Before the AI era (pre-2021), I ran a marketing agency. Back then, client acquisition on LinkedIn was all manual. Once AI agents started becoming a thing, I built one for my agency's internal use, never intended to sell it. It worked really well for us.
A few colleagues and partners kept pushing me to turn it into a SaaS. I said no, we were already profitable running the agency, why complicate things.
Then a few weeks later, I was on an onboarding call with a new client, and he asked, "How did you guys know I was looking for marketing help?"
I told him straight up: we have an AI agent that analyzes LinkedIn profiles and picks up on signals. If someone comments, engages, or posts anything hinting they're looking for marketing, it flags it and reaches out.
He got interested immediately and wanted to buy the agent for his own sales team, was ready to pay well for it. I told him it wasn't public, not for sale. He pushed back: "So make it a SaaS."
That conversation is basically what got the ball rolling. A few months later we actually started building it out.
The hardest part, unsurprisingly, was getting our first users. Our GTM was pretty meta: we used our own tool to book meetings with potential customers and sell them directly.
akhtaaar•41m ago