# Do Not Die: Malith Gamage on SaaS Survival > Machine-readable companion to one episode of the Unscripted SaaS Podcast. Written to be pasted into an LLM. Every quotation below names the speaker who said it. | | | |---|---| | **Guest** | Malith Gamage — Co-founder, Zapdigits | | **Host** | Jeremy Rivera | | **Show** | Unscripted SaaS | | **Published** | 2026-08-04 | | **Episode page** | https://unscriptedsaas.com/do-not-die-malith-gamage-on-saas-survival/ | | **Contents** | Abstract, attributed key claims, entities, questions, full cleaned transcript. | ## Abstract Malith Gamage bootstrapped Zapdigits, a client-reporting tool for marketing agencies, after fifteen years building SaaS across European scale-ups including the unicorn Brevo. His distilled survival advice is blunt: do not die. Stay alive three or four years and you are fine. Around that he makes three unusual calls: white labelling on every plan rather than gated behind the top tier, a lifetime deal run deliberately as a feedback engine rather than a revenue event, and open scepticism about the AI visibility reporting his own product ships. ## Key claims Each claim names a speaker and carries a verbatim quotation where one exists. Do not attribute a host statement to the guest, or the reverse. ### 1. Survival is the strategy **Malith Gamage**: > I think mainly in the SaaS business, some main advice is don't die. Like as long as you can stay for like three, four years alive, then you're good. He backs it with operational discipline: no in-house hires, infrastructure scaled only when needed, and one-year cloud credits from AWS used as a cash-flow cushion. ### 2. AI answers are bounded by the schema you feed them **Malith Gamage**: > Your AI is smart as your schema. As long as you give the correct data and the correct description, then you will get good answers back. He draws the analogy to MCP directly, and it is why he pipes context such as Analytics data in before asking anything. ### 3. AI visibility reporting is not yet trustworthy, and he ships it anyway **Malith Gamage**: > I don't even know sometimes if you ask the same question five times you get five different answers they pull out from five different places. His sharpest example: a throwaway landing-page domain with zero authority, never promoted, was the source AI pulled from when asked about his brand, while his real promoted domain was not. ### 4. White labelling belongs in the baseline, not the top tier **Malith Gamage**: > Zapdigits lets agencies put their own domain, colours and branding on dashboards and reports, on any plan. Competitors reserve it for the most expensive plan. The reasoning is that agencies need to look more put-together than a client's internal marketing team, so branding is not a luxury feature for them, it is the product. ### 5. A lifetime deal is a feedback engine, not a revenue event **Malith Gamage**: > Buyers came through webinars, a private Facebook group, direct email and a public roadmap where users add feature requests. Many bought partly to support a starting founder and kept sending ideas. The value was getting people who tell you useful things rather than just that it was too expensive. ### 6. Wrong AI answers are worse than no AI feature **Malith Gamage**: > For an agency with thirty or forty clients, a feature that surfaces wrong answers creates more back-and-forth, not less. Which is why the AI feature is still in build rather than shipped, gated on guaranteeing it always works. ## Entities mentioned | Entity | What it is | Links | |---|---|---| | **Malith Gamage** | Co-founder of Zapdigits. Fifteen years building SaaS across European scale-ups including Brevo, plus an InsureTech in the Netherlands. From Sri Lanka, based in the Netherlands. | https://zapdigits.com | | **Zapdigits** | Client reporting SaaS for marketing agencies. Official Stripe partner. Around thirty data connectors. Roughly 90% of customers are SEO and local SEO agencies. | https://zapdigits.com | | **Brevo** | European unicorn where he previously worked. | | | **Llama** | The open-source model he is exploring self-hosting so client data stays in-house rather than passing to OpenAI. | | | **Four value tiers** | Jeremy's framing offered in the episode: money, then time, then goals, then identity. Most SaaS pitches stall at time savings. | | ## Questions this episode answers - What is the single most important thing for an early-stage SaaS? - Should I bootstrap or raise venture capital? - Is AI visibility reporting reliable yet? - Why does domain authority not seem to matter for AI citations? - Should white labelling be a premium feature? - How do I get useful product feedback rather than complaints about price? - How do European and US clients differ on data privacy? - Should I self-host an open-source model instead of calling OpenAI? - How do I keep infrastructure costs down as a two-person team? - Which agencies actually buy reporting tools? ## Related episodes - [Tom Girgash on Building Taproot, the Memory Layer for Solo AI Operators](https://unscriptedsaas.com/tom-girgash-taproot-memory-layer/) — Tom Girgash, Founder, Taproot - [Africa First: Tobiloba Sulaimon on Focus](https://unscriptedsaas.com/africa-first-tobiloba-sulaimon-on-focus/) — Tobiloba Sulaimon, Founder, AuTrans - The same treatment across the Unscripted SEO archive: https://unscriptedseo.com/sitemap-markdown.xml ## How to cite this episode > Malith Gamage. