This is such an important point. My plumber that we always call is extremely busy and usually doesn't have availability for at least a week. He is a one man shop and prefers it that way. You call his phone, leave a voicemail and he calls you back whenever he is able to. I asked him if he wants to get more business by automating his incoming calls and he said "not really, I am already very busy and have enough business. I don't need these tools".
So we cannot always assume that the business owner (especially the solo mom and pops) wants more business. Good ones are already very busy.
This seems to be true with every trade shop in my area. HVAC, plumbing, electrical, landscaping, appliance repair, and so on: Nobody picks up the phone, and when you do get someone, they don't seem to be very interested in your job unless it sounds like big money to them. Everyone already apparently has as much work as they want, and if you're a small fish you're out of luck.
Electrician here. I had zero unemployment time between my current job and the last. Sent ~5 applications, had two interviews. Current employer called me in the afternoon offering me a job, after interviewing the same morning.
Danish electrician average is ~80k. Danish software developer is ~100k, but with much higher variance.
However there's also quite a lot of difference in training between Danish and American electricians. I specialised in telecom - part of my curriculum was configuring Cisco routers. The subject of my oral exam was TCP/IP. I love the variety. Yesterday I was chasing down a rogue DHCP server on a network. Today I was mounting a drainage pump controller.
But as they say, do what makes you happy. I would rather be happy at 60k than miserable at 130k.
Yea.. When people say "you can make great money in the trades" what they usually mean is that you can make great money by owning a trade business and/or hiring tradesmen. Which is kind of different than being a tradesman.
True but electricians have a real system without bullshit, we wire something up and it just works, it keeps working too! You press the button, the light goes on, you press it again and it goes off! Except from audio all of the automatons come with the right plugs.
You would think after 50 years software devs build something similar but besides the <input type="submit"> button absolutely nothing works like that. Switching on the lights by clicking on a button using the mouse would already be a serious enterprise level undertaking. Then when you think you are done someone in Russia and someone in China are also able to control your lights.
There are no labels on our buttons, the dimensions are in exact mm. If you ask a software dev they will tell you mm have something to do with printing. On a screen a button can have any size, no one knows really how big it turns out regardless which of the 50 different units you use. pt rm rem px % vw etc etc
Sounds pretty unscientific? Can you at least tell me when it is finished and how much it will cost? Did I say something wrong?
There's this giant no-man's land of more work for less profit they have to cross between "reliably profitable business run by its founders" to "reliably profitable business with a half a dozen or more employees". A helper you can keep tabs on but can work without often pencils out. A crew of 2, 3, 4, that's often less profitable per hour of the owner's labor (with a way higher labor minimum) than just working yourself or with a helper. Only when you have things humming along do you actually make more money than if you were working on those task yourself.
You almost certainly have to take out huge loans against the business to get across that gulf (your employees need those capital investments that you use to do your work). When you consider the long term outlook and the age of most business owners making such a decision it's no surprise that many choose to simply stay small rather than take on a huge amount of work and stress to maybe make more money years in the future.
Basically there's a ton of work for no reward between "I own my job" and "I own a business"
That's wild. Plumbing especially seems like a field where if you need a plumber you need them right now, not a week from now.
I guess as a plumber having enough of the type of jobs that can wait a week that you can turn away the urgent calls might be one of those feature-not-a-bug type situations.
It depends. If you need a faucet changed out with this new fancy one, or if you want to replace a toilet with a new one using less GPF, or any other kind of update/remodel.
Not every job a plumber does is an emergency situation. I used a plumber to help me setup a backyard project to set up a portable propane tankless gas water heater. I took a look at buying at the parts and pieces I would need, but they needed special tools that would only be used once if I were to buy them. Instead, I had the plumber do it for me with all of the necessary parts/pieces on the truck plus the tools to do it. It cost me less than it would have to buy everything. Now, I just need a cold water feed, and I have a portable hot/cold running system.
