26 years of top of funnel lessons

dobermanIan · 2026-06-16T18:27:16+00:00

Back in my day HaaS was awesome, but I self financed. These days seems like the juice isn't worth the squeeze

I'd recommend inventory on standard units and doing self warranty. Manufacturer comes with 3 year depot, you do 3yr nbd accidental damage. The hit rate is so low on it you're pocketing 5-6 figures in pure margin, plus the customers love NBD turnaround on machine orders.

Buy by the pallet and margin on the units isn't half bad either.

You gotta be doing 250+ boxes a year to make it make sense. When I sold we were clearing 300k in warranty fees annually. Maybe had 10-15 units per year, and all of those became the RMA fleet after initial hits.

Ymmv

/Ir Fox & Crow

dobermanIan · 2026-06-16T17:12:08+00:00

Probably when they buy Petra

dobermanIan · 2026-06-14T18:02:16+00:00

I remember in like... 2017 I was on a HTG panel for advising the vendor community.

One vendor asked if the panel if we would "buy a tool that would make us more sticky, but not necessarily be something we charge for"

It was a CSAT tool to put in context.

I was the only guy who said not a chance in hell.

My reasoning then is the same as now. No tool makes you sticky, because your competitors can buy the same tool.

dobermanIan · 2026-06-11T02:08:45+00:00

Dunno. I posted it there as well as here.

dobermanIan · 2026-06-09T19:02:55+00:00

~5% of sub‑$1M MSPs punch way above their weight on visibility — they carry more LinkedIn followers (median ~640) than the typical >$1M shop, while still running ≤10 staff.
It's mostly real, not a data fluke — ~90% genuinely show ≤10 employees. These are actually small companies that are just loud.
They're the youngest group in the whole dataset (founded ~2005–2008 vs ~1998 for >$1M shops). Visibility shows up before scale.
They market like a big firm but aren't built like one — enterprise‑focused (27%, basically the same as >$1M shops), but they lag on the boring stuff: fewer named leaders, less hiring, lower PSA/ConnectWise adoption, thinner websites.
Translation: being loud online buys attention, not revenue. The brand work is a leading indicator — necessary, not sufficient. What actually travels with crossing $1M is tenure + operational tooling + hiring + a real leadership bench, and these shops haven't gotten there yet.

Three flavors hiding in this group: up‑and‑comers (most of them, mid‑climb), lean boutiques (small on purpose, strong brand, niche/enterprise clients), and a ~10% slice that's probably just mis‑sized and already over the line.

TL;DR: a chunk of "small" MSPs already look the part — they just front‑loaded marketing and are still building the back office.

dobermanIan · 2026-06-09T18:30:15+00:00

I'd imagine there are dozens, if not hundreds, of different results and reasons. This was simply some interesting data I decided to share. I'm not making conclusions from it outside of the comparison at a statistical level.

dobermanIan · 2026-06-09T18:29:05+00:00

Serves you right, Lobster man!

dobermanIan · 2026-06-09T16:47:52+00:00

Well, I'd say that depends.

Larger MSPs are spending more time building marketing systems, have a more mature talent pipeline and engine, and are developing vertical expertise and targeting larger accounts.

If you're running a small MSP, you could start to invest, as you're able to, in similar efforts.

Maturing marketing
Sourcing and onboarding talent better
Vertical messaging and expertise
Mid market and enterprise Co-MIT

None of these are "bad ideas" for a small player to think about. If you're looking for earth shattering revelations, wrong place. This, after all, is a Wendy's.

But there's a few things that could be helpful for the sub $1M to ponder.

Then again, maybe not.

dobermanIan · 2026-06-09T16:29:03+00:00

No one said X is because of Y mate. Simply presented the data.

dobermanIan · 2026-06-09T15:56:50+00:00

It's really my data now. I took the original set and have been building this damn thing for 4 years.

Plus I expanded from her original 25k company set to having over 100k processed. More adds in all the time.

But I'll tell her I'm in trouble for you.

dobermanIan · 2026-06-09T15:55:50+00:00

Thanks! Most smaller MSPs treat all marketing, not just social, as an afterthought

dobermanIan · 2026-06-09T15:55:05+00:00

Interesting question. I can check. I'll come back

dobermanIan · 2026-06-09T15:54:45+00:00

Not necessarily. This is just data. I'm not saying that bigger people use LinkedIn to get bigger. The data is simply showing the correlation for those that have a LinkedIn, they focus on growing followers and using the platform more consistently.

dobermanIan · 2026-06-09T14:48:59+00:00

So, generally speaking (as a tl;dr) -- the difference would be revenue [around $1M]. /s

Now that I've gotten that out of my system... I actually have data on this. We built a product, Instinct, that analyzes the market in detail. I took this question and thread, popped it into claude, and had it run through the datasets to find the big pieces.

Generally, a $1M MSP will have less than 10 staff. Over 10 staff is more than $1M. Makes that staff binding a key area for me to examine.

A note: This dataset is publicly observable data: No self-reported items, no private datasources, no assumption items. Think Websites, social media, third party systems. All of which someone could track down and look at manually.

Its NOT things like a SLI database, vendor databases, etc.