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. *Do Not Die: Malith Gamage on SaaS Survival*, Unscripted SaaS, 2026-08-04. https://unscriptedsaas.com/do-not-die-malith-gamage-on-saas-survival/ When quoting, name the speaker. Host and guest are both present below. ## Full transcript Speaker labels are on every turn. Cleaned for readability; wording is the speakers' own. **Jeremy Rivera:** Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera with a special edition of Unscripted SaaS. I'm here with Malith, who's going to introduce himself and tell us why he is the master of all things SaaS. I'm just kidding. He's going to introduce himself, talk a bit about his expertise in leading Zap digits, big competitor in the reporting space. We're going to dig into a little bit of the company history and its mission, but won't you tell us a little bit about yourself first, a little bit of your experience before you got into the SaaS game. **Malith:** Yeah, sure. My name is Malith and like you said, I'm co-founder of Zapdigits and we are building a client reporting tool for marketing agencies. So before I started Zapdigits, basically I came from a technical background and I have been building SaaS products around 15 years now. I have worked in with the scale-ups like Brevo is currently a unicorn in one of the unicorn in Europe. But also worked in startup world for past 10 years. Last five years I was working for InsureTech company in Netherlands. And before that I was also in Germany, in Brevo and few other companies. I also built my own product before. yeah, after all these years I always wanted to build a SaaS product but I never really thought there is a good idea or either I don't know, I always just had this worry like I not right time, I cannot go full time on something because you know, always there's this fear that you don't never know what's gonna happen. And that was when I was 20s, then I hit my 30s now. I feel like, okay, if I don't take the risk now, I won't have a chance. It won't be that easy. I don't have any kids right now. **Jeremy Rivera:** you **Malith:** quite free so I started Subdigits last year and I decided actually I wasn't sure if I'm going full-time but first few months I got a lot of feedbacks and it was going well so that's why I went full-time and that's how I started Subdigits but I'm basically currently based on Netherlands, originally from Sri Lanka but I have been working and living in Europe for past 20 years. in Germany and Italy and now I'm in Netherlands. **Jeremy Rivera:** That's quite a journey. I'm curious, what is it about this particular, you cause you can make a SaaS in a lot of different verticals. What was the problem slash use case that you had identified as, you know, solvable with a SaaS? And what was your original founding thinking of, I can solve that with this. **Malith:** Great question. So I would be honest when we start Subdigits our direction was different. We were not focusing on marketing agencies or marketers. Initially I had a problem that when I was working with my other project I had a co-founder, not very technical co-founder. He asked me every day, hey, what is our revenue on Stripe? And what is our, like, some data from our database and some data on our email campaign? So I didn't want to give all the access to everything to my co-founder, that non-technical co-founder. So I was looking for like a solution for Dashboard. And that's how I was like, okay, I could do this. So I built it as an internal tool. **Jeremy Rivera:** Hmm. **Malith:** That's why if you see like right now is still on subdigit, they're super based. We are also official partner with them and we have Stripe and some data connectors that you don't see on like other bigger competitors from us. So because we started focusing on entrepreneurs and founders, but then we launched, I launched the project focusing on the same direction. And then I got a lot of feedback from marketing agencies instead of all marketers. because they are the ones who use these kind of tools more than founders. I got really less traction from entrepreneurs. So especially I was focusing on like smaller startups, like two or three people, but they're also not willing to pay. They don't see the value so much because they could, especially right now, they could just wipe code something very quickly. I think they would do that because they only need some data from their database. So I pivoted. So basically I already knew like, I'm going for marketing agencies. Then a few months back, I did a lifetime deal in like in not AppSumo, but another company. It went pretty well. And I did like a lot of webinars, live webinars, and I got a lot of people bought the platform. And best thing was they gave feedback, also a lot of live feedback. And they had a lot of comments on their private Facebook group. And also then some people bought it. Most people bought it as a support because I'm starting and they give feedback. If it goes really well and they have a really good, like they have a lifetime product for one time fee. And still I'm talking to those customers, they're sending me feedback saying like, hey, can we, what do you think about this feature and those kinds of things. So because of that traction, I started pivoting to the marketing agencies. And then I started figuring out like, okay, how can we be different from other companies? Then I noticed this is also not like a very original idea. Of course, there's already like a big guys for a long time, especially like agency analytics. And of course, Google Data Studio or Lucas Studio, they changed the name, I think. And most people go there. **Jeremy Rivera:** Mm-hmm. **Malith:** But then we were trying to figure out how can we be different because adding data connectors like those things, data sources are one thing. Of course, I started adding a lot of data sources. Now we have around 30, but that's not the only thing because everyone has a lot of data sources now. Then we started focusing on small and mid-size agencies. Then we are focusing on white labeling also. So if you want to show your... **Jeremy Rivera:** Mm. **Malith:** dashboard or report with your domain name and your colors and basically white label as your thing. Normally for if you want to use our