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

Episode notes

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.