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> That’s why selling SaaS or AI to this kind of company isn’t for me - I’d rather focus my energy on building a company from my own principles, and hire people who share them from the beginning.

> When I told my manager I was leaving, he said I should start my own company and give him a call when I do. So that's what I'm doing.

I love hearing stories like this, because it shows a way to be a builder without the "venture or nothing" narrative that has pervaded the tech space since the dotcom days.

It is very difficult to make a venture-backed services firm (providing services, not software) that can be immediately profitable, grow sustainably, and outperform competitors with in-house technology that's built for real on-the-ground stakeholders... at a speed that will satisfy venture investors.

But it is more possible than ever ([0]), to do this (in-house tech and all) on a bootstrapped basis - since AI reduces the engineering staff required to build, adapt, and maintain an agile best-in-class solution at single-tenant/single-customer scale. The outcome is at the least a lifestyle business, but with upside that can take the form of anything from franchising to licensing to full-fledged SaaS in the future.

I wish OOP the best of luck, and hope he's found a passion. He could go far with this approach if he ends up following through.

([0] This is not to say there are no barriers to entry. There's privilege in the word "founder," and this is no exception. And the K-shaped economy has left many brilliant would-be founders behind. But at least some barriers are lower than they once were, and that's worth appreciating.)

On "venture or nothing" - This will be my second company and this time round I have stripped right back to the problem, which is actually quite basic - pest control is a big, good business to be in and it's possible to build a very big, profitable business by doing the simple things right, consistently.

It will compound over time if the basics are done right (which is harder to do than I thought before this experiment)

In my previous company, we founded it with the outcome first - "take over the world" or bust. This time I think the base case is a good company, and the ceiling is the best in the industry.

A really good company worth checking out in this vein is equipmentshare.com. In 10y they started and IPO'd, by being a better way to rent heavy equipment.

This is amazing. Thanks for sharing the story.

> ...and noticed companies have become less likely to offer their time for ride-alongs and research calls. They get too many requests, and vibe coding is drawing their attention to self-build.

Is this ACTUALLY happening? Are entrepreneurs who get into vibe-coders really eating up time a bunch of time for trades people?

Much more difficult to get attention from blue-collar decision makers than it was previously. Also bc there's a ton of investment in the sector now, so they're bombarded by inbound!

I see, you're statement is less about product research and more about customer acquisition.

Getting the initial conversation even to research (not just to sell to) is more difficult than before for these reasons.

[dead]

I think there is the potential for a beautiful correction here; the general narrative over the last 5-10 years is PE buying up good businesses, enshittifying them and loading up debt to improve margins, and driving down quality.

But this leaves an opportunity for anyone that cares to build a business that is higher quality (and even better if it’s possible to build it efficiently too).

I think with AI lowering the barrier to entry we should expect to see a lot of new small businesses appear, and perhaps if we are lucky this trend can drive a reversal in the enshittification.

I like the story, I struggle to see how to outplay PE.

Yes, PE enshittifies the experience. You can be a better human and win customers that way.

The headwinds are the usual david-v-goliath going up against scale/consolidation stories:

- consolidation gives more purchasing power. When all the PE-controlled pest control vendors in the state are negotiating as one, they get bigger cost breaks

- PE has a bigger war chest. They'll enshittify eventually, but they'll undercut you longer than you can stay solvent. At that point, they'll happily buy you for pennies.

- The end-game is always monopolization. A PE firm bought up something like all the concrete mills in Georgia or one of the southern state. Any building or municipal project in the state effectively buys from that one company, even though it looks like a bunch of different local concrete mills.

- Any AI you throw at the problem presumably PE can handle more efficiently at scale.

What's the strategy that outcompetes?

Where there's a consolidated critical asset like the concrete plant, they can monopolize the area. Different with PC when the work is being done by individual techs on their routes.

Also I'm starting with the goal "Be the best pest control company" and building up from there, rather than to monopolize it.

In this toy model, the strategy that (may) outcompete is delivering a better service.

> The end-game is always monopolization

This is one happy end state of PE but let’s be clear that for large swathes of human history it has not been the goal of most participants in local economies. If PE’s edge is diluted they may find themselves less able to achieve this on the margin.

Service businesses win on service, which notably degrades over time with PE firms.

So you win by taking the long view and building incrementally and opportunistically jump in as the incumbent falters.

> which is actually quite basic - pest control is a big, good business to be in and it's possible to build a very big, profitable business by doing the simple things right, consistently.

I would have thought the opposite because pest control is the easiest thing to DIY for most people. All the insecticides and traps and knowledge for what to use is available online, there is usually no emergency so research can be done, and no technical skills to learn most of the time.

On residential - lots of people don't want to get their hands dirty. For commercial - it's rarely worth doing in-house and in manufacturing / food industries getting it wrong can lead to fines / closure losing contracts, so it's not worth penny pinching.

My biggest problem with a service like pest control is I can't tell what it does. I'm not talking about getting rid of a hornet nest or squirrels in the attic, I'm talking about the door-to-door salespeople who want you to subscribe to a quarterly sprinkling of some magic dust around your house. If I could get a trustworthy measurement like "number of 2x4s not destroyed by carpenter ants" or "sqft of siding not rotten because of nests" I would be a lot more open to it.

For the d2d residential services, you're buying peace of mind and usually the provider will guartantee the service. E.g. if you see ants and you're not due a visit until next month, they'll drop in and sort it.

I think you're assuming that there is no valuable/monetizable difference between a neophyte, and an experienced expert serving (and supported by) a solid organization.