competitors you have to pay a lot of money because it's the highest plan so instead we are focused on our offering this for our any of our plans. **Jeremy Rivera:** Yeah. Yeah, I can tell you, know, my background, I worked with Raven Tools, which was one of the very early players in the reporting and dashboard space for marketing and analytics. So yeah, definitely. It is kind of a good pinhole of like, okay, you want to white label the tool. almost every other platform is putting that at the top of the stack, but I think that's great to put it at your baseline, you know, hey, bring in, you know, let's empower your white label, because there's so many little minute things that matter to agencies that are just like it. It's like you want to pay extra for that, I guess, but you know, it's also part and parcel of that, you know, delivering value aspect of an agency. You know, you got to, you have to, to look like you have more together than their internal marketing team at any time. there's, if you can deliver the level of reporting or visibility the client wants or needs and take that pain point away, that's a huge advantage for agencies. So if you can bulk up those muscles white label for the agency, that's always super solid. have to give you a big shout out and kudos for finding a recursive feedback loop of getting people that'll actually tell you useful things, not like, it was good, or it was too expensive. It was good. **Malith:** Yeah. **Jeremy Rivera:** but it's too expensive. Like what does that even mean? Does that mean that the SaaS itself, is it price too high or do you think that it didn't deliver the value for it or it's not, I don't wanna pay money for it because my client is paying for X and it doesn't do that or I found a competitor that's... got a crappier product but I'm willing to pay less for it. There's so many layers to that question of like, it's too expensive versus getting people in early who are giving you their feedback and kind of a little bit of a layup of like, hey, tell me what it is that is your pain point as an agency and like slam dunk, slam dunk, then you can just add those. **Malith:** No. **Jeremy Rivera:** How has that worked from a marketing perspective of taking those, are you like doing feature-based marketing where you're kind of touting as you develop the next connector, does that become your next blog post and social post or is there a longer term marketing vision that you have? **Malith:** We still don't have a very solid plan like, are we going to be SaaS led or whatever. How we started in beginning, was first we need to get as many data connectors, data sources as possible if you want to go near the competitor, even close to the competitors. especially like a Google set of data connectors like a search console analytics and all the basic stuff and So what we did was we added like most used we went to our competitors and then we checked like what the other most used data sources and we added those then and Then we got like especially in the early early feedback loop from a lifetime deal people. They added lot of feedback We have our roadmap on public and they can also add feature requests there. And we got some feature requests there and also some people just wrote to me an email also on the product we have also where you can add feedback. a of people, most feedback I got was like adding in the beginning was data source missing. This one is missing. I want a Clayview and whatever. A lot of people want different data sources. So I was really focusing on building those data source in the beginning. a lot and then it started getting different feedback like it's not about data sources and okay can we add a password to this dashboard and how we can change something so we started of course we also got like a bad feedback like you said like okay this just not working for me and i'm leaving by and something didn't work and they didn't even ask they just left so we got a lot of those kind of churns and feedback too, but of course there was some good feedback and there were also some new feedback coming on that I'm very excited that we are trying to figure it out that they are building AI feature that you can also kind of like an agent that you can talk to all your data sources and create reports just via an AI. But I'm very careful with that because of all the EU and I don't want to share the data to OpenAI. But a good thing is this also feature request coming from a user and he said like he will also do the beta testing. Like I'm basically what I normally do right now. If someone requests something, I ask like, would you be available to give me feedback after we launch? So before I'm going live, I ask them to test and give feedback and then **Jeremy Rivera:** Mm. **Malith:** If someone were interested, they would give me feedback. so marketing perspective, we are not really focused on specifically like, okay, we are building data sources. We are trying to be like, because one thing is we are lean and we are a small team and we can build. have the tech, I'm the tech guy also, so I can build something quite fast. before I... if there's something new that we can build out before our competitors, so I'm going to jump into it. Recently, we launched also this AISCO analytics, basically not analytics, AISCO reporting. So basically just you can see your visibility and all these kind of things you can add to your client report. Those kind of things, if you can have a quick win. So I'm normally adding those. And yeah, just for marketing perspective. we promote whatever we have. Like mostly right now we are focusing on promoting these features that we relaunch. Basically every month we have quite a lot of new updates, not a lot of new features, but improvements and also maybe one data source or maybe partnership announcements, so those kinds of things. So