Luke Sophinos
speaker
126 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Luke Sophinos’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
How much of it is being spent on people that could be automated with software, right? And in what specific functions? How much of it is being spent on software? All right, what software are they spending money on and how much are they spending on it? And what is it actually delivering or doing for them? It's one thing what they're saying it's doing, it's another what it's actually doing, right?
But a P&L will tell you a lot and you can start to really understand where existing expenses are going and how to create solutions that support the challenging pieces on that P&L.
Yep, yep, absolutely. So outside of the following the money, the other thing I like to do is I like to spend a lot of time looking at... the competition and what, when I say competition, we don't even know yet what we're building, right? We've talked about a few steps here, but we still don't even know what we're building. We're not supposed to even be idea focused, right? It's science, not art.
So the next thing I like to do is say, okay, what are the existing software solutions looking like in this market? There's typically a couple of things that happen when you go deep dive on one industry. there's either massive like legacy providers that are trying to do and probably are doing pretty much everything A to Z, right?
So if I go back to like the trade school example, there's probably like an ERP that's 30 years old that's doing all of this, right? So that will come up in some examples. Another thing when you're kind of studying the software competition, you'll see is they're kind of pulling together a bunch of horizontal software solutions, right? So non-industry specific software.
So they're pulling together a CRM that's built for any type of business. They're pulling together a source of truth or source of record or ERP that's built for any type of business. They're stitching together Slack and Gmail or Zoho or something. And that's, I like those opportunities because it's super fragmented and they're dying for an all in one.
You typically see one or the other when you dig into these industries. The third thing you see, and I promise you, and people fight me on this, but I promise you, you see paper processes still. And it's 2024, I know you're gonna be like, Luke, you're out of your mind, I don't believe you. We still see at trade schools a bunch of paper processes in some of these areas.
But when you look at competition, it's important not to just search like trade school software, right? Like you have to look after you map out how these businesses operate A to Z, you have to look at each of these buckets and understand like what are they actually doing in each of these key areas, right?
And that's where you start to see interesting things coming because you'll say, oh my gosh, they're doing all their academics portion on paper, right? Or they're doing all their placement stuff with horizontal solutions. And this is right for a vertical component or all their compliance is like outsource, right? To some consulting shop. This is how you actually identify and uncover opportunities.
It's not Google searching like, restaurant software.
Yeah, I like AI for the search component. We'll use ChatGPT to just try to do a lot of the desk research piece of it. But my view of AI today is that a lot of this information we're talking about, it's more like research reports and analyst reports. And so AI would be great for the revenue size of the market, the segmentation of the market.
More of these higher level pieces that a research company would put out. I think AI isn't going to do a great job yet on what is every single step of the workflow for a bank.
Let's try it. Let's see what it looks like.
Let's do, why don't we try the machine shop example? Okay, let's do it. Yeah, why not? So first question I'd ask it is like, tell me about the market size in the United States for machine shops.
And I'll give you like 15 questions to ask it. We'll see how it does. So this is perfect, right? This is what we had, 40 billion annually, 25,000 machine shops, employs 300,000 people, growing one to 3%. Industry is largely fragmented. Actually, this is amazing, I love it. With many small and medium-sized businesses.
However, there are also a few larger players that are with some consolidation trends. No real geographic distribution. Okay, so that's beautiful. So that's a perfect place to start, right? So the next thing I would go into is, let's pull up the scorecard. Walk me through, you know, what a machine shop's operation looks like end to end.
I love it. This is so great.
It's good. So what we're seeing, if you're listening to, is they have basically steps one through 14, with one being, if you scroll up, what was one again? It was requesting the quote.
Yeah, so customer inquiry and quote, order processing, design and programming, material prep, setup, machining, quality control, inspection, documentation, package and shipping, invoice and follow-up, maintenance and cleanup. So this is beautiful. So the next thing I would ask it is like, tell me what software solutions are prevalent in the machine shop industry
And can you tie those back to the end-to-end process?
Showing 41–60 of 126 · page 3 of 7
← Previous
Next →