Vertical Software

“Vertical software doesn't really work that way. The power laws are not in your favor if you aim to be number two or three.”

“What we've seen right now is that taking a horizontal approach to the problems we solve, like RFPs and proposals, that's really challenging. We need to go vertical. We need to be really specific in the problems that we solve in those use cases.”

“What I saw as an opportunity, not HOA, I didn't know anything about the HOA market, but these kind of not sexy vertical software kind of markets that, that were sneaky big either had a payments component or a financial services component or had a big ecosystem…”

“I find that having five, 10 customers is actually like a pretty representative model for what the entire industry needs.”

“A whole bunch of vertical software or vertical agents are probably gone.”

“And I think what will happen is that like actually as the cost of software building applications comes down, it will let the sort of core companies build a lot of like industry specific, industry, industry specific vertical applications.”

“So getting the first 1,000,002, three, four, five of revenue Can take as long as going from five to 25.”

“In a lot of these verticals, you've got to get to like workday level product or, you know, rippling compound multi-product company to get the ASPs working.”

“If you get within these like deep vertical workflows and very industry specific software will persist and ultimately it's hard to compete with if you're just trying to use large language models or code generators to try and compete. Like I think, I still think…”

“I think vertical SaaS is much more of a science than an art. I think people believe starting a software business is this artistic thing where you got to come up with some crazy big idea and, you know, you got to hold it close to the vest and you can't tell any…”

“And as you actually visualize the end to end operations of the businesses within the industry, this is how you start to actually identify is there, where is the software opportunity and how big is that software opportunity?”

“What I see as the big opportunity with vertical software is you have these spaces like legal tech or construction, manufacturing, software for hardware, healthcare that are very specific and you can create this sort of defensibility through leveraging that spe…”

“And just the process of defining that software system such that an LLM can generate it would cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars. And so even if it were free to generate a new software system, you would probably still use one of the incumbents as long as…”

“What will happen over time is that this will, that those will become part of much richer, much more vertical, much more specialized pieces of software.”

“I think you've seen that play out over the past, you know, five plus years in areas like vertical software, where again, you know, companies have started by solving kind of a software workflow in lots of different categories, and then it become kind of layerin…”