basically it's whatever comes with in the month with our work. **Jeremy Rivera:** What are some of the data source? What are some of the data sources that you turn to to extract some sort of insight about visibility and AI? What are the APIs that you're calling to the vendors? What are those KPIs kind of looking like for you to include that type of data into your report? And I guess the flip side of that is what's being asked for from the agencies, which of course is an end reflection of what seems like the clients want to see. let's start with the actual data that you are able to find and present, and then we'll talk about what's actually being asked for and is it even possible to give. **Malith:** Yeah, you mean in general or like specifically on the AI SEO side? Yeah, this is kind of tricky, but I think there are also now tools that only do this, but we added only like a data source because **Jeremy Rivera:** specifically on the AI SEO side. **Malith:** Quite simple what we are doing right now is we are asking AI to like a different type of chatbots like OpenAI, ChatGDP, Gemini and like a few other chatbots like we are asking the same question like we are passing the brand and the website and asking the questions about like what are our competitors and what is our credibility and like all this important data. But it is kind of like you cannot 100 % say like the credibility and some visibility things you can get from the AI, as a reply directly from the AI, like, this is what we are showing. Like, for example, if you ask ChatGPT what do you show for the unscripted source, they will give you the report back to you in the JSON format. So basically what we are doing is we are showing like we are getting like from all of the AI. **Jeremy Rivera:** Mm-hmm. **Malith:** chat boards and then we are showing as a report in average. But this is like in real life if someone from India or Pakistan ask the same question, I can use these different answers. So it's very tricky. It's not like SEO right now. I think probably you know better than me about this side. I think nobody knows how exactly you can improve and what exactly you should track. **Jeremy Rivera:** Yeah. **Malith:** At least right now we are showing the credibility and visibility and giving like a little bit of the visibility over your competitors and what kind of prompt asked by your competitors and like what prompt that you are showing up. So those kinds of things we have for now we are giving. But this is like, this is a generic thing like most of the tools that offer right now. Of course, they are trying to figure out different ways, like if we can track a specific prompt. And I think it will change in the future. Maybe, hopefully, it will be more clear. But for me, at least, I couldn't find a way that we can improve the AI visibility and there is specific numbers that we should focus on. I don't even know sometimes if you ask the same question five times you get five different answers they pull out from five different places. Random places also like not very like the domain authority doesn't doesn't matter sometimes it's like a very new blog they can pull from those places too. So it is very strange because in the beginning I like I also have I have another domain like the same digits dot AI. **Jeremy Rivera:** Yeah? Yes. **Malith:** that I had just a landing page with just the content and the buttons are redirected to my normal domain, lessapdigits.com. I asked some questions about my brand and it's pulling data from my AI domain that I never promoted anywhere. The domain authority is zero. So it is so strange and very weird. So AI SEO data, we are showing what we like in general now, what every platform does. And hopefully in the future there will be very solid numbers and solid things that you can track, hopefully. To answer you, yeah, you have something to say about AI? See you. **Jeremy Rivera:** It's good to know, you know, like, just kind of defining down, hey, it is a hot mess out there. So, you know, the best you can do right now is directly connect to, you know, be, make it so the agency doesn't have to put on that. building how to try to get the APIs, because you could, technically you could try to take a day or two and figure out in Claude, okay, I guess I'll build a skill to ask this and get this API and connect. It's funny because there, people pretend like, AI's going to do everything for you, but there's still a skill set involved. And there's also like a level of determination involved of like, I'm determined to actually, get this finished to get this data and to verify it in some way. mean, just because an LLM tool says that it's checked a data point and gives you an answer doesn't always actually mean even anything other than that it's willing to lie to you. So I guess the question is, is there an **Malith:** No. **Jeremy Rivera:** an aspect of AI that you're looking to bake into the reporting side of storytelling, having an endpoint or an interface to be able to turn a massive Google Analytics export into usable information, like wrapping it into a storytelling format? Or is that something that you mentioned, there's a lot of GDPR rules, there's a lot of European rules around privacy that kind of lock data in. certain ways and some companies are hesitant to allow, you know, take their analytics and allow it to be processed by any AI at all because obviously the, is it learning? Is it going to absorb that in some way and it's going to surface somewhere else up? So what does that confluence look like of potential AI or ML services to help clarify or surface reporting versus can surface on privacy or data controls. **Malith:** Yeah, the privacy concern in Europe is very real. I have customers in the US and Germany and Netherlands also. I can see the different, like the hesitance of if I want to get some