Should I hire a marketing agency for my SaaS?
Short answer
Usually not at the early stage. Agencies are built to execute a strategy, not to discover one, and their retainers assume a budget most indie products cannot justify. Early on you need one person who will do unscalable things — write the launch post, sit in the community, talk to users — which is closer to a co-founder or a freelancer than an agency engagement.
The longer version
Agencies are execution engines. You hand them a strategy — this audience, this message, this channel — and they run it at a scale and consistency you could not manage alone. That is genuinely valuable, and it is the wrong shape for a product that does not yet know who its audience is. You end up paying a retainer for someone to professionally execute a guess.
There is also a mismatch in incentives that nobody says out loud. An agency is judged on the deliverables it produces: posts published, ads run, reports sent. None of those are the thing you actually need, which is discovering what makes a stranger care. A retainer rewards activity, and at this stage activity and progress are not the same thing.
What early products usually need instead is one person who will do the unscalable things — write the launch post themselves, sit in the community for a month, get on calls with the first twenty users. That is a co-founder, a first hire, or a freelancer with skin in the game. If you can only afford one of the three, the freelancer with a revenue share is the one that most often works.
The full argument, with the rest of the picture around it:
Why Developers Can't Market Their Products (And What Actually Works)