Services over SaaS – why a partnership-first model works better for growing products

The cost of betting everything on a single product

“SaaS is a dream everybody has - but to be honest.. I’ve never had”

- as Boldare’s co-CEO, Anna Zarudzka, recently opened up on the Messy Growth podcast.

SaaS is undeniably a powerful business model, as it allows the company to scale rapidly and secure strong and predictable revenue. But there’s one major drawback – it forces the organization to commit to one market, product and direction. When it thrives, it pays off big, but if not, the whole company pays the price.

A service-based model distributes the risk differently – instead of focusing on one idea, we’ve helped shape hundreds of products at different stages of maturity, within various industries and technologies. This exposure gave us a broader understanding of how businesses behave under pressure and what challenges repeat themselves across the contexts.

A bridge to real life problems

Services allow us to keep the teams close to reality, in comparison to SaaS, where teams focus on solving one problem or refining one product in one environment. In services, context changes constantly.

A good example of this was our cooperation with The Elephant’s Trunk – an Irish startup building an unconventional e-commerce platform. Their goal wasn’t just to sell children’s books, but to validate a business idea focused on inclusion, diversity and personalization. The challenge was clear from the start: test whether parents would actually buy personalized books with their children as main characters.

Instead of immediate scaling, we focused on a MVP to validate the demand under real market conditions. Time pressure and budget constraints accompanied our every decision, forcing prioritization. It was a pure learning experience grounded in reality.

Paid and faster learning

One of the biggest advantages of a services model is how efficiently it sharpens the judgement – working on real products for real users forces decisions to be made under real-life conditions.

Each collaboration becomes a chance for the teams to take part in a condensed learning loop. They observe how users behave, how organizations make decisions, where processes break and which trade-offs actually make a difference. These lessons result in better time management, communication and a stronger sense of what is worth building now vs. later.

This was especially visible in our collaboration with POLCO, a US-based civic engagement platform designed to bring clear information and data to public politics discussions. Instead of committing to a fully formed product idea, we iterated in cycles, releasing early versions to the users and watching how behavior evolved over time which resulted in invalidation of some assumptions.

This kind of hands-on learning makes teams work faster, not because of rush, but less time-waste. For partners, this means less dead ends and a much clearer path with earlier validations.

More than just delivery

There’s a persistent stereotype that service companies’ main goal is “body leasing” – renting out people and walking away once the sprint is done. That’s a model we intentionally rejected.

For us, services mean building cross-functional teams that share responsibility with the client, stay invested in outcomes, and think in terms of systems, not tickets.

That’s why we choose to work with limited numbers of clients at a time – we want to stay close to the product, understand its context and contribute beyond main deliverables.

In both the Elephant’s Trunk and POLCO partnerships (and many others you can explore in our case studies), this approach meant challenging the assumptions, redefining priorities and sometimes saying “stop” when we realized that a different approach was needed.

It also meant helping partners build independence and grow internal capabilities so they could take ownership over time. Partnership, in our view, is not about the dependency and locking-in the product but about leaving teams stronger than we found them.

20 years worth of lessons

Working in a services-first model taught us to focus less on assumptions and trends and more on what reliably works across different products and stages of development. We started recognizing patterns earlier, especially with shifting priorities or increasing complexity, which is usually the moment when good partnership matters most.

For our partners, this translates into working with a team that understands not only how to deliver services well, but also where the limits are.

That’s why many long-term partnerships move toward the Service-as-a-Software model – an approach that’s becoming increasingly popular as companies look for ways to to scale without increasing headcount. With the current AI revolution, it’s now possible to utilize proven service processes and decision logic into systems to deliver consistent outcomes. Instead of growing by headcount, companies can scale outcomes, quality and consistency. Such a shift works best when it’s based on years of real delivery.

Twenty years of services teach you what no single product ever could.