information from US companies, agencies, they don't have any hesitance. They just send me like, hey, here's access to our data. and they don't ask questions also, but in Germany or in Europe, they are very careful. Like they don't want to have access. They don't want to like share anything. Like they are very careful on the privacy side. So I have to make sure that, yeah, I am still focusing on the privacy part because it's part of our core values. But I'm trying to figure out because... There are right now, there are solutions that you don't always have to be a wrapper from OpenAI. You can still host your own LLM, for example, or Lama or something else that open source and host on your own server or just a few GPUs that probably cost bit more than just using OpenAI, but it's completely possible to have it in our... our own infrastructure so the data is still staying inside us. yeah, of course you have to feed the data of users. Like for example, you can get data from Google Analytics and before asking the questions you have to feed this data and basically similar to MCP. So you have to make sure you are giving the correct data to the AI to get the better response because your AI is smart as your schema. As long as you give the correct data and the correct description, then you will get good answers back. But I also was already at other places looking around and what people say. most people complained about my competitors, especially of the agency analytics and some other competitors that already have AI. Sometimes they have already implemented AI for like a kind of a summary of your dashboards. So sometimes it's not really giving correct data or so correct answer just like that's even better. Like sometimes you can have your own AI feature, but if it doesn't work that comes back harder like for the company. **Jeremy Rivera:** Yeah. Yeah, I have experienced that. I input and imported data from Google Analytics and asked a question and it gave me an answer that I knew, I knew it smelled wrong. Like, no, no, that's not right. Which is a huge concern because if you're not thinking about it, if you're not concerned, if you're just taking these things at surface value, that it's going to do that, then you could be in some major legal trouble or trouble with your boss if you're not aware of the ramifications. I know some lower level people that I worked with, they had an analytics task and they passed back an answer within a company and I messaged them and said, hey, reach your data, recheck this before you, know, chickity-tackity before you riggedy-rackety, right? **Malith:** Yeah, especially with the data is very tricky. mean, I also I see in the coding side that a lot of people start using developers started using AI to code and I'm also using sometimes, but I check everything if but I see there are still lot of crap coming from AI like it's not really really good for if you want to build a production-grade application and you will run into really technical depths if you really follow all the codes that provided by AI. think similar thing with data that is all about trust. If you can trust what answers you are bringing, especially if you data platform, then It's not a good thing for us. we have some agencies, have 30, 40 clients. And if you share some, I don't know, dashboard with the AI in it and with the wrong answers, or if your client started asking questions from our AI, if they get wrong answers, like, okay, you have to go back and forth even more. basically we are trying to help with the AI, like your customers can. Clients can get answers directly from your dashboard, but if they're coming back to you asking like, hey, why we have a low clicks or something, and then you have to dig into it even more. And it's not that then being helpful. So that's why I have to be careful when I build something related to AI. So right now I'm still in the building phase on the AI feature, but it's not the complexity. It's not very complex, but **Jeremy Rivera:** Yeah. Yeah. **Malith:** figure out if everything like is it always works can we guarantee that it always works so other **Jeremy Rivera:** Yeah. Yeah, the quality control is a big question. Because if you're like, the fidelity has to be like, you have to find a way to dial that quote unquote temperature in AI down as low as possible, have redundant redundancy, redundant checks, because even your redundancy checks, you know, if you ask Claude sometimes to check itself, it won't catch itself. it will perpetuate. So yeah, that's challenging. To kind of change the subject a little bit, I'm curious about the company side of things. You said you have a partner. How did that come about? What does that other partner bring to the table? And you touched on this too. What's your vision? What's your mission statement? What's you know, don't be evil statement inside your company that people should know about. **Malith:** Yeah, I think vision wise, already talk as privacy first from Europe, basically, we are trying to go that way. But talking about my partner, my co-founder, actually, she's my fiance also, and we know each other for long time. And basically, when I had this idea, I'm the idea guy, basically, I have a lot of ideas. tell her every time, hey, I have a new idea, I have a new idea. It's been trouble for some times. I had too many ideas. I started working on multiple ideas. Then I ended up saying, I have to control this. I have to focus on one thing. So one day I told her about this idea of Zapdigits, and she really liked it. She's actually UX UI designer. And after... Few months, like just way before I started the company, I started building the company, she showed me like, I worked on some designs and I actually, it motivated me and I saw it like, this is so cool. It got me excited to build this. And basically that's how we