Also, I don't know where you live, but the more powerful substances used by licensed pest control are regulated and aren't (legally) available to the general public. If you're willing to run a business model based on unlicensed use of controlled substances, there are more profitable options than pest control lol

fumigating houses, pest control at commercial food facilities, commercial premises etc is a big dirty difficult job and involves expensive equipment and hazardous chemicals etc plus as OP noted requires exams before you can do it for 3rd parties

My neighbor is the best wallpaper guy in the city, which you’d think is extremely niche but wallpaper has come back in a big way. All sorts of businesses out there for those who identify needs and service wants. And the best way to know about a business is to work for an established one first

I’ve always wondered how the hell things like vacuum repair shops and other niche stores I still see around from time to time are still around.

It’s not that I don’t think anyone would choose to repair their vacuum. It’s more that I can’t imagine they get enough volume to pay the lease/rent/bills on whatever commercial property they’re on.

The smart ones will own their shop outright. If not, they are on a longterm lease.

Also, don't knock it, a quality vacuum like a Kirby or Miele will go decades, are incredibly quiet, and just need maintenance on wear and tear, which these repair shops provide. I think we got used to thinks being terrible. Like my Dyson, does good work, it's also very loud compared to my financially secure friend's Miele.

> Like my Dyson…

Which is wild because a Dyson has a premium price tag.

Tough as consumer goods are generally getting cheaper and better quality. Can’t remember the last time we had a problem with the TV. We have left them behind when moving apartments as they’re relatively cheap now

Love this one. You are selling people their time back with a service like wallpapering for sure.

The idea that AI makes adaptation and maintenance easier for non domain experts seems a stretch at best. All we've seen to date is it makes building shallow copies quicker for more people, and helps experts go faster. Neither of these applies to the majority of bootstrapping vertical domains

Out of all things, you have to be a sadist to be passionate about pest control. Even though necessary at times, it's not a very clean job.

Sounded more like he likes he is passionate about building a business.

It’s the business characteristics I like. Recurring and one off revenue, big market, growing, regulations. The exam barrier to entry rather than 4y apprenticeship like plumbing

Lifestyle business has been a thing since day zero in this space (the tech world)

I have been surprised by how many tech founders, currently funded by VC, have side gigs or are running the company knowing they wont' or can't scale it. I don't think this is a good thing for either the founders or the VC (who probably don't know)

I briefly worked for someone who was funded by Imagine K12, just before Imagine K12 merged into Y Combinator.

He used his funding to rent four apartments in San Francisco, which he then sublet, personally, through Airbnb.

I know exactly who you’re talking about

Name and shame?

I liked that you picked a service that has a relatively low barrier to entry. The real asset are local operators and referrals. Making them more efficient without being controlled by a big company would be a boon for everyone involved.

Consider being a platform coop with regional operators as members. See https://platform.coop/

Yes, the barrier here is the desire to study and pass the exam. If willing, you are up and running relatively quickly - but only as a technician under someone else's operating license. To get the operator license (eg to be a full on pest control company) requires 2+ year documented experience and another set of exams.

The operating license holder is also on the hook for legal action if (when) things go wrong.

"Control" is interesting and I have found in all trades that people value their freedom. The good companies don't monitor employees too tightly, and are rewarded with loyalty and longer tenures generally. Of course you have to run a good recruitment and referral process to find the good people!

I’ve never heard of platform Co-ops. Cool! Lots of people predicted that a beloved local coffee shop was doomed to fail when the workers got a loan and bought it to run as a completely flat cooperative. It’s been a few years and they are absolutely killing it. I’d love to see the tech version of that.

There is still much to be worked out, but some smart people are working on it. See also https://e2c.how/

Thanks! Cool initiative. I’ll look into it.

I like this idea of building your own software to run your own business rather than trying to sell software.

My wife and I run a small chain of second-hand clothing stores that buy from the public, and we run it on our own custom software built on top of a rails e-commerce engine. (Solidus) We don't do anything online, but instead use the engine to run our point-of-sale and credit system. We have one part-time developer who works from home and occasionally comes and works directly with the staff in the stores, and now she leans a little on Claude for assistance.

I would never want the hassle of trying to make our system work for other companies. I love that we have a system that can adapt and change based on our needs without being beholden to some else's SaaS.

If we were to rebuild it all today, we'd probably lean even harder on Claude, but still work using a good open source e-commerce framework.

It's only going to get easier, cheaper and faster to build these things for yourself. Thanks for sharing.

I know about 4 friends that have left their parent company, built a killer product that same company didn't think to build or didn't believe in, only to get acquired by that same company after a few years... some have done it multiple times.

I think this falls in exactly that situation. You see how janky these national companies are doing things, plot out a disruptive course, then disrupt them in a particular region so that you can extrapolate how much that will hurt at national scale and force a buyout that's way beyond the multiple you bought those small operators for.

How did they deal with non-competes? Are they in CA or somewhere those aren't enforceable?

Sounds like they didn't build competing products, they built products that'd have been very valuable to the parent company.

Ask for forgiveness, not permission!

I work as a Boat Captain and I've been building Camera Search for 16 months to provide better tools for tradesmen. It's evolved into a larger platform with multiple clients, but the core use case for me was building a video and photo first agent that is grounded in actual manuals and data and provide better diagnostics, parts, and repair info.

My longterm vision is to be the agent platform for traditional industries, bridging the gap between knowledge work and physical work.

Diagnosis without the professional having to be on site is a good use case.

I'd love if this ends up being he gets a 1m/y pest control empire going and quits tech startups as he prefers the sweaty kind.