You can shut the entire network off, shower/poop at neighbours places or work, laundry at the local self-laundry shop and brush you teeth with a bootle of water. Inconvenient sure, but it would as much problematic to be denied electricity for a long time: lights off, fridge off, no heating, boiler off… there’s alternatives but the usual way for us is to share a long electric cord by an open window… so obligatory work-and-stay-at-home if you’re lucky to have an appropriate activity.
Your plumber story is exactly what trips up most vertical AI pitches I see. The founder assumes every missed call is lost revenue, but for capacity-constrained shops, a missed call is just triage they did not have to do. Curious if anyone has seen an AI receptionist actually grow a shop's revenue vs just adding a layer on top of an already-full queue.
$6000 for both SOC 2 and ISO 27001 with Pen tests ? lol. I paid over $8k just for ISO 27001 for our small company and have been quoted a lot more for SOC 2.
If selling, you can get away with bad buyers as long as the deal is mostly cash upfront. However, I would highly advise against buying from a seller you cannot trust. Imagine they already showed you during the deal process when they have an incentive to be nicer. Once you wire the money, you are in for a lot more surprises. I would never buy from a seller who gave me bad vibes. Regardless of how good the deal sounds.
Source: I have bought 3 smaller projects (one for 500k so i guess not indie but still small) and in all 3 cases, the sellers were incredible genuine and truly cared about their company/product. Just because of how trustworthy and helpful they were, I closed the deals quickly after fair negotiations.
I declined 1 deal where the product was a great fit to my exiting business and it would have been a great transition but the seller was too arrogant and I just couldn't trust him. I backed out after exchanging a couple of messages with him.
I can see that. We were the sellers and the deals were all cash, after the handoff with the money in escrow prior and a binding arbitration clause if there were disagreements on the hand off. We had zero issues though.
Before you think about lawyers, I would say be careful dealing with industry leaders because they may just be sniffing and not really serious. There are plenty of cases where a larger industry leader reaches out in disguise of acquisition and then gets the details and does it on their own. Not saying it is the case necessarily here but just be careful of that.
For example, ask yourself why they really need to buy you out. Why can't they build it themselves ? Is it really your customer base they want ? Is it your technology ? Do they just want you (acquihire) ? What is the moat here that they want to acquire you ? If you cannot answer that clearly, they may not be serious.
In terms of finding a lawyer, you need to find a lawyer who has experience in tech acquisitions especially in your jurisdiction/area (for example, in US, even the state of residence will come into play). Selling a business involves various things including whether it will be asset vs stock sale (you will need to learn the difference),what will be the terms (all cash upfront vs earn out/equity etc).
Be ready to spend $1000s or even $10,000+ on lawyers and the deal may still fall through. So are you ready to spend your own cash ($10,000+ or higher) and still be ready for the fact that deal falls ?
There is nothing wrong with the site as it is. The text reflows, so you can size your window to any width that you find comfortable. With a decent window manager this is just a few keystrokes at most.
The thing is that most people who claim that AI will kill SAAS have never run a SAAS business themselves or have never properly used a SAAS as a real customer for multiple years.
SAAS companies are not just about the software. They provide a series of things including hosting/maintenance, support, data, integrations and most importantly: solving a problem that customer is not interested in solving themselves because they hae more core problems to solve for their own business.
Is it true that some SAAS companies need to go out of business or do better than what they do now (e.g. locked in contracts, shitty support etc) ? Yes, absolutely. However, AI or vibe coding is not magically going to solve this problem.
At the end of the day, SAAS is a business model that has extreme value.
Source: I may be biased as a SAAS founder but I can assure that majority of our customers are not waking up daily and thinking "How can I stop paying this company $xx,xxx/Year for my business where it makes me $xxx,xxx/Year without me needing to hire/build my own product/team". Most of them certainly don't even think about "lets vibe code this shit". How do I know ? They are telling me on a daily basis. Sure, they need us to get on the AI bandwagon to solve their problems a little faster than now. If we cannot keep up, someday they may leave who can solve their problem faster/cheaper but they are not going to vibe code their own homegrown solution. In fact, we routinely migrate B2B customers from their own homegrown solutions (even before AI).
So we cannot always assume that the business owner (especially the solo mom and pops) wants more business. Good ones are already very busy.
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