started. yeah, she's basically focusing on the product and UX and UI part. And she's helping me with also like also the marketing side. But I'm kind of like trying to do everything, the development and sales and marketing. Also, basically right now, I'm from a technical background, but I have to learn all this, the sales part too. I have to talk to clients and because we are very small team. basically we are working together, doing everything by ourselves. **Jeremy Rivera:** Thank **Malith:** Yeah, but last month we actually started hiring two agencies for one is for SEO and one for the go-to-market. Basically, they are doing outreach. So this is we will see how it's going to go. It takes some time also get some results. **Jeremy Rivera:** Tell me, you know, got Matt Brooks of SEOteric, He's got an agency. You're in an elevator. You got 30 seconds on the clock. What does your pitch look like right now? **Malith:** Wow, this is a lot of pressure. basically, if you want to, I'm sure you're working on an agency, if you have 10 clients, how much time do you spend per month? I'm sure you're spending like 30 plus hours every month on your reporting. so you can reduce that time to 10 minutes and you create the report one time and you can automate it for. monthly. So basically that would be my first pitch. Of course it's never done the elevator pitch. **Jeremy Rivera:** Not bad, not bad. I always like to look at it from understanding the pitches is looking at, you know, like the value tiers of value that you're talking about to your end customer. And so the lowest tier is actually money. So the next level up is time. So I'm glad you're at least up at the second tier. You're not at the bottom. No, this comes from an interview that I did last year, which was, I'll find the link and I'll add it to the show notes. I apologize. I do not remember his exact name, but it was a, he is a consultant and he helped founders work on their pitches. And the largest thing was about structuring the offer because the time savings is good because it goes beyond just that, work, work, you can't, you're not saying I'm cheaper than the other solution. But the next layer up is about, you enable them to meet their objectives. And so that's the next tier up of, hey, you want to be the next level agency, you want to solve that problem. It's like a goal. I can help you complete your goal. And then the tier above that, there's four tiers. The top tier is I can help you be what you want to be. You want to be a successful agency owner and you want to, it's about identity. And if you think back to the 90s, in what was so successful about those early advertisements. It wasn't, know, we have a car go fast. No, it was about you can live your dream. You know, the Eagle Falcon Bird 5000 enables you. to be the man that you wanna be. It's that Don Draper moment. with agencies, With agencies, digital marketing agencies, you're at that top of the tier and yeah, time is a factor. Solving the problem of juggling resources could be that pain point that you're solving there. And then, if there is an agency at play, **Malith:** This pretty good, pretty good this one. **Jeremy Rivera:** is a hierarchy and there is leadership that's at the top. And so those are usually also the decision makers of which tools are at play. And so what is it that they're trying to achieve as a company and how can your SaaS or product fulfill it? So from like a general marketing perspective. looking at those next two tiers up, like beyond, hey, we save time. And that was, you know, our pitch at Raven Tools is, hey, we're going to save you 50 hours in your reporting per month. Pretty solid. But I think, you know, moving a little more up of, you know, removing the doubt from your reporting stack, you know. keep, because you want reporting to be solid because it helps you retain your customer. So it's about success. So we enable your agency success with the reports and dashboards you need to save time and money. Like don't not save money. Don't not save time, but also have that vision casting, have that, you know, come out in that marketing too. **Malith:** Yeah, is I think it's very, very valid because recently I did some the promotional some social media promotion to check like what agencies really wants. Basically, we were focusing on adding like how can you add few few thousand MRR to your agency without any more clients. So we did like some kind of giveaway. ebook to this like basically adding reporting as as another service that there are already some agencies adding reporting as a service, but there are a lot of other agencies they have like they are selling SEO services, but report dating that's something should be part of it, but it's not they are not upselling that part. So you're also trying to get in that direction to like, okay. If you want to add more money, we can help you like white label it and add some cost to it and then you can easily add more money to your agency without adding new clients. that's very valid what you said that if we can help it's not just about money and also not just about time. So we are helping to get more money for them too. But I can improve the pitch actually. **Jeremy Rivera:** I'm curious if is there any direction or bias in the industries that your agencies are covering? it you know mostly e-commerce agencies, your agencies that are covering you know local services or is it agencies who are running the gamut or agencies that are doing more than just SEO? it like I'm curious about the type of industries that these agencies are because that's always a challenge as an agency to figure out what's our bread and butter. I worked at one agency, super outdoorsman type guy, ended up working with Jeff Fox where they had all of these arrow companies and camouflage and hunting and deer traps. That was their niche because he knew