Building a Privacy-First Client Reporting SaaS
BEST QUOTES
"In the SaaS business, the main advice is: don't die. As long as you can stay alive for three or four years, you're good."
— Malith Gamage, Zapdigits
"White labeling — normally, competitors put it on the highest plan. We are focused on offering it on any of our plans."
— Malith Gamage, Zapdigits
"Your AI is only as smart as your schema. As long as you give the correct data and the correct description, you will get good answers back."
— Malith Gamage, Zapdigits
Introduction
JEREMY RIVERA
Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera with a special edition of the Unscripted SaaS Podcast. I'm here with Malith, who is going to tell us a bit about his expertise in leading Zapdigits — a big competitor in the reporting space. We're going to dig into a little bit of the company history and its mission. Won't you tell us a little bit about yourself first?
MALITH GAMAGE
My name is Malith and I'm co-founder of Zapdigits and we are building a client reporting tool for marketing agencies. Before I started Zapdigits, I came from a technical background and I have been building SaaS products for around 15 years. I worked with scale-ups like Brevo, which is currently a unicorn in Europe.
I also worked in the startup world for the past 10 years. The last five years I was working for an InsureTech company in Netherlands, and before that I was also in Germany, at Brevo and a few other companies. I also built my own product before.
After all these years I always wanted to build a SaaS product, but I always just had this worry — like the fear that you never know what's going to happen. That was when I was in my 20s. Then I hit my 30s and I felt like, okay, if I don't take the risk now, I won't have the chance. I don't have any kids right now, so I started Zapdigits last year. The first few months I got a lot of feedback and it was going well, so that's why I went full-time.
I'm currently based in the Netherlands, originally from Sri Lanka, but I have been working and living in Europe for the past 20 years — in Germany and Italy and now the Netherlands.
Founding Story: From Internal Tool to Agency Platform
JEREMY RIVERA
What is it about this particular vertical? You could make a SaaS in a lot of different verticals. What was the problem or use case that you had identified as solvable with a SaaS? What was your original founding thinking?
MALITH GAMAGE
I would be honest — when we started Zapdigits, our direction was different. We were not focusing on marketing agencies initially. I had a problem when I was working on another project where I had a non-technical co-founder. He asked me every day: hey, what is our revenue on Stripe? What's the data from our database? I didn't want to give all the access to everything to my non-technical co-founder, so I was looking for a dashboard solution. That's how I built it as an internal tool.
That's why we are official partners with Stripe and we have some data connectors you don't see on other bigger competitors, because we started focusing on entrepreneurs and founders. But then when I launched the project, I got a lot of feedback from marketing agencies instead. I got really less traction from entrepreneurs — especially smaller startups who weren't willing to pay.
So I pivoted. A few months back, I did a lifetime deal. It went pretty well. I did a lot of webinars and got a lot of people to buy the platform. Best thing was they gave a lot of live feedback. Because of that traction, I started pivoting fully to marketing agencies. Then I started figuring out how we can be different.
I noticed this is not a very original idea — there are already big players for a long time, especially Agency Analytics. We started focusing on small and mid-size agencies and on white labeling. If you want to show your dashboard or report with your domain name and your colors, normally with competitors you have to be on the highest plan. Instead, we are focused on offering this on any of our plans.
JEREMY RIVERA
My background — I worked with Raven Tools, which was one of the very early players in the reporting and dashboard space. And I think that's great to put white labeling at your baseline — empower agencies because there are so many little details that matter. If you can deliver the level of reporting or visibility the client wants and take that pain point away, that's a huge advantage for agencies.
I have to give you a big shout out and kudos for finding a recursive feedback loop of getting people that'll actually tell you useful things. Getting people in early who are giving you feedback — 'hey, tell me what is your pain point as an agency' — and then you can just add those features. How has that worked from a marketing perspective?
Roadmap, Marketing, and the AI SEO Reporting Feature
MALITH GAMAGE
We still don't have a very solid plan. First we needed to get as many data connectors and data sources as possible. We went to our competitors and checked what the most-used data sources were. Most of the early feedback was: this data source is missing, I want Klaviyo and whatever. So I was really focused on building those in the beginning.
