Chris Willow is the founder of Wayfront, a successful SaaS for productized agencies. He made the switch from doing agency work to solving problems for agencies with software. In this interview he discusses starting his SaaS, the importance of picking a good name for your business and how AI will affect agencies in the future.
Can you tell us a bit about yourself and what Wayfront is?
I'm based in Riga, Latvia. I used to run a productized agency before anybody really knew what productizing meant. Basically I was selling promotional product videos that you could buy as a package and we’d create them from a template in 24 hours. It was a low ticket offer so I had to have all these systems for making sure people were filling out their info, cross checking orders with payments, all this stuff.
I did a couple SaaS projects to solve client problems, including a Wistia type of service, and then ended up selling the client portal to other owners I knew, mainly in the SEO space. Originally it was just a php script which I later made into a proper SaaS. I think covid was probably when it took off, I hired some people quit the agency work and went full time on it.
Can you tell us what you’ve achieved so far as an entrepreneur?
I’ve been fortunate enough to jump on the product train early and build a good life for myself. But then more importantly it’s the thousands of agencies who’ve sold and delivered over $500M in productized services on the platform. If you’ve bought any SEO packages or content services in the past you’ve probably interacted with Wayfront order forms (the platform used to be called Service Provider Pro up until this year, we just rebranded).
We could have probably grown faster with outside investment but it’s been good regardless and I don’t really care for being beholden to investors. Funny enough people are kind of realizing now how many good businesses are ruined by VC money where they’re great for the team but not world changing enough to generate the return VCs are looking for.
