I wanted to build vertical SaaS for pest control, so I took a technician job

https://www.onhand.pro/p/i-wanted-to-build-vertical-saas-for-pest-control-i-took-a-technician-job-instead

by tezclarke • 4 months ago

448 174 4 months ago

zhainya• 4 months ago

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?

tezclarke46• 4 months ago

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.

truetraveller2• 4 months ago

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).

1970-01-01• 4 months ago

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

tezclarke46• 4 months ago

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

MisterTea• 4 months ago

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

tezclarke46• 4 months ago

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.

fma• 4 months ago

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.

alberth• 4 months ago

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?

petesergeant• 4 months ago

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.

clcaev3• 4 months ago

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.

tezclarke46• 4 months ago

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.

johnea• 4 months ago

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...

9x39• 4 months ago

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.

tezclarke46• 4 months ago

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.

TurdF3rguson2• 4 months ago

I read it as Google Tag Manager, lol.

stbtrax• 4 months ago

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

parallel• 4 months ago

s/w? Does that mean sidewalk?

mememememememo5• 4 months ago

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.

tezclarke46• 4 months ago

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

mememememememo5• 4 months ago

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

jojobas• 4 months ago

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

crystal_revenge• 4 months ago

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.

tezclarke46• 4 months ago

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.

z3t4• 4 months ago

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.

clcaev3• 4 months ago

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/

tezclarke46• 4 months ago

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!

DrewADesign12• 4 months ago

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.

clcaev3• 4 months ago

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

colesantiago• 4 months ago

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!

tezclarke46• 4 months ago

Congrats - what's the company called?

d675• 4 months ago

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?

bashtoni• 4 months ago

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.

dsalzman2• 4 months ago

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

spenczar5• 4 months ago

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

jofzar• 4 months ago

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.

deweywsu4• 4 months ago

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

dsalzman2• 4 months ago

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

downrightmike2• 4 months ago

Buy then build

Joel_Mckay2• 4 months ago

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

diordiderot• 4 months ago

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.

system22• 4 months ago

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.

tezclarke46• 4 months ago

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!

system22• 4 months ago

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.

nomilk• 4 months ago

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

deweywsu4• 4 months ago

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.

TurdF3rguson2• 4 months ago

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

deweywsu4• 4 months ago

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.

tshaddox• 4 months ago

Sounds great for people who need pest control tool services!

linkjuice4all• 4 months ago

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.

tezclarke46• 4 months ago

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.

TZubiri2• 4 months ago

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.

est31• 4 months ago

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.

Aeroi• 4 months ago

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.

tezclarke46• 4 months ago

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

TZubiri2• 4 months ago

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?

tezclarke46• 4 months ago

2 months

tezclarke46• 4 months ago

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

taude• 4 months ago

You can't offshore pest control.

ozten2• 4 months ago

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

downrightmike2• 4 months ago

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

isatty• 4 months ago

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

tezclarke46• 4 months ago

Absolutely not.

aaronbrethorst• 4 months ago

squish them very gently (and then give them treats)

Joel_Mckay2• 4 months ago

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

tdb7893• 4 months ago

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...)

btown• 4 months ago

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.)

anon291• 4 months ago

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

tezclarke46• 4 months ago

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)

tezclarke46• 4 months ago

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.

tezclarke46• 4 months ago

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.

anoojb2• 4 months ago

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?

seibelj• 4 months ago

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

lotsofpulp• 4 months ago

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.

theptip2• 4 months ago

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.

wouldbecouldbe• 4 months ago

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.

tezclarke46• 4 months ago

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

andrew_lettuce• 4 months ago

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

ozten2• 4 months ago

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

impish9208• 4 months ago

The bugs are the feature!

tezclarke46• 4 months ago

Bugs are top of funnel.

pier25• 4 months ago

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.

tezclarke46• 4 months ago

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

teleforce• 4 months ago

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/

tezclarke46• 4 months ago

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.

g947o• 4 months ago

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

tgtweak• 4 months ago

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.

tezclarke46• 4 months ago

Ask for forgiveness, not permission!

charlie0• 4 months ago

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

williamdclt• 4 months ago

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

skyberrys• 4 months ago

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?

tezclarke46• 4 months ago

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.

BigBalli5• 4 months ago

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

tezclarke46• 4 months ago

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

truetraveller2• 4 months ago

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.

BigBalli5• 4 months 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.

vlinx• 4 months ago

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

tezclarke46• 4 months ago

They killed it. "A better way to rent"

Fokamul• 4 months ago

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 :)

jamesjolliffe• 4 months ago

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.

skizm2• 4 months ago

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?

tezclarke46• 4 months ago

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

skizm2• 4 months ago

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.

_spduchamp• 4 months ago

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.

tezclarke46• 4 months ago

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

cestith• 4 months ago

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.

tezclarke46• 4 months ago

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

sizzle• 4 months ago

I have annoying carpenter ants does anyone recommend Taurus SC?

tezclarke46• 4 months ago

OP here - this was my first post on HN, loved it. Thanks for all the discussion, it helped challenge and solidify my thinking.

I wanted to build vertical SaaS for pest control, so I took a technician job

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