Services is having its software moment

SMBs aren't bad customers. They're bad customers for SaaS. AI is turning the market everyone wrote off into the biggest one of all.

My parents have run a business together for my whole life. They're in the outerwear industry, sourcing and selling out of a small office in Midtown Manhattan's garment district. It's a real business — it put me and my brother through college — and they're good at what they do. But they've never grown as fast as their products deserve. They're so busy servicing customers that there's no bandwidth left to think about marketing or new channels.

Watching them succeed within real limits — limits no software ever helped them break — is a big part of why I started Blaze.

"SMBs are bad SaaS customers"

There's a widely held belief in the technology industry that small businesses are bad software customers. High churn. Fragmented. No time to learn new tools.

Based on our early experience selling software to SMBs, we agreed.

Our retention data on the early versions of Blaze told the same story: people would sign up, try the product, and eventually leave because it required hours and attention that small business owners simply don't have. The feedback was always some version of the same thing: this is great, but I don't have time to run it.

SMBs don't want to buy a tool. They want to buy an outcome.

The turning point: SMBs aren't bad customers. They're bad customers for tools. They're exceptional customers for services.

If you look at where small businesses actually spend their marketing dollars, it's not on software. It's on agencies.

The US marketing agency market is roughly $284 billion — more than twice the size of the SaaS market. Small business owners have been buying marketing on retainer for decades. They just buy it from humans, as a service. They don't have the time or the expertise to operate a tool. They never did. And no amount of better UX was going to change that.

Marketing isn't a closed-loop problem. Even when AI produces competent work, creative is subjective. A human has to review, approve, and edit it. For most of our customers, that human couldn't be the owner.

The number one piece of feedback we heard, over and over: "this is incredible, but can you just do it for us?"

That "complaint" opened up our entire market.

Looks like an agency, runs like software

We rebuilt Blaze around that feedback: an agentic platform on the backend, a real human on the front end. It looks like an agency to our customers. It runs like a SaaS platform.

The platform orchestrates marketing end to end — competitor analysis, strategy, multichannel campaign generation, posting, engagement, performance tracking, and self-improvement. Everything you'd expect a fancy agency to do for $10k a month.

We package it as a "Done For You" offering, with a dedicated strategist who ensures quality and results. All for $999 a month.

It worked. With Done For You, customers got the outcome they had always wanted: effortless marketing at a fraction of what an agency would charge. It also changed our economics. We now run top-decile gross margins and retention for an AI business.

Most importantly, the customers everyone wrote off as a graveyard for software turned out to be some of the best customers we've ever served.

AI levels the playing field

At big companies, the AI story is about efficiency. AI automates low-end work, enables smaller teams, and reduces the need for some external SaaS tools.

For small businesses, AI is about capability. It lets a five-person company do things that used to require a team of fifty. My parents don't need to become more efficient. They need to operate like their bigger competitors — with a real marketing strategy, great content, managed distribution, and 24/7 analytics that drive continuous, automatic improvement.

AI now makes that possible, and the cycle that follows is virtuous. Better marketing means more customers. More growth means more marketing spend, which means more revenue for us and more jobs across the economy. It's the opposite of the efficiency story you hear about AI at large companies, with their layoffs and cost cuts. Small businesses, powered by AI, will drive real economic gains and create jobs the AI-layoffs headlines miss entirely.

The bigger picture

Blaze replaces the $10,000-a-month agency retainer with a service at a tenth of the cost. But replacing agencies isn't the biggest part of the opportunity. Agencies never fully unlocked the market to begin with.

The agency market is large, but it understates the real demand. Most small businesses that tried agencies found the ROI wasn't there. High cost. Uncertain outcomes. A model never designed for a business without a marketing team to manage the relationship. So they churned, or they never signed up in the first place. The nonconsumption was always bigger than the consumption.

What Uber, Airbnb, Shopify, and Square have in common isn't that they beat an incumbent. It's that they unlocked demand the incumbent's pricing and model had left sitting on the table. Uber didn't just take rides from taxis — it created trips that never would have happened at taxi prices. Shopify didn't just digitize existing retailers — it created millions of merchants who never could have opened a store. The real market was always the demand that never got served.

That's the opportunity we're building toward. Agencies are our black cars — the existing, expensive option. We're not just replacing them at a lower price. We're building the thing that finally makes marketing accessible to the thirty million small businesses in the United States that never had a real marketing program — not because they didn't want one, but because nothing existed that worked for them.

We think we finally built that thing. And the future will be different because of it.