphere. I get

46:26really really stoked about it. I mean, I'm I'm very bullish about the fact that your UI is not going to matter anymore. Uh if you don't have a SAS that is an infrastructure, like we call it software as a service today, but if software is taken by another interface, which is your your chat, in the end, you have to

46:43build an infrastructure as a service. That's where we're going for as well. So, the advice is that, yeah, definitely spend more time in thinking through what is it that I'm actually going to be uh building. You know, play around with the idea of, okay, how big is the market? What are the valuations there? Is it

46:58something that I will enjoy doing? Because you can build whatever from scratch, and there's an excitement with, you know, seeing something come through. Just one prompt, and website is already there. It's like a playing with Legos when you were a kid, you know, you're super excited with that with that. That can be a hindrance, I find, in creating too much and then getting lost with I don't even know what I'm going to

47:17promote. Why I should promote this one? Is there a market for that? Are there high valuations? Are there like exits exit opportunities? If you're looking to exit as well. And yeah, I think that's that's definitely what I would I would advise. I wanted to stop there, but I think I have another question because you talked

47:33about it. Yeah, sure. Uh AI. So, you say like you build an MCP. Mhm. What else did you do to make to make like Skylist uh agent friendly? Yeah. Um It's uh the the thing is like agent friendly, if you mean about uh MCPs, the MCP is a mirror of your API uh in a way. So, the better structure, the faster your response rates are, and so on. So, like, that's really the foundation of your your architecture. So, that's really what we are like even today actually when before we had the the meeting, I was still again reviewing how is how our servers are performing, how

48:08is our database structured, do we respond fast enough or not. That's one one thing cuz I think it's important that you have the right infrastructure to do that. Another thing that is under estimated is maybe not directly to technically agent friendly, but it's actually future use case friendly. We're in the business of data. So, because we sell data, there's compliance measures to be taken in data. A lot of competitors, a lot of players in this sphere, when you get started, you know, it's a high cost actually if you don't if you don't know what to do, it's super complicated actually. I'm becoming a data compliance nerd. Whatever the CCPA,

48:45CCPA, etc. because I know that this is going to be a moat. A lot of our larger companies, you know, they ask us okay guys, like, are you compliant with these things? And we know that a lot of competitors cannot be compliant, so they will be dismissed and we sign deals as through that. So, the agent friendliness, why I mentioned compliance is one is we have the architecture that we improve all the time for any agent to be able to just, you know, pick and use what we do. Structured in a way that it's super simple and fast fast response. The second one being actually the data that your agent is uh

49:19is calling up and is using from us, it's legit data. You can use it. You're not going to face any issues down down the line. And that's an important thing cuz like if you feed your LLM with crap, good luck. That's the thing, yeah. Amazing. Well, Youssef, thank you for your time. That was a really nice

49:36conversation. That was fun, man. Thanks for having me, yeah.