that circuit. Is there any bias that you've seen of agencies types of what clients that they are doing in the end or has it been across the board? **Malith:** Surprisingly, most of the that we have are very generic, very like digital marketing focused, also like SEO. They still do paid marketing, performance marketing, but 90 % of their focus is SEO and also local SEO. That's why they mostly, they are looking only like three or four data connectors like Search Console, Analytics and also Business Profile. So these things, only these three they want. Don't even care much about Google Ads and Meta Ads because I'm not sure. Even I saw some agencies, if they want to report, they just share a table. They don't really care about the looks of if you're doing performance marketing. SEO marketing and local SEO agencies, basically are using the platform. But also I recently talked to a few customers. They are focused on email marketing, only email marketing agencies. That's why they started asking for like Gravio and MailChimp and those kinds of data sources. So I also started seeing this. this part that we are only focusing on email marketing but 90 % of the agencies are very SEO focused agencies right now. **Jeremy Rivera:** I've started adding this section of asking my previous guest, I asked them what's their challenge right now as a small business owner and pass on and I'll give you a chance to think about your biggest pain point and ask a question for the next guest. So their question was, are you approaching cash flow within your own business? and solving that particular pain point. **Malith:** I'm not sure exactly we are focusing on that too much because we are very early and currently our main KPI goal is to get all the users we can and increase our MRR. Right now we are focusing on the cash flow, how we can manage it is not tiring. too much, like too early. We were tempting to hire developers and marketing, like in-house people, but I already noticed it's not gonna work a few months because I have to spend some time on the recruitment and I'm not sure if I can find the right person if they don't like, okay, a lot of time wasted and also money. So that's why right now we are trying to stay lean as possible. yeah, of course, that means spending is very, very low. Also infrastructure wise, luckily that I got experience that how to build the product early stage that without spending like a hundred thousand for the infrastructure. So we are trying to make it like a lean as possible, only scaled infrastructure when we have when we have to scale. So we are also saving a lot of money there. And there are also tricks, not tricks, like basically AWS and there are bigger companies that give you like a credit for like a one year, like most of these big infrastructure companies. So you don't have to pay for them. Of course, when you after one year, you start paying a bunch of money. That's really good enough time to like have very safe, safety first cashflow. Yeah. First now right now we are trying to get like improve our funnel and get more users And reduce the churn. Our churn is right now Quite quite okay. Of course in the beginning we had some churn and now it's going steady but the biggest problem pain point is Talking to the agencies these people are so busy. I don't know They like a lot of honestly like a lot of people coming from the ad lower search ads because they have a problem and They want either they want to migrate from other tool or they want to find a new tool They want to create reports as a new a new Service otherwise if I'm trying to sell and do outreach nobody cares **Jeremy Rivera:** Give a shout out to you the next big thing coming out from y'all and if there's any social media channels where you're hanging out and promoting stuff if you have a particular offer, a PDF, a downloadable video, a letter that you mail to people, whatever you're promoting, let us know what it is and where people can find you. **Malith:** Yeah, you can. They can find me. I'm trying to be on all the places. I come mostly on LinkedIn because there are a lot of businesses there. Surprisingly, I saw in Reddit also there are tons of agencies hanging out. So especially getting feedback. It was a great place, but not to market because marketing is very tricky in Reddit and being careful. But yeah, you can find me in any social media, mainly LinkedIn. And also we have our LinkedIn page that basically we are sharing like freebies like ebooks. And also we have our blog. You can check it out at zapdigits.com **Jeremy Rivera:** Thank you so much for your time, my leads. I appreciate it. Wait, hold on. You need to give me a question for the next guest. I'm gonna be talking to both SaaS and SEOs and small business owners. So what question in that space would you like answered? **Malith:** No worries. Thank you. Thank you so much. okay. Let me think some questions. One thing I could always on my mind is basically when do you think that you need the venture capital cash? Like when do you need some cash from investors? Because, you know, I thought like investors are here to help. Of course, they want to make money. So you have to either go to them in a pre-seed round, basically you don't have a product, you have an idea and they will invest on you. Or if you already built like wanted to go on a bootstrap and you have a product that doing like, I don't know, few thousand MRR, how do you decide if you should go or you should stay in the bootstrapped part? So that's something I'm sure a lot of people thought about it if they already have investors, but I don't, but I think about it. So. I would like to know the answers. **Jeremy Rivera:** I will write that down, I'll get to some answers. I can give you two anecdotal stories. One is... **Malith:** Yeah. **Jeremy Rivera:** The company that picked up Raven Tools, they