> 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.)

This is the kind of founder story that rarely gets told on HN but probably represents the majority of successful bootstrapped companies. Going undercover as a technician to understand the actual workflow is exactly the right move -- you cannot build good software for a domain you do not deeply understand.

The insight about companies being less willing to offer ride-alongs resonates. I have noticed the same thing in other verticals. Taking the job yourself is the cheat code that most developers are too proud to use.

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/

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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

>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/

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

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.

One thing I've noticed building domain-specific SaaS with AI assistance: the first few weeks feel like magic, but then the codebase becomes hard to maintain.

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.

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?

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!

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

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

You can't offshore pest control.

The bugs are the feature!

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.

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

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...

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?