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.

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

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.

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

Ask for forgiveness, not permission!

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Absolutely not.

They killed it. "A better way to rent"

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

Bugs are top of funnel.

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!

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

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.

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

2 months