We spend a lot of time thinking about which verticals are right for the kind of company building we do. Not every industry is equally ripe. Some are already well-served by software. Some don't have operators who are ready to make the transition. Some have structural dynamics that make the early customer acquisition motion too slow to survive the startup stage.
But some verticals have a specific combination of conditions that make them unusually good for operator-led company building right now. And one vertical keeps coming up in those conversations more than any other: field services — the trades. HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, home health care, pest control.
This isn't a formal investment thesis. It's an observation about where the conditions are most favorable, backed by specific reasons.
What makes a vertical right
We look for four things when we think about whether a vertical is ripe for the kind of companies we build.
Large enough to sustain a real business. Niche is good — but niche has to be relative. A vertical serving 50,000 businesses spending $20,000/year on software is a $1B market. That's not niche, that's focused. The businesses don't have to be big; there just have to be enough of them.
Fragmented enough that no one player owns it. If Salesforce or Workday already dominates the workflow, the opportunity looks different. Fragmented markets with no dominant player — where the top five software vendors combined hold less than 30% market share — leave room for a new entrant with a more specific product to win a meaningful segment.
Software penetration that's still low. The best signal that a market hasn't been properly served by software is that operators are still using spreadsheets, whiteboards, or paper for core workflows. Not legacy software — paper. That gap creates urgency among buyers who are watching competitors move faster and know they're falling behind.
Operators with money and daily pain. The buyer has to be in enough pain to buy, and have enough margin to pay for the solution. Businesses with thin margins and chronic underinvestment in tooling are hard to sell to, even when the software would obviously help them. The sweet spot is a business that is profitable, under pressure, and watching a problem compound every day.
Why field services checks all four boxes
The US field services market — HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, and related trades — is estimated at over $600B annually. It is almost entirely composed of locally owned businesses. And software penetration is shockingly low.
Most field service businesses are run by owner-operators who built the company from a truck and a license. They know their craft and their customers. They do not have dedicated operations staff, finance teams, or IT departments. Many of them use QuickBooks for accounting, text messages for dispatching, and paper or Excel for everything else. This is not because they're unsophisticated — it's because the software that's supposed to serve them has historically been built by people who didn't understand the workflow.
The horizontal platforms — ServiceTitan, Jobber, Housecall Pro — are real businesses with real customers. But horizontal means they serve everyone and optimize for the median. A platform that handles HVAC, plumbing, electrical, landscaping, and cleaning services can't build deep workflow support for any one of them. The HVAC dispatcher has different problems than the residential plumber. The roofing estimator has a completely different job than the pest control technician.
This is where vertical depth creates a product edge. An operator who spent 15 years running an HVAC company doesn't see a generic field service problem. They see the specific failure point in seasonal job scheduling, the specific friction in parts ordering when a technician is mid-job, the specific gap between the service record and the warranty tracking system that costs the business money every week.
The specific workflow gaps
Here are the workflows that are still largely manual or underserved in most field service businesses we talk to:
- Technician scheduling against real-time job complexity and drive time
- Parts procurement when a tech discovers mid-job that they need a part not on the truck
- Quote-to-invoice reconciliation when scope changes during a job
- Warranty tracking across manufacturers, parts, and labor — all in one record
- Customer communication between service visits (maintenance reminders, equipment history)
- Seasonal demand forecasting for staffing and inventory
- Subcontractor compliance and insurance tracking for multi-crew jobs
- Service agreement renewals and automated billing for maintenance contracts
None of these are hard engineering problems. They're product problems. Solving them well requires knowing the workflow at the level of someone who's lived it — who's been the dispatcher who got a call at 4pm from a tech stuck at a job with the wrong part, who's reconciled a month-end that didn't close because three estimates were changed and nobody updated the invoice.
What the right founder looks like in this vertical
The founder who can build this company is someone who ran one of these businesses — not someone who sold software to them, consulted for them, or did a three-month field study. The difference is trust, language, and access.
That trust can't be manufactured with a market research report. It's built over years of being in the room, making the same decisions, dealing with the same vendors, managing the same kinds of people. It's the reason operator founders in these verticals close design partners in weeks that other companies spend six months chasing.
An honest note about the limitations
Field services is not an easy market to build in. Owner-operators are slow to adopt new tools, especially from vendors they don't know. The sales motion is relationship-driven, not event-driven. You will not acquire your first 500 customers through paid ads or a self-serve trial. This is a referral-and-reputation game, and the flywheel starts slowly.
That's actually a feature of the model, not a bug. For an operator founder who already has 200 people in their contact list from 15 years in the industry — relationships with other shop owners, with distributors, with manufacturer reps — the referral-and-reputation channel is already warm. The problem that makes the market hard for an outsider is solved by default for an insider.
Price sensitivity is also real. These businesses are not paying $50,000 a year for software. The unit economics need to work at lower price points, which means you need volume or you need to find the specific businesses in the vertical with higher margins and more administrative complexity. Both are viable paths. But they require knowing the market well enough to know which one fits the product you're building.
If you're from this world
If you've spent years running a field service business and you've been thinking about the software company that should exist in your corner of it — this is a conversation we want to have. Not because we're experts in your vertical. Because we're looking for founders who are, and we want to build alongside them.
Send us two paragraphs about the specific workflow you want to fix. We'll respond in 48 hours.