Why every SaaS should start as an aaS
From my experience guiding founders at Antler and building GTM from scratch
Before product-market fit, you're not building a software company. You're delivering a service.
Call it what it is: aaS, [YourThing] as a Service.
You’re the product. The software is just a promise.
At this early stage, you're not competing on tech. You’re competing for trust. And trust is earned by solving real problems for real people, manually, if needed. That means cold emails, custom help, awkward calls, and solutions that look automated but are really duct tape and weekends.
I’ve seen this work firsthand. At Antler VC (where I mentor founders), one adtech founder wanted to build an automation tool. I told her: don’t start with a product. Start with five clients. Manually run their ads. She did. It looked like software on the outside, but she was the one making decisions behind the curtain. The result? Proof it worked. Customer quotes. Case studies. Data. Confidence in her pricing. And eventually, a real product people already wanted.
This isn't new. Before AppSumo became a platform, Noah Kagan manually matched creators to buyers. No code, just hustle.
And the opposite? Plenty of founders waste six months building a product no one asked for. I mentored one team that built a brilliant dashboard for HR analytics, took them 9 months. Beautiful UI, zero users. They never got feedback early enough to realize HR didn’t want dashboards, they wanted done-for-you reporting.
Here’s what most early founders get wrong:
They think launching means having a landing page and an app. But real traction comes from doing the work, one customer at a time. That’s where product insight, market fit, and sales confidence live.
You don’t need a website. You need a Calendly link, a few smart blog posts, and the guts to hit send.
If you're early, here’s what to do:
Write 3 short articles on the problem you want to solve. Make them useful.
Cold email 20 prospects. Share the articles. Offer free help.
Deliver the outcome manually. Learn. Adjust. Repeat.
"Hey Prospectname, I’ve written three articles on how to solve XYZ challenges in your market (link 1,2,3). I can tailor these solutions for your specific business/challenges for free. Please schedule a 20-minute call here (Calendly link), and I’ll be available to meet you this or next week."
This is how I would start.
Software can scale later. But first, be the product. If you're not willing to do that, you probably shouldn't build one.