> 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.)

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

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.

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.

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

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

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/

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.

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.

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?

Godspeed bro.

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!

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...

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

Genuinely or sarcastically?