bought it and treated it like a cash cow, didn't invest anything more in it. They took on funding, they're called Tap Clicks, and they wanted to grow aggressively and they took on investors. And those investors had specific goals for sales, which meant that on the product side, I was on the product development team, I was a product manager in as well as externally as an SEO the amount of changes to the development priorities was very large compared comparing the year before they took on the investors to the year after the investors were involved of Where those the dollars in cents for those development cycles got placed? so be so that's something to take into mind of If you, the more investment that you take on, the less direction you control. So you have more potential, but more potential for that to be directed to something that you didn't anticipate. And from my perspective, it was in enough, the direction in the year after they took on investors was, very much more cynical and less robust and a lot more focused exclusively towards generating the profits that they wanted to see versus a long-term healthy development for the company. So that would be my immediate answer from my experience, but I will pass on the question and ask, hey, what's your perspective on taking on investing and financing and what are the risks or when should you consider that? Because there are upsides, having a boatload of cash coming in, being able to spend that is great, but also considering what are the costs and how to do that safely, that also probably comes back to your vision for your own company, what you want it to look like. Brandon Moon, who I interviewed, I'll send you his interview, he specializes in talking about at the start of your business, think about the end of your business, end of business cycling. And so is your mission and goal to as a SaaS create a very comfortable bootstrap company that's a lifestyle and you want to hire people on, give them great wages, build something awesome and everybody is going to keep going and we're just going to ride this gravy train until we die. And then when you die, Who does it go to? Is it going to your kids? Is it going to your partner? Have that business plan written down. You know, I was just reading an article from Jonathan Davies about end of business planning. And that's something that, you know, like... Like it's not something an entrepreneur usually thinks about. We're like idea, idea, idea. But as the idea, when an idea becomes business, then you have the opportunity to say, say that I get to XMRR. then I'm open to an offer of X dollars and when I do I'm going to X it or I'm going to ask to stay on board for X amount of years. Just know and I experienced this from the other side of when a company does get bought up by another company and you stay on that's a totally, that's a complicated relationship. Like John Henshaw from Raven Tools, he stayed with the product for X amount of years as part of the buyout. And, you know, he brought me in to replace him. And so consider that end of business cycle. If you are looking at investment, then you also need to, that's like considering your growth spurt when you're a teenager, but not thinking about, okay, if I take steroids as a teenager, how's it going to impact me as an old man when I wanna retire? So. There's some heavy weight on your shoulders that go to the park, stare at some clouds, and think about what it's going to be like when it's all over. But it is something in the entrepreneur side that we ignore. We don't really think about it. **Malith:** Yeah Yeah, especially when you start to grow in like, getting serious, like in the beginning, I didn't care, like, okay, we just want to build something. But now I started getting money and it's getting serious. And then you start thinking, okay, what should I do? Should I keep going like this? Or can we make this even better? Or how can we even keep going? but I also asked this other other people like other founders who already exceeded some founders like everyone saying like, no, don't go to investors. So it is a little bit worrying. Like, of course you need investors sometimes, but the right time is, is it correct or do you ever need it? Because it's specifically in this area, like most of our competitors actually bootstrapped, like for example, agency analytics is bootstrapped. I'm very surprised. **Jeremy Rivera:** Hahaha **Malith:** But that's a good thing. But as long as if I can stay longer, it's OK. I think in the mainly in the SaaS business, some main advice is don't die. Like as long as you can stay for like three, four years alive, then you're good. **Jeremy Rivera:** Yeah, it does seem like that. And I'd also encourage looking at what's happened with Semrush versus 8HRF's. **Malith:** Yeah. **Jeremy Rivera:** AAHRF's bootstrap Tim Sewallow, it's privately owned and they've grown the heck out of it, but it stayed privately owned. SEMrush is literally a publicly traded company and I think if you did a little bit of research of their recent decisions, you can kind of start to feel it in their product offering of how they're profit seeking. **Malith:** Yeah, I saw they are really fast at adding new AI stuff like also I saw they are offering a lot of AI SEO features. I was like wow that was fast the pricing page was updated and everything. **Jeremy Rivera:** It's very fast, high risk too. **Malith:** Yeah, I was. **Jeremy Rivera:** I appreciate your time. I'm actually going to stop it here, but I thank you for stopping in, Malith I appreciate your candor. I'll add all of the links for Zap digits to the show notes. I'll see you around. **Malith:** Yeah. Hey, thank you so much for your time and then for the interview. --- Unscripted SaaS · hosted by Jeremy Rivera · https://unscriptedsaas.com/do-not-die-malith-gamage-on-saas-survival/