Building a Privacy-First Client Reporting SaaS with Malith Gamage of Zapdigits

Malith Gamage is the co-founder of Zapdigits, a privacy-first client reporting and marketing dashboard platform built for agencies. Originally from Sri Lanka and based in the Netherlands, Malith brings 15+ years of SaaS product development experience, including time at Brevo (a European unicorn) and an InsureTech company. He bootstrapped Zapdigits with his fiancée — a UX/UI designer — after identifying a gap in affordable, white-labeled reporting tools for small and mid-size marketing agencies.

• How a personal pain point — sharing data with a non-technical co-founder — led to the founding of Zapdigits
• Why white labeling on every plan (not just premium tiers) is Zapdigits' core differentiator against Agency Analytics and Looker Studio
• The current state of AI SEO reporting: what's trackable, what's not, and why the same query returns five different answers from the same LLM
• How European GDPR concerns shape product decisions around AI features and data handling — and why self-hosted LLMs are part of the solution
• The four-tier value pitch framework Jeremy uses to help SaaS founders move beyond 'we save you time' to identity-level positioning
• Bootstrap vs. investor funding: when to take the money, and what happens to product direction when you do

Malith originally built Zapdigits as an internal tool to solve a specific frustration: his non-technical co-founder kept asking for Stripe revenue and campaign data, and Malith didn't want to hand over full platform access. That internal dashboard became the seed of a full product — one that now serves over 90% SEO-focused marketing agencies, with Search Console, Google Analytics, and Google Business Profile as the three most-requested data connectors.

"White labeling — normally, competitors put it on the highest plan. We are focused on offering it on any of our plans."

On the AI SEO reporting front, Malith is candid about how messy the space is right now. Zapdigits currently aggregates brand visibility data across multiple LLMs — ChatGPT, Gemini, and others — to produce averaged visibility scores for agency clients. But as he explains, "domain authority doesn't seem to matter — sometimes it's a very new blog they pull from." He even found his own zero-DA Zapdigits AI domain being surfaced in responses after he'd never promoted it. The full breakdown of how they're approaching this is in their blog post on monitoring ChatGPT visibility at scale.

One of the most practical discussions in the episode centers on why shipping a bad AI feature is worse than shipping no AI feature. Malith's approach: before any feature goes live, he recruits the user who requested it for beta testing. That feedback loop — built from lifetime deal buyers and direct email conversations — has shaped the Zapdigits public roadmap, which users can vote on directly.

"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."

Jeremy and Malith close with a rich conversation about when (or whether) to take venture capital. Malith observes that most of his direct competitors — including Agency Analytics — are bootstrapped. Jeremy shares a first-hand account of how Tap Clicks' investor-driven priorities reshaped product development at Raven Tools, and contrasts the Semrush (public) vs. Ahrefs (private) trajectories. The bottom line, in Malith's words: "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."

Website: zapdigits.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/malithmcr

Blog: zapdigits.com/blog

️ Public Roadmap: zapdigits.com/roadmap

The Unscripted SEO Podcast is hosted by Jeremy Rivera and features candid, unscripted conversations with SEO practitioners, agency owners, and marketing leaders. New episodes drop weekly at unscriptedseo.com.

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