Every agency starts with the same dangerous sentence: “We work with everyone.”
It feels safe. Inclusive. Like you’re maximizing your addressable market. In reality, you’re just making yourself invisible. When you serve everyone, no one can refer you with confidence. No one can describe what you do in a sentence. You become a commodity before you’ve even shipped your first deliverable.
Bruno and I almost made that mistake. In the early days of PipelineRoad, we had conversations with e-commerce brands, local restaurants, a fitness influencer, and a real estate developer — all in the same week. We said yes to most of them because saying yes felt like progress.
It wasn’t.
The Mess Before the Niche
The problem with serving multiple industries simultaneously is not that the work itself is different. Writing copy is writing copy. Running ads is running ads. The problem is that your pattern recognition never compounds.
When you write landing pages for a restaurant and a SaaS company back to back, you learn nothing transferable. The objections are different. The buyer psychology is different. The sales cycle, the pricing model, the competitive landscape — all different. You’re starting from scratch every time, which means you never get meaningfully faster or better.
I remember a week where I spent Monday morning researching commercial kitchen equipment and Monday afternoon studying enterprise procurement cycles. By Tuesday, I was exhausted and had produced nothing distinctive for either client. That was the week I started thinking seriously about focus.
The Three Criteria
We didn’t choose B2B SaaS in a flash of insight. It was more like a slow elimination process. Bruno and I sat down and wrote out three criteria for our ideal market:
Recurring need. We wanted clients who would need marketing month after month, not project-based work that required constant re-selling. SaaS companies, by nature, run continuous marketing engines. Content, demand gen, email sequences, paid acquisition — it never stops. That meant retainers, not one-offs.
Willingness to pay. This sounds obvious, but it isn’t. Plenty of industries need marketing desperately but have no budget for it. Local businesses, early-stage consumer startups, most non-profits — the need is real but the willingness (or ability) to pay agency rates is not. SaaS companies, particularly those with venture funding or healthy MRR, have marketing budgets baked into their operating models. They expect to spend money on growth.
Intellectual density. This one is harder to articulate, but it mattered to us. We wanted to work in a space where the problems were genuinely interesting. Where the messaging required thought, where the competitive dynamics were complex, where we’d learn something new from every engagement. B2B SaaS gave us that. The products are technical. The buyers are sophisticated. The positioning challenges are real.
The Lucky Part
I’d be lying if I said it was all rational analysis. There was luck involved, and I think it’s dishonest when founders pretend otherwise.
The lucky part was that we already had context. Before PipelineRoad, I’d spent time around SaaS founders. I understood the vocabulary — MRR, churn, CAC, LTV. I knew what a Series A deck looked like. I’d sat through enough product demos to understand the sales cycle intuitively.
That familiarity meant we could skip the most painful part of entering a new market: learning how to speak the language. When we showed up on calls with SaaS founders, we didn’t sound like outsiders. We sounded like peers. That mattered more than any case study or credential we could have presented.
Bruno brought a complementary angle. His background gave him a sharp eye for operational efficiency and scalable systems, which is exactly what SaaS companies care about. When we talked about building marketing engines — not just running campaigns — it resonated.
What We Said No To
Choosing B2B SaaS meant actively saying no to everything else. This was the hard part.
We turned down a $6,000/month engagement with an e-commerce brand because it fell outside our niche. That was real money at a time when we needed real money. I won’t pretend it didn’t sting. But every time we said no to something outside our focus, we freed up mental bandwidth to go deeper inside it.
Within six months, something shifted. Referrals started coming in from people who said, “Oh, you guys do marketing for SaaS companies? I know someone who needs that.” That sentence — that specific, confident referral — only happens when people can describe what you do simply. And simplicity only comes from focus.
The Counterargument
I’ve heard the objection a hundred times: “But what if you’re wrong? What if the market you pick is too small or too competitive or too saturated?”
Fair question. And the honest answer is: you might be wrong. We could have picked a market that didn’t work. But the alternative — staying broad and hoping something sticks — is a guaranteed way to stay mediocre. At least with a niche, you’re making a bet. And bets can be adjusted.
If we’d chosen B2B SaaS and it hadn’t worked after twelve months, we would have pivoted. The skills transfer. The discipline of focus transfers. What doesn’t transfer is the years you spend trying to be everything.
The Compounding Effect
Three years in, I can see the compounding clearly. Every engagement makes us better at the next one. Our onboarding is faster because we’ve seen the same tech stacks, the same org structures, the same buyer personas dozens of times. Our content is sharper because we understand the competitive landscape instinctively. Our proposals close at a higher rate because we can reference relevant experience without stretching.
None of that would have happened if we’d stayed broad.
Choosing a market is the first real strategic decision an agency makes. Most founders agonize over their logo, their website, their service offerings. Those things matter, but they matter less than the answer to a single question: who are you for?
Answer that clearly, and the rest gets easier. Not easy — but easier. And in the early days of building something, easier is worth a lot.