E48: From Service to SaaS with Aaron Schwartz & Daniel Brady

In this episode Aaron Schwartz and Daniel Brady, co-founders of Orita, joined us and we talked about how they built an ML-powered audience intelligence product for e-commerce brands. Orita tells you which customers on your list want to hear from you, when and what about. It started as a consulting project where 5 out of 6 cold-outreached brands booked a meeting in under thirty minutes, it grew entirely through word of mouth, and the founding team was only 2 machine learning engineers.

A near-perfect close rate was a pricing signal they couldn’t ignore. DB and Zach were only charging $50 a month to manage a brand's entire email strategy. Aaron doubled the price on the next three pitches and closed all three.

We talk about how every retention tool hits a ceiling eventually. How retention as a category has a budget, which determines what a founder or CFO approves, regardless of the ROI in the dashboard. For some brands, Orita generated a 17x return and still got cut because the line item looked too big for a retention budget. That's what pushed the team into performance marketing, ads and direct mail, where buyers think in multiples of spend and the ceiling moves with results.

Rishabh makes the case that Shopify warps the ecommerce founder's expectation of the cost of SaaS, because the real cost is buried in payment processing fees, and that gap shapes what merchants are happy to pay for every tool around it. DB talks about how he makes the every day decision on what to build and what to ignore, which features get commoditized in 3 to 6 months, and which ones require years of domain data, expertise and ML depth to replicate. The answer is some mixture of stay on the hard problem, build something durable, and outlast the noisy low value competition.