Not long ago I left a reasonably cool AI startup to join an ops heavy (like people physically doing work, running warehouses etc) company. There was some adjustment but the ability to deliver real, concrete, monetary value to people working in the field is incredibly rewarding (and oddly the pay is on par with most bay area startups).

I recently talked to a few companies in the AI space, from (smaller) frontier model labs to companies still looking to build "AI products" and my take away was that, if you're not working for one of the big players, the market hasn't really figured out if there is an "AI engineer" job yet.

I'm increasingly starting to believe that the future of work for people that have technical skills (more than just 'software') is likely going to be working in places that are less about "shipping software" and more about supporting teams doing something physical in the real world.

These companies are also the most ripe to truly leverage AI: they have tons of messy problems that need to be solved and iterated on extremely fast. Operations people tend to be "EoD" deadline people, not quarterly planners. Getting solutions solved in an actionable way on time often means really understanding the core business, the technical space surrounding it, and how to leverage AI to pull of some miracles. It can be stressful, but when you pull it off your stakeholder have sincere and real gratitude and you're actually moving the needle for the company.

I don't think the Bay area, even those sniffing the AI vapors the hardest, is really willing to accept what AI is going to do to software and software companies.

I love working for those companies also, where they are used to waiting months for a small software update and I can do it in hours and they think I'm a wizard.

The best outcome is bespoke software for every company and small "ops heavy" (in startup context) startups have a window to grow like weeds. Imagine the culture shock and legal / procurement process for an established player to bring a vendor in to build this for them. It won't work, it needs to be an internal team, but even then, the internal politics, and short term affects to people's bonuses and incentives will make it almost impossible.

I give this example as I previously worked at a big European REIT. My job was to implement renewable energy across the portfolio which on paper was a no-brainer due to legislation and grants / feed in tariffs etc.

We got huge pushback from every angle with the local teams, people paying lip service to drag it out and delay. Eventually I got to the root cause... The capex had to come out of the business unit, and the payback would negatively affect their KPIs and bonus. Next time I came across this kind of issue, I asked to see the incentive structure before approaching anyone.

This is going to be the route for a lot of white collar people as they lose their jobs to AI.

Absolutely. I am thinking what my blue collar alter ego will be.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but as a recent white->blue collar convert, (union metalworker,) tech workers are usually far less qualified than your average vocational high school graduate, way less physically capable, and waaaaay less tolerant of the sort of workplace unpleasantries in these types of jobs at the entry level. Your tech experience gets you pretty much zero advantage, and there are lots of very smart people outside of the software world that have put a whole lot more thought into that industry than you have. Consistently high labor demand meant companies had to comparatively treat tech workers with kid gloves, and as a result, most don’t realize how much smoke has been blown up our assess for decades. They start as soft, arrogant, maladroit noobs who will cosplay as working class for a couple weeks and either eat crow and stick with it long enough for their boss to not want to throw them off a bridge, or give up/get fired and try to pay the bills doing zero-entry-barrier gig work. I was fortunate enough to have been a blue-> white collar covert a couple of decades ago so I knew what I was getting into. The fantasy that a tech worker landing in a blue collar field will naturally rise above the rabble and shoot to the top is a workplace version of the fantasy where a white person finds themselves in some jungle full of “savages” and is so inherently impressive and sophisticated that they’re immediately made king.

Blue collar guy here who started working construction at 13 years of age. I concur that many white collar people won’t have an easy time adjusting to blue collar jobs. Some people do switch and thrive. Many however don’t have the mental fortitude to push through the misery of a non stimulating brain numbing endless job that could kill somebody if you stop paying attention.

There are also a lot of geniuses who might barely know how to read but can do incredible work and figure out some really difficult problems.

I consider myself blue collar even though I am a school teacher currently. It’s in my blood. I don’t especially like the work but I can do it and I am skilled at it.

My advice to anyone moving in to the blue collar world is to be respectful. If you are educated Don’t ever let on that your education makes you superior somehow. You will make a lot of enemies by being that person.

You will likely run in to people who really are quite unintelligent just be considerate and don’t get into debates with them. A lot of people come from poverty or really tough backgrounds and many are quite sensitive about it so don’t make a big deal about it.

On the other side there are many people who are quite intelligent and have the skills and knowledge of engineers even though they do not have any formal training or education.

A lot of people have been sold a lie about uni education (and willingly bought it in a lot of cases).

IF you're reading Hacker News, you're probably not one of those people. You're probably someone for whom a university education, and working in software, are actually good fits.

Agree.

I agree. I am not naive! I would not be doing it as a lifestyle choice though. I'd do it because I need to. I have worked in a factory before so culture shock wont be there at least. I get my pay would half (luckily I am not on the US West Coast monster TC so merely it would half).

It’s far worse in the restaurant industry. We’re going to see a lot of really awkward concept restaurants and bars open and close in quick succession.

Yes. Although if we can get more robot sushi restaurants for a while I will not complain.

Yeah if software developers have anything to do with that, it’s providing the software or the money. Running a restaurant is extremely complex, specialized knowledge with a dizzying number of moving parts. Something like 40% of restaurants close their first year, and the large majority don’t make it 5.

Funding someone that knows how to run a restaurant and an engineer with food processing expertise, HAACP compliance and all that? Sure. But I was in that business in the Boston area and saw SO many tech geniuses blow through their funding before they even opened.

I'm sure there are many software engineers and similarly unqualified people in that 40%.

They don’t make up the majority of that 40%— it’s tough even for experienced people— but the majority of that crowd ends up in that 40%… or soon after if they’re good at convincing other people who have no idea what they’re doing to invest in it. The NRA (the other one) stats that I’m probably misremembering slightly are actually pretty eye-opening.