Then the feedback started shifting — it's not about data sources anymore. We also got new feedback I'm very excited about: we are trying to build an AI feature where you can talk to all your data sources and create reports just via an AI agent. I'm very careful with that because of EU regulations and I don't want to share client data to OpenAI.
What I normally do: if someone requests something, I ask — 'would you be available to give me feedback after we launch?' Before going live, I ask them to test and give feedback.
Recently we launched AI SEO reporting — basically you can see your brand's visibility in AI and add that to your client report. For marketing, every month we have quite a lot of new updates — improvements and also maybe one new data source or partnership announcements.
JEREMY RIVERA
What are some of the data sources you turn to for extracting insight about AI visibility? What are those KPIs looking like to include in your report? And what's being asked for from the agencies, which reflects what clients want to see?
MALITH GAMAGE
What we are doing right now is asking AI — different chatbots like OpenAI, ChatGPT, Gemini, and a few others — the same questions. We pass the brand and the website and ask about: what are our competitors, what is our credibility, and all this important data.
You cannot 100% say the credibility and visibility things are totally accurate. We get responses from all the AI chatbots and show an averaged report. But in real life, if someone from India or Pakistan asks the same question, they can get different answers. It's very tricky — it's not like traditional SEO.
At least right now we are showing credibility and visibility scores and giving a little bit of visibility over your competitors. See our blog post on how agencies can monitor ChatGPT visibility at scale. But this is a generic thing most tools offer right now.
I don't even know — sometimes if you ask the same question five times, you get five different answers. Random places too. Domain authority doesn't seem to matter. I even had my own Zapdigits AI domain, just a landing page with a domain authority of zero, and AI started pulling data from that domain I never promoted anywhere. Very strange.
JEREMY RIVERA
It's good to know — defining down that yes, it is a hot mess out there. The best you can do right now is directly connect to these sources, make it so the agency doesn't have to spend a day or two figuring out how to get the APIs. People pretend like AI is going to do everything for you, but there's still a skill set involved. Just because an LLM tool says it's checked a data point and gives you an answer doesn't always mean anything other than that it's willing to lie to you.
Is there an aspect of AI you're looking to bake into the reporting side of storytelling — having an interface to turn a massive Google Analytics export into usable information? Or does GDPR and European privacy rules lock data in certain ways?
AI Features, GDPR, and the Trust Problem in Data Reporting
MALITH GAMAGE
The privacy concern in Europe is very real. I have customers in the US and Germany and the Netherlands. US agencies will just send me access to their data without asking questions. But in Germany or in Europe, they are very careful. So I have to make sure privacy is part of our core values. Read more about our approach on the Zapdigits About page.
But there are solutions where you don't always have to be a wrapper from OpenAI. You can host your own LLM — like Llama or other open-source models — on your own server. It costs a bit more than using OpenAI, but it's completely possible to have it in our own infrastructure so the data stays inside us.
Of course you have to feed data to the AI — similar to MCP. Your AI is only as smart as your schema. As long as you give the correct data and the correct description, you will get good answers back.
I also looked at what people say about competitors. Most people complained that competitors like Agency Analytics — which already have AI for dashboard summaries — sometimes give incorrect answers. If you have your own AI feature but it doesn't work, that comes back harder on the company than not having it at all.
JEREMY RIVERA
I have experienced that. I imported data from Google Analytics for a concrete fence company , asked a question, and it gave me an answer that I knew smelled wrong. That is a huge concern because if you're just taking these things at surface value, you could be in some major legal trouble with your client or trouble with your boss if you're not aware of the ramifications.
MALITH GAMAGE
Especially with data it's very tricky. I see in the coding side too that a lot of developers started using AI to code — I use it sometimes — but I check everything. There's still a lot of crap coming from AI. Similar thing with data: it's all about trust.
