Completely co-sign this. Am doing it right now.
The fastest way to build a $100M company is to buy a great agency.
Productize it. And turn it into a vertical SaaS business.
There is a real opportunity here.
Agencies look uninteresting to venture investors. That is exactly the point.
They trade at low EBITDA multiples, while vertical SaaS businesses trade at double-digit revenue multiples.
But the best agencies sit on two assets most startups spend years trying to acquire: deep vertical expertise and embedded distribution through real industry relationships.
They also have something far more valuable than your AI wrapper tool. They have recurring relationships with the exact customers a vertical SaaS company wants, but usually cannot reach cheaply.
This is where the arbitrage is.
You buy the agency on a services multiple. You extract the repeatable parts of the work. You turn process into software, workflows, guardrails... and AI.
Over time, revenue shifts from hours to recurring fees.
The best version of this strategy does not try to eliminate the agency. It uses the agency as the lab. Services stay close to the edge cases and software absorbs the common paths/workflows.
The mistake is thinking of this as “services to software.”
The opportunity is thinking of it as “expertise to infrastructure.”
When you get it right, you are not starting a SaaS company from zero. You are upgrading a business that already understands its customer, its economics, and its distribution, with multiple layers of arbitrage working in your favor.