The problem is that the business requires showing the customer just enough of the labor, planning, etc that goes into their experience to make them feel like they’re getting a lot for their money, but not so much that they feel bad for enjoying it. Unfortunately, the customer doesn’t see most of that labor, and so often they think “well I’ve been to so many restaurants that I b know how they work… I could do this…” They’re almost always totally wrong.

Oh for sure. I worked in a restaurant for years through college: eventually the mildly famous chef/owner retired (staff found out by guests commenting on the newspaper story that night). Turned out he had sold it to an up-and-coming local star chef, a couple years past his “apprentice of the year award” and back from working in major kitchens overseas. We were convinced it would be dead within months: it was a 26yo chef who had never run a business, backed up by his wife (who was waiting tables for the first time ever as her second shift after a day job covering the mortgage), and his parents, who came across as thought they had never been inside a restaurant kitchen before that.

Turned out his dad had just been pushed into retirement from head of purchasing and logistics at a multi-state department store, so he ran the paperwork and it was a dream team. Mom was not my type of person but worked her ass off cleaning the whole place every day, very impressive. After about a year they were doing well enough that his wife got to quit working night shift there.

yeah. there absolutely are lots of very smart and capable people outside of tech. as someone who has seen the blue collar world "up close" (family businesses), its a different breed... the culture and attitude gap is enormous. shockingly so. most tech workers I know couldn't hang (don't hustle as hard, risk averse, liberal), but some skills may transfer, like problem solving and diagnosis, i.e. debugging.

Why is risk averse a thing. Blue collar jobs are just jobs unless you are going self employed and buying all the gear etc.

This is a great example of the perspective disconnect.

In trades, the risk is usually not financial. I come home every day smelling of petrochemicals, with minor to moderate injuries, having been on my feet for 8 hours, sometimes up on ladders with greasy boots on, climbing on, into, and out of machines that could maul me without even making an unusual sound, and carrying 100lb sharp steel parts up stairs because it’s more efficient than waiting forces the shop hands to do it.

While the risks certainly have financial components, they’re more “get cancer, brain damage, lose a limb, or maybe even your life” risks. Risk averse is career death.

> buying all the gear

Most blue collar jobs require this. A mechanic usually has to provide his own tools. This can be tens of thousands of dollars just for a basic set that lets you do standard jobs. Then you might have specialty tools for specific equipment.

Even a framer or roofer is bringing his own hammers, saws, PPE, and anything else that's required. You don't just roll up to a job and get handed everything you need like a software job.

Big time money on tools and professional tools are not fucking cheap. I have about $1800 in measuring equipment alone that I had to buy out of pocket. Add in wrenches I can put my entire body weight into all day long, a drill index, multiple top-end hammers, screwdrivers, grinders, deburring tools, punches, clamps, handheld grinders, etc. etc. etc.

I think mechanics have it worse though. In my shop I mostly only need imperial tools, at least.

At least in the factory I worked in prior to becoming a software engineer, there was a significantly higher component of physical risk than in any of the software jobs I've worked in

From above: "endless job that could kill somebody if you stop paying attention"

Cash flow and accounts receivable management is a headache for these guys

I mean, brains transfer to any job, and it’s tough to be a developer if you’re genuinely stupid. So in that respect, sure. But I’m definitely not saying that developers aren’t smart enough to do blue collar work.

> But I’m definitely not saying that developers aren’t smart enough to do blue collar work.

Fine. I'll say it: developers aren't smart enough to survive a blue collar environment.

My credentials? I worked in a factory in my youth. 12hr shifts, nightshift only, 7 days a week, on assembly lines.

Your average developer is definitely not risk averse enough to keep all their limbs. Where I worked, two people on two different lines lost limbs.

If you have ever used npm install on your daily driver without sand boxing it, you're too stupid to work in a factory.

Well to be fair the risk of "npm install on your daily driver without sand boxing" is that you might have to wipe and reinstall everything, or even deal with a persistent malware and loss of data. There's no risk of going home missing a limb. That sort of risk does tend to grab your attention a lot more.

There are some really important distinctions in the types of smart we’re talking about, here.

> you have ever

That's way too strong. I would say "if you've ever done it and had an issue and not learned from the mistake then you're too stupid".

The trades differ from software and that there's a lot more "learning on the job" and making rookie mistakes in terms of how the physical world works.

There is learning on the job with software, but it's a much smaller component and much of that is being replaced with AI skills.

This made me laugh. “We’ll computerize it and get filthy rich! They’re stuck in 2015!”

I’m guilty of this type of thinking and occasionally get reminded when I’m way out of my lane.

Agree having made the switch from construction -> Tech job. Having sat around at least 25,000 tech related meetings until now worked with thousands of people in various roles in tech, i could count on my one hand the number of people from each tech company I worked that could qualify to survive the real blue collar world.

I just imagine random scenarios that would definitely happen— like some pallid, heavily moisturized former lead developer in $500 work clothes deciding to jockey for smartypants cred by ‘debating’ a shop supervisor/foreman/whatever about their approach to something as it’s being executed, or in a meeting in front of everyone, like they might interject about an architectural decision at a dev meeting… saying something like “well it’s basically a traveling salesman problem” and spewing some seriously flawed approach without realizing that the super is using a technique unequivocally proven superior in like the 1940s. Or arguing with an actual engineer about an engineering decision because they “read this substack article written by a software developer that puts a ton of research into this stuff.”

I then nearly die of internal cringe.

Hate to see you in gray, I went from dropout waiter to Google via my own startup in between. And you nailed e v e r y t h i n g, I am screenshotting this and reading it over and over again for years to come. Great writing too. Cheers.

