SaaS Factory · 4 min read
We didn't copy what Lovable, Bolt and Cursor do brilliantly. We doubled down on what they all do badly. Here's what Reverse Benchmarking the AI build tools taught us, and why our only metric is the first pound in your bank account.
Building an app is easy. Getting it to generate revenue is the hard part.
I heard Rory Sutherland talk about 'Reverse Benchmarking' recently and it stuck with me. He's a behavioural economist and one of the most original thinkers on why people actually buy things.
The idea comes from a book called Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara. He ran Eleven Madison Park restaurant in New York, and took his team to eat at the number one restaurant in the world to see what they should copy.
Then he asked a different question. Not "what was great". He asked "what was disappointing?"
Two answers came back. The coffee was average. And if you drank beer instead of wine, nobody cared about you.
So that's what they went and fixed. Not the food. The coffee and the beer, by employing a coffee sommelier and a beer sommelier. They went from number 50 in the world to number one.
Rory keeps repeating "they didn't copy what everyone else did brilliantly. They doubled down on what everyone else did badly."
At SaaS-Factory.ai, we Reverse Benchmarked the AI build tools
Instead of just being another vibe coding tool, we asked what was disappointing.
From that list, our coffee and beer was clear. Speed of revenue and getting paid. And taking away all that technical friction.
We didn't pick those two at random, we picked them because I paid the price more than once.
That's the biggest lesson I've learned in nearly thirty years of starting, building, growing and exiting a SaaS company.
You can build a great app. You can get it live. But if you can't distribute it and you can't get paid for it, it isn't a business.
Most of what gets built with AI right now is vaporware, not a revenue generating SaaS company.
Getting an app built is now the easy bit.
The hard bit is everything between a working app and money in your bank account. The stack, company setup, pricing, billing, payment rails, GTM, support. To getting in front of a first customer.
"That's months of friction. It's where most good ideas quietly die".
SaaS-Factory.ai strips all of it out. Every part of that is already built, already wired in, waiting for you.
Our core metric isn't how many features we coded for you. It's the first pound, dollar, yen or euro in your bank account.
Everything else is secondary.
It's for someone like me.
I'm not a technical person or a coder. I'm an entrepreneur. I've built a multi branch lettings business, agentOS, a proptech CRM system, Calmony, a banking business, and agentPay, an account servicing business, and successfully sold to Volaris.
Every time I sat down to vibe code something, I hit friction. Setting up databases, wrestling with repositories, connecting domains. All of it was friction to getting the product out there and getting revenue.
But I do know the other side. Go to market plan. Seeding a CRM. Where the value sits and how you charge for it. Focus on getting that first paying customer. That's what matters.
Software that generates value for a customer, which creates revenue.
And those skills have grown 10x since joining Volaris and Omegro and being part of an organisation and peers who do this at scale.
So if you're:
Then put your idea and mission statement into SaaS-Factory.ai and watch a SaaS business spin up in a couple of hours.
We started building SaaS-Factory.ai in February 2026.
Then we did the obvious thing, we got SaaS Factory to build SaaS Factory. Eating our own dog food as the saying goes (using your own tech). We have built SaaS Factory, the business, on SaaS Factory, the product.
Since then we've built our own products that generate revenue, not demos.
That was the real test. If SaaS Factory couldn't build our stuff, it wasn't ready for anyone else's.
We're now opening it up. First to our sister companies in the Volaris and Omegro group, then to a small number of beta users outside that.
If you want in, Register on the Waiting List. We're keeping the first group small on purpose.
Thanks to Rory Sutherland for the Reverse Benchmarking concept from Unreasonable Hospitality.
Go and watch Youtube. Worth your time.
Glyn Trott founded agentOS in 2004 and sold it to Volaris in 2024. He continues to be CEO of agentOS Proptech Group, part of the Omegro and Volaris group, and co-founder of SaaS Factory with Dylan Davies, CTO, who came up with the SaaS Factory concept.
Glyn lives in Wales and is big into CrossFit. Dylan lives in New Zealand and adores red wine.
If you love the technical stuff, if you enjoy tinkering with the stack and getting the architecture just right, we're not for you. Go and use the build tools. They're very good and you'll enjoy it.
