🤖 Software margins, no team

Hey there 👋,

At LetterOperators, we run newsletters for businesses who know they need one but don’t have the time or internal team to make it happen. From the outside, it might look like a service business. Under the hood, it now behaves more like software.

Right now, we’re running 11 newsletters. It’s just the three of us: me, Maciej, and Ryan. No freelancers. No plans to hire. Ryan is building an internal agentic system that powers everything from onboarding to final draft. AI handles the bulk of the work. We focus on tone, structure, and strategy.

We’ll soon be moving to our own beehiiv Enterprise account, meaning every new customer will get the platform included in their monthly fee. One subscription. One relationship. Content, delivery, and infrastructure all bundled. It pulls us further away from the agency model and closer to software-backed delivery.

We charge a $1,000 setup fee and $500 per month. Our only recurring costs are beehiiv plus AI usage. That’s it. No salaries. No office. At 20 customers, we’ll be operating at over 80 percent net margins. That’s higher than most SaaS companies, without the team overhead or financial burn.

We’re building a lean, operator-led company with the systems and economics to reach a seven-figure valuation. Using a conservative 3.5x profit multiple, that means generating $285,000 in annual net profit. With 11 customers already contributing around $77,000 in first-year revenue, we need to generate another $240,000.

Assuming customers stay with us for 12 months on average (we believe it will be higher, since there have been no cancellations since we started at this price point last September), each new one brings in $7,000. That means we need around 35 more. One or two per month gets us there inside two years. Since I handle the lead gen and sales side of the business, I’m going for one.

As the system becomes more efficient, we plan to reduce our pricing for everyone. The more scale and automation we achieve, the more value we can pass back to our customers while maintaining strong margins.

No scoping. No proposals. Just a fixed, productized offer running on infrastructure we control. Built for scale. Priced for leverage.

If you want to offload your newsletter and plug into what we’re building, or if you're running a service business and want to transform it into a software-backed model like this, we can help. That’s exactly what we do at AgentStacker.

Let’s build smarter, AI-enabled businesses.

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💀 The end of Skype (sob):

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📈 The New Economics of Done-for-You

Most people still think “done-for-you” means people doing things manually. But that model is breaking. It doesn’t scale well, and the margins are thin. Clients want outcomes, not effort. Founders want leverage, not headcount.

At LetterOperators and AgentStacker (what we call internally “LOAS”) we’re betting on a different kind of DFY. One where the work is handled by software, powered by AI workflows, and delivered through a tight, productized system. That means no scoping, no billable hours, and no random Slack channels. It also means we can keep prices fair while operating at software-style margins.

The economics of DFY used to be built around time and bodies. Now they’re built around infrastructure. The new model looks more like a product than a service. You invest upfront to build the system, then let it run.

This is how we’re thinking about delivery, margin, and scale. It’s why we don’t need a team. And it’s why we’re confident this business model is attractive to investors. The machine gets more efficient with every customer.

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That’s it for this week, until next time, buy my product and catch me in the community!

Cheers!

Richard (@richardpatey)

Disclaimer: Nothing in this email is financial advice and I am not a professional investment adviser. I send weekly updates on digital asset news and what I'm doing personally - consider it informational and for entertainment purposes only. There are native ad sponsorships from the beehiiv ad network (such as The Daily Upside in today’s issue) and ones I source independently via Passionfroot (soon to be beehiiv’s direct sponsorships). Plus I often add affiliate links to software I use and website marketplace listings such as Flippa who have paid me to feature listings.