Haha, thanks. It’s bobbed up and down around that zero a few times. People that know it’s true vs. people that may soon find out that it’s true.

Building a vertical backoffice for just 1 company used to be pointless and probably still is.

Doing something similar. Bought a business in the petroleum equipment service space. Building internal tools for ourselves. Pen and paper still dominates the industry.

Does it matter that pen and paper dominate? How much of the business's expenses are overhead?

I worked in scheduling and timekeeping industry for a little bit, when pen and paper is mentioned you think "oh it's just notes written, and some other things" but in reality it's literally whole departments storing everything in daily/weekly sheets/binders and it's like 20 people's job to keep it all in order and keep the ship running for next week.

When someone asks what the plan is for next week, the answer is normally, it needs to be written out, or I'll have to find this for you etc.

Yeah, my first job at a startup was at an oil and gas saas that ingested unstructured data into a standardized db for smaller operators.*

"How much money did we make yesterday?" was a nontrivial question that required a several people a couple of days to compile manually before our software.

--- * Would probably make a killing today; this was over a decade ago and the extraction was 98% regex and custom if statements

Would you recommend buying a business over starting one from scratch when possible?

Depends on the industry and your experience plus your access to capital. Sorry for the non-answer

Depends on the industry / multiple / employees.

You want at least a year where you're systemising the owner out of the business without filling their shoes.

You'd also want some kind of break clause so you can back out if it turns out the business can’t run without the owner, or if the team won’t adapt and can’t be replaced.

Usually... buying proven technology, and marketing lead lists is still a gamble. However, the other YC posters are correct in the "never make what you can buy" advice... if and only if there is still mileage in the product life-cycle.

In general, there are a lot of serious rules around energy and fuel industries. Rockwell and Kongsberg technology still dominate for some very practical reasons. Seeing a few small firms fail hard in the area, I would still call it a fools errand for those looking at low hanging fruit. =3

Buy then build

You took a job as a tech in order to learn about pest control business so you could build a SaaS platform? Do I understand that correctly? In the end you decided not to build a SaaS and started your own pest control company?

I wanted to get in the field for real, see how it works. There is going to be a lot more people exploring blue-collar work as white collar jobs are eliminated. I plan to acquire the traditional operator I've identified, and tech-enable it. If that works, grow it as a platform by either acquiring other companies or attracting technicians over.

Congrats, and genius move. And great hustling, show's there's no way out of hard-work.

Reminder to myself to pick an industry that's always gonna have demand. We recently paid ~$200 for a 30 minute visit to seal off like 3 tiny holes around the perimiter of our house because of mice (actual cost of materials ~$5).

Lots of guys working at the big companies do this type of work (called exclusion) on the side. One guy where I worked charged a restaurant $8k for exclusion work that took 2-3 days out of hours and $500 in materials. I asked the company why we let this work go - they don't want the liability and relative hassle compared to steady service routes.

Interesting pivot. What I don't understand is how the SaaS software fits into it or helps grow a pest control company.

I don't believe SaaS is a good option in this sector - the incumbent VSaaS is decent, cheap, and ubiquitous. By "tech-enabling", I mean layering tech into the ops where it adds value and helps to scale the business. Obvious wins are upselling, hands-free data entry to the CRM, smart traps/stations. My choice is to compete as a tech-enabled operator, rather than sell AI/SaaS to incumbents.

Similar boat here. Many of these service industries are cheap. I've built my own CRM/management system that no big company will ever touch. Even if I can sell to 1000 companies and charge them $25 a month...I'd have staff overhead, maintenance to support it. SaaS isn't some little photo editing app or something you can just launch and forget.

I'd rather grow my business and make as much money. If I can crush it with my business I'd make more than that.

Yeah agree - software needs to either do a ton more, be much cheaper, have network effects (such as connecting supply and demand), or some data benefit to avoid being built in-house or replicated.

Also for me there's an element of picking the pain I want to solve for. I've run a software company before, and prefer the tech-enabled route personally.

I’m genuinely inspired by your journey.

One question for clarity: why don’t you see an opportunity to sell AI or other technology into this space again? Is it just because incumbents already have it locked up and it’s cheap?

The reason I ask is that this feels like one of those moments in history similar to mobile. PlanGrid succeeded because tradespeople suddenly had iPhones and iPads in the field, which made it possible to digitize blueprints and collaborate in real time.

Put differently, what could be the new “PlanGrid” for your industry - that AI makes possible now, the way mobile once did for construction?

Pest control is about 60% consolidated, and I don't want to pick the fight of convincing the top 5-6 to buy more SaaS or AI. Realistically they're looking to Salesforce for leadership there.

I see today's consolidation as fragile though, and it's not locked in forever. I'm better at building a competitor where I have full influence of the customer and worker experience, and I have the patience to see it through.

Part of shaping my thinking here is 1) knowing what I'm good at, much better than I did before, and 2) in my previous company we built a heavy equipment telematics platform which was used on about 1/3 of the UK's infrastructure projects. JCB (an equipment OEM with their own bad version of what we were doing) threw the kitchen sink at field sales and account management, and they had reach into all the sites across the country. It was an eye opener and good lesson about go to market for enterprise sales in traditional industries.

I did this for a small recruitment niche, and made good money. I burned out for various reasons, so when the niche (Perl programming) dried up, I didn't have the energy in the tank to push into other niches, but I think there's a _lot_ of meat still on that bone. I'll almost certainly have another crack at it if I can find the right tech-recruiter partner.

The software for businesses like this is tightly intertwined with operations. Hence, it's less of a SaaS and could be more like a franchise model.

