While I Was Writing Today’s Signal // Noise:

Hard to believe Stankonia dropped 25 years ago next week. Rolling Stone stuck it at #64 on their all-time list, which feels low if you’ve ever blasted Spaghetti Junction in a used Camry w/ old speakers.

🎧 Want the whole vibe? The running playlist is right here.

From sound to signal, let’s get this baby rolling with what’s on my mind…

One big idea, insight, or take - grounded in the real work, not theory.

A ton of founders find their way to $1 million the same way — by solving a painful problem for someone willing to pay for it. Usually through services. Consulting, creative, technology, something messy, but valuable.

Then they hit an inevitable ceiling.

Because the next leap — from $1M to $10M — requires more than just grit and a good solution.

You need predictable revenue, a bit of margin, systems. You need leverage, with tech & people.

And according to Bessemer Venture Partners, this is the hardest stage of growth, where most companies stall or die. You’re too big to wing it, but also too early to run on process.

That’s why the founders who break through often don’t start with software — they start with services. It’s slower, messier, but it gives you what a blank SaaS roadmap never will: cash flow, proximity to the customer, and data on what actually matters.

Or, as Nathan Latka calls it, the “agency-to-SaaS hack” — using services to validate and fund the product before you ever write start writing a line of code.

When Chris Hall launched Bynder, he wasn’t running a SaaS; he was running a creative agency in Amsterdam called Label A. His team kept watching clients struggle to keep track of their brand assets, so they built an internal tool to help. Nothing fancy, just something that solved the chaos. That internal fix became the product, the product became a platform, and the platform became a $600 million exit.

Jason Cohen took a similar path with WP Engine. He started as a one-man managed-WordPress hosting service — manually migrating sites, fixing downtime, offering white-glove support. It wasn’t all that scalable, but it proved that people would pay premium prices for performance and reliability. He used those lessons (and cash flow) to automate what repeated, turning a service business into a SaaS machine doing $400M+ ARR.

Even James Deer of GatherContent followed the same curve. His design agency kept helping clients clean up disorganized content workflows, so they built a lightweight internal tool to manage it. When clients started asking to use it themselves, the team spun it out — and it’s now used by hundreds of organizations around the world.

Three different industries, but the same move: start manual, spot the repetition, productize it, then automate. It may not be the “sexiest” thing in the world, but it’s predictable — and that predictability is the oxygen most founders run out of between $1 M and $10M.

If you’re running a service-led business today, it doesn’t have to binary — SaaS or die. Don’t burn it down to “go all in.” Productize what’s working, document the steps, automate the friction, and let your customers fund the transition.

That’s the quiet playbook behind Bynder, WP Engine, GatherContent — and a dozen others like them. The work comes first. The leverage follows.

More Links:

Dispatches from the field - lessons, stories, interviews, experiments.

Loved Platform Revolution when it dropped — re-read it years later while running Hampton and still found new gems. My notes on network effects, curation, & filters.

Smart reads, sharp tools, or internet gems.

On the note of Agency → SaaS, my buddy Ethan Brooks wrote a killer piece on Hampton member Jess Chan and what she got wrong about B2B SaaS vs. agency sales cycles.

Smart breakdown from Trace Cohen on why today’s AI boom isn’t the dot-com rerun people think it is. The data’s wild — trillion-dollar revenue bases, real cash flow, massive infrastructure spending, and physical constraints you can’t fake.

Holy Moses Malone. This might be my favorite book of 2025. Murder, kidnapping, WWII, love, loss — this page turner has literally everything. I tore through it in 5 days and honestly wished I could unread it just to read it again.

Last but not least - I’ve really been digging Mindstream, this AI newsletter. Quick actionable insights, essential news, they were acquired by HubSpot a while ago and just have great content. Check them out.

Hope everyone has a great weekend.

And until next time, thanks for reading.

Jordan

P.S. Wanna work on something? Got a pod or content idea? → Email me | Need 30–60 min of advice? → Book here | Want a coach in your corner? → More info