2 builders who never spoke to each other

Rebuild the generic tool around one trade

Take a product several industries currently bend to their own purposes and build it around one industry's actual workflow, priced against what that trade already pays a person to do the job. The richest signal is a segment still paying consultants, or running fifteen-year-old software, because nobody large has bothered with it.

The method

1. 01

   Take a broad, generalised product that many industries bend to their own purposes and rebuild it around one industry's actual workflow.

2. 02

   Take a horizontal category into one trade vertical, wire it into whatever ops tool that trade already runs on, and price it against a part-time human in the same role.

3. 03

   Look for one feature that forces an otherwise no-code customer to hire a developer, and sell them that feature.

4. 04

   Generate candidates by starting from the desired business model rather than the problem: list chores that could run unattended, then test whether each makes a business.

5. 05

   Look for tools that work well but are trapped inside one host platform, and offer the same capability somewhere the demand has moved.

What it returned

• $1,500

  Suggested at $1,500 to $3,000 a month for HVAC, plumbing, dental, real estate and accounting practices, hooked into QuickBooks for trades or Dentrix for dental. Pilot serves venture-backed startups and nobody ships the trades equivalent.

• Suggests mining Salesforce, Quickbooks, Freshbooks, Basecamp, WordPress and Shopify for niches, and cites Mindbody, whose scheduling, teacher tracking and payments are built specifically for yoga studios

• Research showed sites with store locators were usually simple builds on Squarespace, WordPress or Shopify, with the locator being the single jump in difficulty

• Cites Stunning, which plugs into Stripe and automatically chases customers whose stored card has expired until they update it

Sources

• AI Employees: Named Personas, Cautionary Tale, Outcome Pricing - Trends.vcDru Riley · trends.vc · ☁️ Opportunities · 2026-05-21
• Chapter 5: Getting Your First Customers - Tyler TringasTyler Tringas · tylertringas.com · Become a consultant · 2017-01-19
• Closing SolarList: a cleantech post-mortem - Tyler TringasTyler Tringas · tylertringas.com · Origins · 2014-11-14
• Chapter 3: Finding Micro-SaaS Business Ideas - Tyler TringasTyler Tringas · tylertringas.com · Niche versions of existing SaaS · 2016-10-28
• Chapter 2: What Makes A Good Micro-SaaS Idea? - Tyler TringasTyler Tringas · tylertringas.com · Other players in the field · 2016-10-28