I agree a lightweight franchise would be attractive, though I don't like most franchising options due to the fees and lack of equity build up for the operator.

Some franchising platforms (window cleaning is a good example) don't offer much beyond sales and marketing support and some nicely designed uniforms. There's not much to window cleaning other than basic equipment, so a person's route can easily be disrupted by a new entrant who doesn't have the franchise rake to contend with.

There's a model between employment, ownership and franchising that will probably emerge as sales, marketing, ops gets easier technically.

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The possum is a friend and not a pest though. I hope you aren’t killing them :(

Possums are stinky bastards but I love them so much! Juvenile possums are shockingly adorable, just look at these little guys!

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Baby_opos...)

Absolutely not.

squish them very gently (and then give them treats)

Possums and Skunks may carry diseases like most wild animals, but usually only show up if there is a rat/mouse infestation around a food/garbage source.

Taming wild animals is bad for their long-term well-being around human populations, as rabies also initially causes uncharacteristically "friendly" behavior at first.

I agree people should leave nature alone whenever possible. =3

Domain knowledge is really the most important in any business. If you're making software for a particular industry you won't get very far without it.

Agree, and can't be skipped (can be accelerated though)

This might be a bit of a gold rush of sorts at first, in that the first people to transition from tech to running a small business, whether tech-enabled or not, will find a bigger piece of the pie waiting for their taking. But as the stream of many others increases over the years, the pie's slices will get smaller as competition for the same market segments increases. Not trying to paint doom and gloom, just that I'd imagine, as the author says, this kind of white to blue collar shift will accelerate, and as it does, competition will rise, lowering the chance for overall profits.

In my limited “ai transformation” experience the biggest gains seem to be just forcing down some of the walls between these different systems. Larger, more well run places were probably integrating all of their systems/data/etc so there was none of this low hanging fruit. It seems AI as a forcing function of combining data sources to feed into the AI just had the beneficial side effect of connecting all the crap.

Getting data into the crm without physical input is a good quick win. Techs will often drive and type at the same time. Another good win is scheduling the right technician for a job when the customer call comes in. Lots of companies building these agents at the moment and a challenge for them is how to get into customers at scale.

How did you get such a good sense for business alongside implementing solutions with programming? Did you have experience doing this before?

I'm non-technical so I don't code, although I'm able to do a lot more myself than a year ago, with AI / claude cowork.

Is it a gold rush or a pie eating contest? (I need to know if I should be selling shovels or forks).

That said, this guy is a superstar. This kind of application of skill to a totally different business paradigm to improve it is what I'd love to spend my time doing. Knowing my personality, once I improved the business, I'd get bored running it and move on to finding something else to improve.

Sounds great for people who need pest control tool services!

What's the gold rush in this scenario, just business in general?

Doesn't seem like it can be a tulip if it encompasses all productive endeavors.

The end game is a resource based economy as all sorts of labor becomes cheap.

Think of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Putin's Russia, or Norway. I.e. risk for highly nepotic dictatorships, with the potential that it might end up well despite the odds (Norway).

Before, if you made a product that improved the lives of everyone, say you invented Google or Heinz ketchup, you could make a lot of money through that, and you did a good deed and became rich the same time. The masses of humans would reward you for delivering the benefits of your invention to them by giving you a piece of their work output.

As their work becomes less and less worth, why focus on those humans though? I am asking rhetorically of course.

An economy that thrives from innovation enriches the innovators, making them powerful. A brute in power causes the innovators to leave or in the worst case, he mass-executes them outright (think of what Stalin did in Russia). With AI, you can have a brute in power though, as an oil rig or datacenter can be protected by a bunch of machine guns.

An economy with AI everywhere will be, after a short and very innovative period, just be about who controls which resource, i.e. water for a datacenter, production lines for robots, mining rights, operational control of robot fleets, etc.

The working 95% will probably experience a sharp decrease in purchasing power, making a lot of products unaffordable to them, so consumption wise we'll have a further shift towards plutonomics. The owning top 10% will probably be affected by this major shift in consumption as well, E.g. a tower full of condos becomes worthless if the tenants can't pay rent because they got laid off, etc.

Need for robots and AI will further increase. Eventually most economic activity will revolve around those robots. It's a bit like paperclip optimizer here, whether those robots protect gay luxury space communism from counterrevolutionaries, or they project the will of the Davos council of Forbes 400, economically it will be quite similar.

There will still be human societies, humans will still talk to other humans. We won't be all exclusively conversing with LLMs, I doubt that. There will still be social mobility but it will revolve around nepotism, lying, and various escalation steps of war.

We might end up in different scenarios depending on the country, but some countries like Germany might lose relevance as most of their value lies in stuff that is going to be replaced by AI, i.e. they have less natural resources, or they have been depleted already.

We might also see companies that automate everything from end to end, from mining to producing and running weaponized robot fleets. Shareholders of those companies will do great too, if the leadership of the companies respects minority shareholder rights that is (why should they though, they will outgun any law enforcement).

Do I like this future? I don't think so. We will probably have solved cancer, communicable diseases, and aging in the next 30 years if AI continues its successful trajectory, but not sure if it will be accessible to 8 billion humans.

> We have an acquisition of a small residential operator lined up, which we'll build the tooling for and grow a platform around once we’ve proven the model works and can scale.

This is the exact process private equity tries to do at scale, right?

We plan to build more technology in house than PE does. We will start with this first small acquisition, learn and go from there. It might grow by more acquisitions, franchising or organically by attracting the right technicians over, or having a better training program to quickly train and get experience for new guys

Hopefully I didn’t come off as dismissive. Love the hustle here. It’s always been a dream of mine to quit big tech and do something local like this. Glad to see others have made the jump successfully.