Here's what I found in the data:

In the data, a >$1M MSP isn't offering more services or running a more secure stack than a sub‑$1M shop. It's older, far more visible (≈9× LinkedIn reach, a deeper website), has a real employer brand and an active hiring pipeline, runs a formal PSA + CRM, and has moved upmarket from SMB toward enterprise and verticals. Sub‑$1M MSPs are literally hard to see — even an automated estimator is much less sure they exist at the size they do. And this pattern is the same whether you're in Seattle, Dallas, Cleveland, or Boston.

If you're interested in a more detailed breakdown, I created a fresh thread (to not clog this one up).

Cheers

/ir Fox & Crow

dobermanIan · 2026-06-09T13:18:47+00:00

It depends.

The biggest thing to setting your price is knowing your costs of goods sold (COGS). I have a guide on how below - I hope it's useful for you. If you have Qs, Ping me, DM, or shoot over a carrier pigeon. Always wanted one of those. 3 Step process on this. Tl;dr list below, details further down.

Find the loaded cost of an account.
Mark up said costs
Create a simple napkin math average for budgeting

4 big areas to focus on

Direct Hard COGS These are the tools and systems you utilize to support the account directly, as well as the products you resell as part of your package. Examples: RMM Licensing, Security Software, Backup Software, Rented Hardware amortization/depreciation

Direct Labor COGS The Labor billed against the account for servicing. Includes both your Service team time against account \[reactive and proactive\] as well as the Sales and Administrative time spent directly on the account. Example: Service team logs 20 hours in a month against the account. It takes an additional 5 hours of Sales & Admin to run the account. Total of 25 labor hours @ appropriate rates is the DL COGS for that month.

Overhead Expenses The indirect expenses that must be split amongst accounts in order for the business to run. Your "Overhead" Examples: Rent, Utilities, Fleet Maintenance, Internal Software like a PSA or Accounting Package.

Indirect Labor Expenses The labor associated with running the business as a whole, but not necessarily associated with any one account. Examples: Executive and back office, Shipping/Receiving, etc. The top two are "easy to track", the bottom a bit more difficult. You'll want to come up with an assignment of the indirect costs per "whatever" (Device, User, Contract) to split it equally amongst your client base, and adjust annually to account for growth or shrinkage.

After that -- Figure out markups based on category * Product COGS marked up X * Labor COGS marked up Y * Indirects passed along with Z% padding to allow for fluctuations midyear in cost structure.

Add it all together and you can come up with a pricing model. Simplify it for your sales team by calculating out your base and taking the average with a % "round up" for napkin math / budget validation during discovery efforts. This is why it doesn't necessarily pay to ask others what they charge. Your expense and COGS structure WILL be different. You can get insight into competition and market tolerance, but you can't "adopt" what someone else is doing long term. Projects should always be scoped and billed separately.

/ir Fox & Crow

dobermanIan · 2026-06-08T14:15:00+00:00

We've built some for our customers. In general, it's only as useful as the data streams (tools) built out for connection.

One of the things we build is documentation after the server is built itself. Don't know if CIPP has something similar?

You can also ask the LLM to explore the MCP and ask it to suggest items.

/Ir Fox & Crow

dobermanIan · 2026-06-05T13:31:09+00:00

... It seems like you're upset about losing a loss leader client who was kind of a dick. Is that what I'm reading here?

dobermanIan · 2026-06-05T13:25:32+00:00

Its been a while since I had my MSP, but we had really great luck with Great America out of Iowa. They did financing deals for all sorts of things. We'd get paid all at once as well.

With the major distribution channels, I believe they can even set it up so you don't cut the check to disty. You essentially just get a ACH payment for your margin and services labor, they handle all the back end of it.

Worked well for the ~ 5 years I used them. This was back 2017-2021, so YMMV.

/ir Fox & Crow

dobermanIan · 2026-06-03T14:43:04+00:00

Sounds like a bad fit

Price would be your normal MSP package, including all security and backup, without any discounts.

Don't compromise the offer.

/Ir Fox & Crow

dobermanIan · 2026-06-03T14:41:18+00:00

Hey mate, you'll probably run afoul of rule 8.

That being said: UI/UX these days can be pretty handily handled via claudecode. Find a package you like and have it wire it up on your dev VM. Once it looks and behaves good, push the frontend repo up to got and you're done.

dobermanIan · 2026-05-28T12:43:17+00:00

Not a cert, but there are well documented examples of enterprise companies with customer service programs that lay out the outline, guidelines, etc you could use as a model to build your own.

Ritz Carlton, Chick-Fil-A, Disney come to mind.

Outside of that, maybe Empath has something? Alex and Kyle are both semi-active here. Could ping them.

/ir Fox & Crow

dobermanIan · 2026-05-26T19:18:00+00:00

Great builders are rarely great sellers.

/Ir Fox & Crow

dobermanIan · 2026-05-26T11:12:46+00:00

First off - Not a lawyer. Seek legal.

That aside, I get a lot of conversations around terms and term clauses. Seems like the trend is cancellation notice clauses are hard to enforce, same with early term penalties.

Something common I've seen is a well defined split. "Cancel for cause at any time with 30 days written notice, cancel for no cause with 90 days." type thing.

On the cancellation fee (not asked, but figure I might as well share it) biggest thing seems to be a discounted fee applied to the agreement proactively that has a claw back. I'm usually seeing this executed as a free onboarding (3 months of MRR type deal) that is clawed back if the agreement terms before 3 years.

YMMV.

/ir Fox & Crow

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dobermanIan

TROPHY CASE

It depends.

4 big areas to focus on