Pivoting our SaaS: Stick with Business Owners or chase Marketing Agencies?
My two co-founders and I have been building WebGremlin, our first SaaS, for 1-2 months now. It’s a website analysis tool. After we did the customer dev, we targeted three groups: business owners, marketers, and marketing agencies. We validated business owners with an MVP and made a few sales, so we started working on version 1.
We are having a soft launch now and it showed lower than expected conversion from business owners. However a few marketing agencies reached out, asking for an agency plan and are ready to pay, even without the features they want, basically saying "shut up and take my money".
Now we’re stuck. Agencies seem like the hotter market, but pivoting means redoing our homepage, marketing, and adding features, more dev work when I’d rather focus on marketing. Also we haven't done our official launch so it's still early to say if we should pivot or not.
Do we stick with business owners or pivot to agencies?
What’s the smart move here?
Replies
Here, your business plan can help. Which target has the most potential? Market size, CAC/customer type, LTV, etc.
My advice would be to pivot if the return is better on agencies, especially as you seem to have found a good PMF with them. You have to take back a lot of the work you've already done, but the ultimate goal is business.
@maxime_jegat That's great perspective. Thank you for the great advice
I think I roasted your site on the big roast thread. My two cents is that it's going to be very hard to sell direct to business owners and much easier to find, chat with, and sell this to agencies. Can't you just make a 'whitelabel' page and sell to marketing agencies off of it while still keeping your same branding to sell direct? It's pretty normal to have a Tier A and B price for direct and Tier C for agencies.
@steveb Creating a seperate landing page is great idea. Thank you for the feedback. And yes you roasted my website :) Cheers Steve
Great breakdown — and you’re in a classic early-stage SaaS dilemma: validate the initial ICP or follow the pull?
If agencies are already raising their hands (and wallets), that’s strong signal. But I’d suggest a hybrid approach before a full pivot:
• Create a light agency landing page (without going all-in on features yet)
• Set up 1:1 calls or a waitlist to test pricing appetite and map must-have features
• See if you can sell without building first — that’ll give you a clearer “go/no-go”
In parallel, keep nurturing the solo business owner audience, but don’t ignore where the heat is.
You’re not stuck — you’re just at a really promising fork. And that’s a good sign.
@gianmaria_caltagirone Yeas 1:1 is great call, that's what we plan to do next so we can pinpoint exactly their needs. Thank you for the feedback!