There’s no way to build domain knowledge like working in the field you want to target. This could be a reusable model for people looking to serve a well-targeted vertical with one’s own software company for that vertical.

Yes, and the other way around is increasing now. Industry insiders building their own tools to solve specific problems.

>I built my own training GPT and passed in 13 days, which was a company record. The training manager knew I'd built the app but never showed an interest, which makes sense: it could replace about a quarter of his role.

I'd really love to read a dedicated article on this side project.

Apparently, Karpathy is into AI based education business with Eureka Labs [1].

[1] Introducing Eureka Labs:

https://eurekalabs.ai/

The training was basically to sit and read books all day, and it could be so much faster. Surprisingly there is no reliable test / quiz prep tool available online, just some free ones that contain errors.

Given this company is basically the best, they should really build their own revision / quiz tool. The most valuable part of training was a webinar which I took notes from, and turned into revision cards alongside info from the books and revised the way I know works for me. They could do this bespoke for each trainee in seconds now.

The whole thing looks dead. I followed a few links but couldn't find anything meaningful that comes out of this.

the incentive structure thing is so real. i build tools for institutional investing and the number of times i've seen a perfectly good product idea die because it threatened someone's quarterly bonus is depressing. the REIT example is exactly what happens in finance too -- compliance teams will block adoption of something that saves money if it makes their workflow tracking harder, even temporarily. working in the domain first changes what you build in ways you can't get from interviews. you stop building features nobody asked for and start solving the annoying 5 minute tasks that happen 40 times a day.

You don't have an email address listed - could you ping me at my username at googles popular email service to chat on tools for institutional investing?

vicchenai is an LLM bot.

I think taking the technician job is brilliant and exactly how you find the 'better way' for vertical SaaS, similar to how EquipmentShare understood the deep inefficiencies in heavy equipment rental. It's

They killed it. "A better way to rent"

I love this, the perfect antidote to all the stupid startup-bro grind bullshit posts.

You put in real work to understand the business landscape and typical pain points. With AI, implementing solutions has become much easier but knowing what the problems are and how to solve them hasn't.

One thing I've noticed building domain-specific SaaS with AI assistance: the first few weeks feel like magic, but then the codebase becomes hard to maintain.

The issue isn't the AI output quality — it's that most builders (myself included, initially) use AI reactively. Ask a question, accept the answer, move on. No structure for maintaining context between sessions or verifying that new additions stay coherent with the existing system.

The builders who get the best results seem to treat Claude/Cursor more like a junior dev: useful, but you review everything, and you explicitly maintain shared context about the state of the project.

Domain-specific SaaS is actually a great use case for this because the problem space is bounded — you can give the AI a really tight context. "We are building scheduling and invoicing for pest control companies. Current architecture is X. Today we are adding Y." That specificity makes the output dramatically better than generic prompting.

Good luck with the build — the insight to go learn the domain in person before building is genuinely rare and gives you a huge moat.

It'll go further - bespoke software for the specific company. The exam training is a good example - people have different learning preferences so why can't we cater to that automatically if we already have all the data and context?

Voice input that actually works to reduce screen time and distractions while driving or wearing gloves on site. Understanding and reacting to parking availability in cities, prompting the technician to upsell in the way the system knows he's most comfortable with (so he actually does it).

Incumbents will have to base this on Salesforce and adapt it which is expensive and a grind. Even if they have appetite for that, retraining the technicians who are used to the existing way will be horrendous.

That's wild. I literally just launched https://pestpro.app and find this extremely fascinating.

AI slop - you've sent me the same message on linkedin and you vibe coded that two minutes ago.

I wasn't sure you'd see the comment here (didn't know you posted it yourself). Was just trying to connect to learn from you.

Really quite disturbing that you can now generate this kind of slop in minutes.

https://pestpro.app/blog/

Let's be honest here, why did you generate this just now, are you hoping for work building mobile apps, or are you sincerely expecting to run a pest control SaaS business with AI generated blog posts and a download link that doesn't work?

You've done the incredibly easy bit (making a prototype), do you intend to do the hard work of building a business over 10+ years?

Hey! I have no absolutely no clue who OP (BigBalli) is. I checked this guy's profile out. He's a member since 2012, I don't think he meant bad at all.

I'm personally anti-AI. I checked out his app, and whether vibe-coded or not, it looks very well done. And the app actually has both offline mobile apps + web apps. And it's free? And FWIW, pestpro.app was registered ~1 month ago.

On top of the app store link not working, the privacy and terms links also 404.

Also why is it free? Presumably the data is the product.

yeah, apple still has to review it... hence the broken link

Agreed, reaction from OP is concerning to say the least

thanks

FWIW didn't mean to hurt/insult(?)

If you click on "download button" which should open the link to the App Store you will notice that is a broken link. This is why is ai slop.

Spinning a web like that today is 30 minutes of Claude Code prompting.

But like it or not, the gatekeeping of Apple and Google means that pushing an app to their stores is days work and wait time.

So yeah, reeks of ai slop.

apple still needs to review it. That's why I said "literally just now".

Love stories like this, where someone learns some completely orthogonal domain for educational purposes.

William Burroughs on 1959 HN: I wanted to write Naked Lunch, so I took a pest control job.

The bugs are the feature!

Bugs are top of funnel.

Wow this is a wild read. I can't believe it worked out so well, although it certainly had it's share of hiccups. Just recently I had an encounter with a pest at my house and then spent some time trying to find a company to deal with it for me. The results of my calling were unsatisfying so I ended up just taking care of it myself. However after I solved my problem I saw a truck from one of the companies I was calling driving through my neighborhood. I think I must have managed to convince my guest to move to another house and apparently that home owner has less issues than I do with the pest removal methods.

