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

onhand.pro

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

#71
post #68
post #63

> 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 "vent…

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)

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

#72

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…

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.

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

#73
post #63

> 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 "vent…

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 experimen…

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.

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

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#77
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

#80
>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/

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