What are your thoughts on starting a startup versus a service-based business?
My thoughts are simple: a service business (agency) brings immediate income but requires managing people, while a SAS (software) trades early losses for later scalability and automation. In the early years, an agency can generate far more money—maybe 10 times more—than a startup, because you get paid right away. However, once the SAS finds product-market fit, it can scale with far less time investment since it doesn't need people to fulfill. The trade-off is time versus money. My optimal approach is to start with a service business to earn money, gain client experience, and learn financial management. Then evolve that service into a managed service and eventually a product. For example, Instantly began as a cold email agency, made early money, then built a SAS product that now scales. I recommend this path for most people today.
$10,000/month is achievable through sheer tenacity, consistency, and caveman-style intellect. $100,000/month, at least for a service business, is not achievable that way — you actually have to learn how to do business: hiring, building productized systems that run without you, etc. (You can hit $100K/month as an affiliate or in e-commerce too, but that path needs more inputs like startup capital and inventory.) I focus on service businesses specifically because they have the lowest barrier to entry and made the biggest impact on my own life, but scaling one past $10K/month by brute force alone doesn't work — you have to actually learn to run a business.
I think packaging automation as a SaaS product is cool. I've done this before for many viewers. You can view it as a way to improve consolidation, but essentially you can treat SaaS as either green or blue—just a label. SaaS product growth over time is tricky at first, then you hit product-market fit and scale rapidly. For most of the lifetime, especially the first couple years, you make basically no money, unlike an agency or service implementation where you can earn a fair amount right away. Agency revenue tends to be up and down and hard to scale; after 2-3 years, an agency might still be where it started, while a SaaS product could have completely overshot it. So there are pros and cons depending on the time scale you plan for. Market dynamics also help—SaaS is becoming easier to build with no-code tools. Additionally, you can package an automation as a SaaS but still sell it as a service implementation. For example, take your automation workflow and have Lovable or Bolt create a simple front end for it. If you want more nuance, check out a video where I actually built one. I don't recall which specific video it is, but there's an example: me wearing a backward baseball cap, turning a 2K automation into a 10K SaaS no-code product using Lovable to package the automation I built as a SaaS product resembling a little proposal generator. You can try that approach, but still sell it as a service. Hopefully that answers your question.
Offering a managed service means you deliver the work yourself—through calls, consulting, or a done‑with‑you approach—frontloading revenue and providing a white‑glove, customized experience that clients pay a premium for, but at the expense of long‑term revenue. Building a SaaS product flips that: you backload revenue and enterprise value, potentially making little upfront (e.g., under $10 K/month the first year) but outperforming a pure‑service model in years 2‑4 if you’re a competent operator. The trade‑off is short‑term versus long‑term revenue; choose managed service for immediate cash, SaaS for long‑term growth. My own shift from pure service to longer‑term bets like content and branding followed the same pattern: first earn enough to cover basics, then invest in assets that compound over time.
The feeling you describe is akrasia — knowing what to do but not doing it because the required activation energy feels too high. To overcome this, consider the two business models you mentioned. A SaaS model is highly scalable but requires product‑market fit and can take years to generate revenue, during which you burn runway with no income. An agency model, by contrast, lets you earn money quickly (e.g., $20k in the first month) but is hard to scale and lacks predictable recurring revenue. I recommend a blended approach: start with an agency to generate early cash flow and runway, use that revenue to fund your SaaS development, and then gradually shift from manual implementations to a SaaS product. This path takes longer to reach the same scalability as a pure SaaS, but it yields far more money in the early years and gives you proven business‑owner credibility, which makes raising funds or reinvesting easier.