Side note, is it just me or do these services seem designed to be a short term patch so I have to have a long term, every 6 month, sort of servicing from the pest control company?

The regulations for pesticide use are really tightening up, especially in California. Today's treatments often don't kill the pest, rather they make them feel a bit sick and they move along to more welcoming environments like you say.

Huge admiration and respect for this guy. Jealous of his people skills. Legit, what % of developers on HN do you think are well-rounded enough to pull this off?

Godspeed bro.

You can't offshore pest control.

But you can onshore pests... wait, Nutria pest control and generate demand by ... introducing Nutria to untapped markets!

We did with the central american hook work fly etc prevention programs

So how is hiring going to be handled at this new company? Is he expecting people to just show up and start working?

We will recruit technicians who are aligned with the tech-enabled approach.

How long was the employment at the pest company? At any point, did anyone treat you like you were stealing their business? I thought about this approach, but I chickened out many times because of the possible confrontation.

No, and to be absolutely clear, you should not be dishonest or fabricate.

I was up front that I was exploring getting back into blue-collar, coming off the closure of my startup, and that I wanted to get into sales but wasn't sure if this would be a long term thing as it's a totally new industry for me.

We were aligned on giving the technician job a try before moving into sales, and it's common for people to take that path as you can't really sell the services if you've not done the job for a bit.

Important context - I am not a tech millionaire. The top guys regionally at these companies earn $500k+, and some are in the $Ms, so if there was a route to be top pest guy at BigCo, I was up for it!

Thank you. This story is a reminder that all these niches we pass on assuming they are not worth pursuing are actually thriving quietly in the background.

There is definitely money in the pest control SaaS business, mine is running at $2M ARR for a few years now.

There are lots of antiquated operators not having newer technology for pest control, which makes this area lucrative for even $50K MRR.

Go for it!

also starting in a blue-collar field soon as an operator-ish in a facility management company. I've already lined up an awesome new SaaS in the main industry. Pest control will be one of the verticals the company has customers fo so I will be keeping an eye for it, was thinking of just starting a pest control business it self.

Does your software do anything fancy or is mostly for organization, good workflow, and being the central source of truth?

Did it require a lot of development after getting a few customers on boarded?

are you a 1 man show?

Congrats - what's the company called?

I hope LLMs will soon replace all these sales people and SaaS companies. Recreating SaaS product with LLM legally, will be fun during this year and I think it will explode in 2027, also with major lawsuits :)

I have annoying carpenter ants does anyone recommend Taurus SC?

GTM? Does that mean Get The Money?

Assuming everyone knows your acronyms is just not a good writing style.

Since I couldn't understand how s/w was going to get opossums out of anyone's basement, I think the correct decision was made: hands on!

You deserve accolades for making this choice. Good Job!

Like any physical trade, this is by it's nature a local only endeavor. So a web presence that is primarily visible to geographically local potential customers would be most effective.

Any aggregation is really just a way to skim some of the profits from the people actually doing the job. That is to say, GTM according to my definition above.

Personally, when I can't get an in-real-life personal referral to some trade, and I'm forced to do web search, I always spend extra time to try to find a web page that is put up by a local company, not an aggregator.

Things like plumers.com (this is a totally made up example, not referring to any real website) I find to be extremely irritating. Since they have absolutely nothing to do with whoever will eventually show up and do the work.

This form of aggregation through, is extremely common today, and a very large part of why the modern internet sucks.

craigslist.com (the actual website) used to be a good example of referring local services, until it was overrun with spammers and scammers.

Will this correct? Will we proceed to the dead internet? Who knows! What next weeks exciting episode to find out...

Go to market - e.g. how to sell your thing.

For residential / consumer markets, referrals are the gold standard and I agree to an extent about the local focus. A lot of PE (private equity) backed roll-ups result in a worse customer and worker experience as they try to force scale too fast.

Some PE companies will open a local market by initiating acquisition conversations with all local players, low ball everyone, buy some and for a short period dramatically reduce pricing to force the hold-out cohort to sell at an even lower price. Not good for communities.

The unlock to balancing scale and customer / worker experience is creating the right incentives for people to adopt the behaviors you're after. This is why bolting on SaaS or AI to established companies is tough, as the staff often don't want to change and will leave - which is bad in a tight labor market.

Searching for home services online is totally broken and is a tax on buyers and operators. HVAC contractors pay on average $600 for a closed lead from online ads, and close about one in four / one in five leads.

I read it as Google Tag Manager, lol.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go-to-market_strategy

GTM is ubiquitous on the business side.

If you read his post, there's significant effort not "catching opossums" but waiting or churning through admin overhead - wasted time, which maybe he can translate into $. This much inefficiency is...common in many businesses.

s/w? Does that mean sidewalk?

bizarre take and writing style. if the saas enables them to be more efficient it's overall net positive

Did I read this correctly? You were on the job for 1 month and you are now starting a competing company?

>when I was leaving my boss told me I should start my own company.

Genuinely or sarcastically?

2 months

and not competing - we are looking at a different location and sector, not that I think they'd even consider us as competition anyway

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> Taking the job yourself is the cheat code that most developers are too proud to use.

This line smells clanky

> This line smells clanky

This is my new favourite phrase.

The whole post does.

"Here's why disappearing white collar jobs leaving only undesirable low-paying jobs is a good thing. Use this one weird trick to win big!"

If this story is real* it should be pinned to HN home page, IMO.

* Always take sales people's stories with a grain of salt

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