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

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

This episode of the SaaS Podcast features Farzad Rashidi, co-founder of Respona, on how a long plateau forced him to rethink the company’s business model. Instead of continuing to push a DIY SaaS product, Respona shifted to a done-for-you, outcome-based service built on top of its software. That move dramatically improved customer pull, expanded contract sizes, and helped the company 5x revenue in 12 months after years of slow growth.

The conversation also goes deep on Respona’s current focus: helping brands show up in AI-generated answers across ChatGPT, Claude, Google AI Overviews, and similar systems.

Key business model shift

From SaaS tool to outcome-based service

• Respona originally started as a DIY outreach/link-building SaaS tool.
• Despite steady inbound traffic, growth stalled because customers often signed up but didn’t use the product enough.
• The team kept trying to fix churn by adding features, but the real issue was that customers didn’t want to do the work themselves.
• A pivotal conversation with a large marketing agency changed everything:
  • They initially wanted the DIY tool and negotiated on price.
  • Then they proposed paying per result instead of per license.
• Farzad responded by offering to do the work for them, using Respona behind the scenes.
• That first deal started at roughly $7K–$8K/month and later grew to about $65K–$70K/month.

Why the change worked

• Customers were not rejecting the value; they were rejecting the effort required to get the value.
• The service model matched customer demand better than the software-only model.
• It also allowed Respona to capture more value by charging for outcomes rather than seat-based access.
• Despite moving toward services, the company preserved margin by productizing the workflow and automating parts of delivery.

How Respona helps brands show up in AI answers

The core idea

• Respona is now positioned as a way to help brands appear in AI answers, not just track visibility.
• The company doesn’t just report on performance; it actively helps brands get cited in the sources LLMs use.

How the strategy works

• LLMs generate answers by searching the web and pulling from high-authority editorial sources.
• Respona identifies the kinds of articles and sites AI systems cite, such as:
  • listicles
  • product reviews
  • comparison guides
• Instead of blindly pitching those exact sites, Respona finds “lookalike” publishers:
  • similar authority
  • similar topical relevance
  • similar search visibility
• They then place fresh, high-quality content on those publishers with the client brand featured prominently.
• Over time, this increases the likelihood that the brand appears in AI citations and answers.

Why this matters

• AI visibility is not just about your own website ranking.
• External mentions and editorial validation matter a lot.
• The work also tends to create traditional SEO benefits:
  • backlinks
  • more organic traffic
  • stronger brand visibility in search

Lessons on productized services

What changed operationally

• The first service delivery was extremely manual:
  • a Google Sheet for intake
  • humans handling execution
  • no formal workflow
• As demand grew, the team had to build:
  • client portals
  • publisher management systems
  • internal automation “brains” to connect the workflow

The important distinction

• Farzad emphasized that not all services are equal.
• The goal is not to become a custom agency with endless client calls and bespoke work.
• Instead, the service must be:
  • standardized
  • tiered
  • priced clearly
  • built for automation later
• In other words: productized service first, software-enhanced delivery second.

Strategic takeaways for founders

Key themes from the interview

• Don’t dismiss services too quickly.
  If customers want outcomes, offering the done-for-you version may unlock growth.
• Talk to current customers.
  Ask them directly whether they’d pay for you to do the work.
• Look for signs of product-market fit in demand, not just product usage.
  Sometimes customers want the result but not the workflow.
• Build for scale from day one if you can.
  The service should be structured so software and AI can automate it over time.
• External validation is becoming more important.
  For AI visibility especially, being cited by other sources matters more than self-promotion alone.

Notes on SEO, AEO, and AI visibility

The modern search landscape

• Farzad argues that SEO is not dead, but it has changed.
• The job is no longer just to rank your own pages.
• Brands now need to be consistently mentioned across authoritative sources because AI systems pull from multiple citations.
• Reddit is useful, but it is far from enough:
  • it may be the most-cited single source
  • but it represents less than 5% of total citations
• The bigger opportunity is still editorial coverage from trusted websites.

Lightning round highlights

Advice Farzad disagrees with

• “Don’t go into services.”
• His view: services can be a powerful path if they are productized and outcome-based.

Book recommendation

• Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

Hard-earned lesson

• Good businesses take time.
• He says he was overly confident early on and had to learn humility through years of struggle.

Favorite time-saving tool

• Granola, for meeting transcription and note-taking

What he does for fun

• Plays tennis

Bottom line

This episode is a strong case study in how a struggling SaaS company found growth by abandoning dogmatic SaaS thinking and focusing on customer outcomes. Respona’s shift from DIY software to productized service not only unlocked revenue growth, but also positioned the company well for the AI-search era, where authoritative external mentions are becoming more valuable than ever.