Nobody starts an agency thinking they’ll build software. At least I didn’t. The plan was simple: help B2B SaaS companies do better marketing. Get good at it. Grow the team. Maybe, eventually, sell the agency or run it profitably until we got bored.
PipelineRoad.com — the platform — was never on the roadmap.
It showed up the way most real insights do: slowly, then all at once.
The Pattern
About a year into running the agency, we started working with fund managers. PE firms, venture capital, real estate funds, credit funds. They came to us because they’d heard we understood B2B marketing, and fundraising — at its core — is a B2B sales problem. You’re selling a financial product to a sophisticated buyer. The dynamics are different from selling SaaS, but the mechanics are surprisingly similar.
What struck me immediately was how manual everything was.
These were firms managing hundreds of millions of dollars, sometimes billions, and their capital raising workflows looked like something from 2009. Spreadsheets tracking investor relationships. Email threads with no CRM integration. Associates spending fifteen hours a week on data entry that added zero strategic value.
I’d sit in meetings and listen to partners describe their process, and I’d think: this is insane. Not because they were bad at their jobs — they were exceptional. But because the tools available to them were either generic CRMs that didn’t understand fund management, or legacy platforms that cost six figures and looked like they were designed during the Clinton administration.
After the third or fourth fund manager said some version of “I wish there was something between a spreadsheet and Salesforce,” I started paying attention.
The Notebook
I have a Moleskine notebook — the small, hardcover kind — where I write down business ideas. Most of them are terrible. Some are just observations. But there’s a section from around that time where the entries get increasingly specific.
“Fund managers need a CRM that speaks their language.”
“Nobody is doing deal origination + investor relations in one place.”
“The data exists. The workflow doesn’t.”
“Capital raising is a pipeline. Why doesn’t it look like one?”
That last one became the name.
Bruno and I started talking about it over dinners. At first it was hypothetical. “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” conversations. Then it got more concrete. We’d sketch wireframes on napkins. I’d come back from client meetings with new frustrations that mapped perfectly to features.
The insight wasn’t complicated. Fund managers run a pipeline — just like salespeople — but no tool was built specifically for how they think, how they work, how they measure success. They don’t think in “opportunities” and “accounts.” They think in funds, LPs, commitments, and closings. Every existing tool required them to translate their world into someone else’s vocabulary.
We decided to build the thing that spoke their language natively.
The Double Life
Here’s what nobody tells you about building a product while running an agency: it’s like having two full-time jobs and being mediocre at both for a while.
The agency was our livelihood. It paid the bills, covered the team, kept the lights on. I couldn’t neglect it. Our clients were paying us real money for real outcomes, and they deserved our full attention.
But the product was the thing that kept me up at night — in a good way. I’d finish client work at seven, eat dinner, and then spend three or four hours on PipelineRoad.com. Weekends disappeared. Vacations became “working from somewhere scenic.”
For about six months, I was chronically tired and chronically excited. Those two states coexist more often than people realize.
The hardest part wasn’t the workload. It was the context switching. Agency work is inherently reactive. Clients have deadlines, campaigns need adjustments, someone’s Google Ads account is bleeding money and you need to fix it now. Product work is the opposite. It requires deep focus, long stretches of uninterrupted thinking, the willingness to sit with a problem for days before the right solution emerges.
I got better at separating the two. Mornings were for product. Client work started after lunch. Bruno held down the agency side when I needed to disappear into a feature spec. We developed a rhythm that worked, but it took months of stumbling before we found it.
The Unfair Advantage
People in tech love the phrase “unfair advantage.” It’s usually deployed in pitch decks to justify why this team, right now, will win. Most of the time it’s posturing. But in our case, the agency genuinely was one.
Here’s why.
Every week, we were sitting in meetings with our target users. Not user research sessions or structured interviews — real working meetings where fund managers were telling us their actual problems, showing us their actual workflows, complaining about their actual tools. We had front-row seats to the pain points that most product teams spend months trying to uncover.
