How I transformed my marketing agency into a Tech Startup One of the biggest problems in the agency business is the customer churn rate. You work with clients for 3-5 months and then they leave. This means that you need to find more and more customers. You always need to 'run' to 'stay in one place'. It's like a treadmill. I know it because I had this problem too. My agency specialized in CRM implementation and marketing automation While working with marketing software vendors, I realized one key thing about their success. They sell the product, not a service, and they have recurring revenue. They make a lot of effort to make the first sale, and after that, this customer pays them for years on a subscription basis. It's like a man and a woman relationship. To have first-time sex with a woman, you need to make a lot of effort - flowers, compliments, and all this sweet stuff. If you want to have sex with your girlfriend you just need to say “Hmm I want to show you something’. The result is the same, and the amount of effort is quite different. That’s why I asked myself: ‘How I can make subscription revenue even if I don’t have my own software?’ I started looking for partner programs. Some vendors have 50% of the revenue share affiliate program. And I started reselling this software to my existing customers. I charged clients for Facebook ads service, Email marketing service and made an upsell for CRM and email marketing software. Service sales were an active income. Software sales were subscription revenue and passive income. From some customers, I had only 20$ commissions every month, but a few customers were paying me thousands of dollars each month for a couple of years. I was doing it for a few years, got passive income, and realized that it was time to start my own startup. When I was selling and implementing marketing software I started to understand that all customers were struggling with integrations between all these marketing apps. So, I decided to create our own integration platform named Apiway that can solve this problem. Now more than 25k digital marketers use Apiway for data transfers between marketing apps. Let's summarize I made 3 key things. First, I quickly realized that a service business is not a good business and I need to transform it into a subscription-based business. The second thing I figured out is that you can start building a subscription business without a product. You can just start to resell someone’s SaaS product and make recurring revenue. The third thing is when I was making a marketing service I understood customers’ pains and create a product that solves these pain.