Hero Analytics (Sell to the Agency, Not the Brand)

01The full story

Zach and his partner Brendan launched Hero Analytics in October 2024. Nineteen months later they showed Pat Walls a Stripe dashboard at roughly $96.2K MRR for the trailing four weeks — over $1M in ARR — pacing at close to $10K of net new MRR a month, with churn that Walls called the best he had seen from anyone on the channel. The backstory is the part that explains the speed. Zach and Brendan worked at a data visualisation startup that Amazon acquired, then worked at Amazon, then left. They started a newsletter business that failed — but through it they learned email marketing. That turned into an email marketing agency they ran for about six years, with roughly 30 clients. Those 30 clients are, almost exactly, the ideal customer profile for Hero. Brendan got fed up with the friction points that every agency in that space hits and decided to build something. Once Hero had real momentum they stepped away from the agency full-time. Zach's own framing: "it took us like 10 years to build hero." The data visualisation startup, Amazon, the failed newsletter, the agency — every one of those was a prerequisite. Our read: the headline is "$1M ARR in 19 months," but the actual asset was six years of operating the exact business they now sell to. They did not do customer discovery. They were the customer. That is the part most people copying this will not have, and it is the part that most needs replacing with real work.