From Agency to Software: Karl O'Brien, Store Hero | Ep:010

FREE AGENCY VALUATION (5-min assessment, PDF report): https://moveatpace.com/agency-valuation/Karl O'Brien spent eight years running a Dublin digital marketing agency before founding Storehero (https://storehero.ai/), the AI growth coach for ecommerce brands and agencies. After watching client after client fly blind on profit (revenue grew, margin disappeared into the Meta and Google tax, attribution wars never ended), he built the dashboard he wished his agency had. That dashboard is now an MCP-powered profit brain plugged into Claude, with billions of dollars of ecommerce revenue passing through it annually and customers across 15 countries.For agency owners, this is the agency-to-SaaS conversation that does not skip the hard parts. Why most SaaS businesses are "venture-backed agencies in the background". Why Meta and Google are coming for the management fee. What productisation actually looks like when AI is compressing your costs faster than your prices.In this episode we talked about:- The eight-year Dublin agency that taught Karl what ecom brands actually needed (and couldn't see)- Why a SaaS should be the end-degree of automation for work an agency was already doing- The future of ecom agencies: either lower-cost specialised at scale, or higher-margin profit-focused- Why agencies are 60% of Storehero's customers (and another 10-15% are agency referrals)- The Storehero Claude Connector in production: automated Monday morning anomaly detection across a client book- The Profit Scaler skill that turns a junior's two-day analysis into a two-minute insight that blows away the client- Bezos in the AI era: "your margin is my opportunity" and what it means for agencies in 2026- Events as the in-person counterweight to digital fatigue (Shopify partnership, 1,000-member NYC community)- Karl's closing advice: solve an expensive problem, the kind people will pay to make go awayKarl did not set out to build a sellable business. He set out to build a better one. The result is the same. This episode covers two levers: financial reporting (the profit visibility every ecom client wants and most agencies cannot offer) and repeatable delivery (the productisation curve that ends in software, or somewhere close to it).---Want to work with me?Take the free Agency Valuation and find out what your agency could be worth:https://moveatpace.com/agency-valuation/Join 200+ agency owners getting weekly frameworks:https://moveatpace.com/newsletter/---Connect with me:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/c-mca-0a9b6b160/Website: https://moveatpace.comPodcast hub: https://moveatpace.com/podcast/Email: [email protected]#ExitReady #MoveAtPace #AgencyOwner #Ecommerce #SaaS