We have some agencies with 30, 40 clients. If you share a dashboard with AI in it and wrong answers, your client starts getting wrong information. They're coming back to you asking questions, and now you have to dig into it even more. It's not being helpful — it's creating more work. So that's why I have to be careful when I build something related to AI. Right now I'm still in the building phase on the AI feature. It's not complexity — it's figuring out: can we guarantee that it always works?
JEREMY RIVERA
The quality control is a big question. The fidelity has to be dialed down as low as possible, with redundant checks. Because even your redundancy checks — if you ask Claude to check itself, it won't always catch itself. It will perpetuate the error. That's challenging.
Company Structure, Co-Founder, and the Privacy-First Mission
JEREMY RIVERA
To change the subject — I'm curious about the company side. You said you have a partner. How did that come about? What does that partner bring to the table? And what's your vision and mission statement?
MALITH GAMAGE
Vision-wise, privacy first — from Europe, we are trying to go that way. See our About page for more on the mission. My co-founder is actually my fiancée, and we've known each other for a long time. I'm the idea guy. I started working on multiple ideas and ended up saying I have to focus on one thing.
One day I told her about this idea of Zapdigits and she really liked it. She's a UX/UI designer. A few months before I started the company, she showed me some designs she had worked on, and it motivated me — I saw it and thought, this is so cool. It got me excited to build it. She's focusing on the product, UX, and UI part, and also helping with marketing.
Last month we actually started hiring two agencies: one for SEO and one for go-to-market. They are doing outreach. We'll see how it goes.
Elevator Pitch, Value Tiers, and Reporting as a Revenue Stream
JEREMY RIVERA
You're in an elevator. You've got 30 seconds on the clock. What does your pitch look like right now?
MALITH GAMAGE
If you have 10 clients, how much time do you spend per month on reporting? I'm sure you're spending 30-plus hours. So you can reduce that time to 10 minutes. You create the report one time and you can automate it monthly. That would be my first pitch.
JEREMY RIVERA
Not bad. I interviewed Colby Wegter and he talked about the value tiers of what you're talking about to your end customer. The lowest tier is actually money. The next level up is time. So I'm glad you're at least up at the second tier.
The largest thing from a pitch standpoint was about structuring the offer. Time savings is good because it goes beyond just saying 'I'm cheaper.' The next layer up is: you enable them to meet their objectives. That's the next tier — 'I can help you complete your goal.'
And then the tier above that — there are four tiers total — the top tier is: I can help you be what you want to be. It's about identity. Think back to the 90s and what made those early advertisements so successful — it wasn't 'our car goes fast.' It was 'you can live your dream.' With agencies, you're at the top of that tier. What is it that they're trying to achieve as a company and how can your SaaS fulfill it?
MALITH GAMAGE
That is very valid. Recently I did some social media promotions to check what agencies really want. We did a kind of giveaway ebook on adding reporting as a service — how can you add a few thousand MRR to your agency without any more clients. There are already some agencies adding reporting as a service, but a lot of other agencies selling SEO services don't think to upsell that part. We're also trying to go in that direction: if you want to add more money, we can help you white label it and add more revenue to your agency without adding new clients.
Agency Verticals and Customer Mix
JEREMY RIVERA
Is there any direction in the industries your agencies serve? I keep running into this gap. There's a residential window cleaning operation I work with in Middle Tennessee. Spring and fall cleans, HOA contracts, route-based scheduling, multiple trucks. The owner of this cleaning company honestly doesn't need anything past GBP, Search Console, and a call tracker to see his whole business.
Then I look at an e-commerce candle client and we're stitching Shopify, Klaviyo, and ad platform data before the report means anything. So who actually shows up in your customer base?
MALITH GAMAGE
Surprisingly, most of the customers we have are very generic, very digital marketing-focused — also SEO. They still do paid marketing and performance marketing, but 90% of their focus is SEO and local SEO. That's why they're mostly looking only for three or four data connectors: Search Console, Analytics, and Google Business Profile. Only these three.
I recently also talked to a few customers focused only on email marketing agencies. They started asking for Klaviyo and MailChimp. We have a how-to guide on creating an email marketing dashboard on our blog for exactly this use case. But 90% of the agencies using us right now are very SEO-focused.