When we’d build a feature, we could test the concept in the next client meeting. “Hey, what if a tool did X? Would that be useful?” The feedback was immediate, specific, and honest — because they weren’t evaluating a product, they were just answering a question from their marketing agency.
We also understood the language. Fund managers use precise terminology, and getting it wrong is a credibility killer. Because we’d spent a year immersed in their world, our product felt native from day one. We didn’t call things “deals” — we called them “commitments.” We didn’t have “contacts” — we had “LPs” and “prospects.” Small things. But small things compound.
The agency also gave us distribution. We already had relationships with dozens of fund managers. When we launched the beta, we didn’t need to run cold outreach. We sent a note to people who already trusted us. The first twenty users came from that list.
The Scary Conversation
There was a moment — I remember the exact week — when Bruno and I had to decide whether we were serious about this. Not “let’s keep tinkering” serious. Actually serious. Allocate real resources. Hire a developer. Start thinking about pricing and go-to-market and all the things that make a product a business.
The conversation happened on a Tuesday evening. We were in the office, which at the time was a rented desk in a coworking space in Austin. I’d just finished a call with a fund manager who, unprompted, said: “If you built this, I’d pay for it tomorrow.”
That’s the sentence that tipped us over.
Not because one person’s enthusiasm validates a market. But because it was the twentieth time we’d heard something like it, and at some point you have to either build the thing or stop talking about it.
We decided to build it.
The Mistakes
I want to be honest about the mistakes, because there were plenty.
We built too much, too fast, in the beginning. Classic first-time product mistake. Instead of launching with a tight, focused MVP, we tried to cover the entire fund management workflow. The result was a product that did eight things at a seventy percent quality level instead of two things at a hundred percent.
We also underestimated how different selling software is from selling services. With agency work, you’re selling expertise and trust. The sales cycle is relationship-driven. With software, people want to see the thing work before they commit. They want to click around. They want to compare you to alternatives. The buying psychology is fundamentally different, and it took us a few painful months to adjust our approach.
The biggest mistake was trying to maintain the same level of agency output while building the product. Something had to give, and for a while, we pretended it didn’t. We stretched ourselves too thin, and both the agency and the product suffered. Eventually, we made hard choices about which agency clients to keep and which to let go. That was gut-wrenching. But necessary.
Where It Landed
PipelineRoad.com is now its own thing. It has its own team, its own roadmap, its own identity. But it’s still deeply connected to the agency work that gave birth to it.
We still run the agency. It’s smaller now, more focused. We work with fewer clients but go deeper. And the agency continues to feed insights back into the product. When a fund manager tells us about a pain point in a client meeting, that pain point goes straight into the product backlog.
The two businesses make each other better. The agency keeps us grounded in real-world workflows. The product gives the agency a technological edge that competitors don’t have. It’s a flywheel that took two years to build, but now it spins on its own.
What I’d Tell Someone Considering It
If you run a services business and you’re thinking about building a product, here’s what I’d say.
First: the insight has to come from the work. If you’re building software because you want to build software, you’ll struggle. If you’re building software because you’ve seen a gap that nobody else can see from where they’re sitting — that’s different. That’s real.
Second: be honest about the cost. You’ll be tired. You’ll be pulled in two directions. Your agency will suffer temporarily. Your product will launch later than you want. Accept this upfront rather than pretending you can do both perfectly.
Third: your clients are your beta testers, your focus group, and your first customers. Treat that access as the asset it is.
And fourth: the transition is never clean. There’s no moment where you flip a switch and become a product company. It’s messy and gradual and uncomfortable. That’s fine. The best things usually are.
PipelineRoad.com exists because we listened. Not in the “customer discovery” framework sense. In the human sense. We sat in rooms with people who were frustrated, and instead of just solving their marketing problems, we asked: what else is broken?
The answer became the company.