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.
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Yeah, maybe you just say like... Well, you're saying what software solutions are prevalent, right? So is that enough?
I love that.
So this is great. So it's telling us they use CRMs, ERPs, uh, design like CAD software, right. Design software. Um, manufacturing software, machine monitoring software, quality assurance and management software, inventory management, project management, scheduling. And it's giving us a couple in each of these. Yeah. So why don't you ask it that? Like how many of these are less than five years old?
Yeah. So there's two areas. One is legacy pieces, right? Yeah. The other angle is going to be areas that are still on paper that haven't actually been digitized yet.
That's number two. And then number three is where are they stringing together point solutions for, right? So those things you're probably not going to get out of AI, right?
Yeah. So first is what areas of machine shops are still being run on pen and paper?
So the other thing I like to look at is AI opportunity and payments opportunity. So which areas are machine shops not leveraging AI? So I always look at AI opportunity, FinTech opportunity. I just wrote something on the payments piece that's so important. Third, I'd say is please identify areas where machine shops are using a myriad of horizontal solutions, horizontal software solutions.
I love this so much.
I think it's absolutely incredible. And so my next step here would be to go and validate all of this, right? Just show up at machine shops and say, I'll buy everybody. I'll buy you guys lunch today. I know I probably look like a crazy person, but I'll buy you guys lunch today if you just let me shadow the operation for today. Go validate it.
Yeah. You'd be shocked. Yeah.
Especially in like blue collar industries. Like you just say, Hey, I'm trying to build a software company for machine shops and
I think there's... I would doubt that... any aspect of machine shops today are probably utilizing AI, especially in SMB and mid-market. I would highly doubt it, which is great. So this is showing a ton of opportunities. I bet you there's even more.
It's on the money. It's on the money. So this is incredible. So AI is an incredibly helpful kind of assistant for anybody listening to go build a vertical SaaS. I think start out with those frameworks around market size, segmentation, right? And then this can be a totally... It's your own research assistant, right? The only thing I'd say is do not... There's no news in the building, right? So...
make sure you go out and spend time validating and ensuring that what we're seeing online is is the reality in person 100 100 i'm gonna ask it one last question which i don't think it's gonna i don't think it's gonna work but i'm i'm getting greedy i'm gonna say these
Look, it even wrote you a machine shop SaaS validation plan. It's pretty cool.
I think the next thing that I would do... So... Let's zoom out for a second, right? So we've found an interesting market. It meets the size requirements. It meets the segmentation requirements. We've studied the end-to-end operation. We basically have a couple of different areas where we understand there's product opportunity, software product opportunity.
Um, the next piece that I think is hypercritical is you have to really understand the go-to-market and be comfortable with the go-to-market before you go and invest a bunch of time here. And so let me give you an example of that is I see founders all the time. They build these beautiful products. They come up with incredible things.
Well, you can have a great product, but a great product without users is a shitty product, right? You know that better than anybody, Greg. Um, And so you have to be understanding of the distribution piece. And so a way that I like to do that is I like to look at vertical SaaS companies that have scaled in that particular space and I study their go to market.
And I bet Claude or ChatGPT would help here too, which is like, tell me, you know, one of the companies that came up there was Fishbowl, right? I believe it's inventory management for machine shops. But tell me about how they got their first 10 customers, first 100 customers, first 1,000 customers.
I think one of the things that founders need to be cautious of in vertical SaaS is go to market is really, really difficult in a lot of these industries. And what I mean by that is a lot of them to date have required pretty heavy outside sales models. So they're not your typical like product led motion where I can, you know, drop a product uh, on product on or via email and, and get users.
Showing 61–80 of 126 · page 4 of 7
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