Cash Flow, Staying Lean, and the Bootstrap vs. Investor Question
JEREMY RIVERA
The question passed forward from my last guest was: how are you approaching cash flow within your own business and solving that particular pain point?
MALITH GAMAGE
We're not focusing on cash flow management too much yet because we are very early. Our main KPI goal is to get as many users as we can and increase our MRR. Right now we are trying to stay as lean as possible. We were tempted to hire in-house, but I already noticed it's not going to work at this stage.
Infrastructure-wise, luckily I have experience building products early stage without spending hundreds of thousands. We only scale infrastructure when we have to. There are also credits from AWS and other bigger companies that give you credit for one year — so you can build to safe cashflow before the bills hit.
Right now we are focused on improving our funnel and getting more users and reducing churn. You can follow our progress on the public roadmap at Zapdigits. But the biggest pain point is talking to agencies — these people are so busy. A lot of people come in from search ads because they have a problem: they want to migrate from another tool or create reports as a new service.
JEREMY RIVERA
Tell us the next big thing coming out from y'all and where people can find you.
MALITH GAMAGE
You can find me on LinkedIn and also check out our blog at zapdigits.com where we share freebies like ebooks, and check the help center for documentation.
JEREMY RIVERA
Before we close — you need to give me a question for the next guest. What question in the SaaS/SEO/small business space would you like answered?
MALITH GAMAGE
When do you think you need venture capital cash? When do you need money from investors? You can go to them in a pre-seed round with just an idea, or if you've already built something on a bootstrap — maybe a few thousand MRR — how do you decide if you should go for investment or stay bootstrapped? I think about this a lot.
JEREMY RIVERA
I can give you two anecdotal stories. First: the company that picked up Raven Tools treated it like a cash cow. TapClicks took on funding to grow aggressively, and those investors had specific goals for sales. On the product development team the amount of changes to development priorities comparing the year before they took on investors to the year after was very large.
The more investment you take on, the less direction you control. You have more potential, but more potential for that to be directed somewhere you didn't anticipate. The direction in the year after they took on investors was more focused exclusively on generating the profits investors wanted to see versus a long-term healthy development.
I'd also encourage looking at what's happened with Semrush versus Ahrefs. Ahrefs is bootstrapped — privately owned — and they've grown enormously but stayed private. Semrush is literally a publicly traded company, and if you did a little research on their recent decisions, you can start to feel in their product offering how they're profit-seeking.
Also, I'd encourage looking at end-of-business planning. Is your mission and goal as a SaaS to create a comfortable bootstrap lifestyle company? Then who does it go to when you retire? Have that business plan written down. Consider that end-of-business cycle — it's something entrepreneurs usually ignore.
MALITH GAMAGE
Yeah, especially when you start to grow and it's getting serious. Most other founders I asked said don't go to investors. And most of our competitors are actually bootstrapped — Agency Analytics is bootstrapped, which surprised me.
In the SaaS business, the main advice is: don't die. As long as you can stay alive for three or four years, you're good.
Key Takeaways
→ White labeling from day one as a baseline feature — not a premium add-on — is a genuine differentiation play for agencies who need to present polished, branded dashboards to their clients without paying top-tier pricing.
→ AI SEO reporting is still in an embryonic, chaotic state: the same prompt yields different answers across LLMs, domain authority carries little weight in AI citations, and no one yet has a solid set of trackable KPIs. Offering a standardized report aggregating multiple AI sources provides value while the space matures.
→ Data accuracy and trust are existential for a reporting platform. Shipping an AI feature that gives wrong answers is worse than not shipping one — it erodes client trust for the agency and creates more work, not less.
→ Privacy-first infrastructure (self-hosted LLMs, no third-party data sharing) is not just a compliance checkbox in Europe — it's a genuine product differentiator and core company value for Zapdigits.
→ Value-tier pitch construction matters: move beyond time savings toward enabling agency objectives and agency identity.
→ Bootstrap as long as possible, but have a clear end-of-business plan before needing investor money. Taking on venture capital often redirects product development priorities away from long-term product health toward short-term investor return targets.
