(EARLY BIRD TICKETS ARE AVAILABLE FOR THE MIDWEST HOUSE SUMMIT IN GR FOR 35 MORE HOURS HERE: https://luma.com/qgst3fc7
They are $149 - the lowest price they’ll ever be - and there’s only like 20 of them left, so don’t delay. More details below)
About a week before the Midwest House Summit in Columbus - I sat down with my pal Max Joseph at a spot called Bada Bean Bada Booze (I had to include the name in this thing) to catch up.
Max is the Co-Founder and CEO of Robot Sales Club (recently acquired by our friends at Vessel.) He and I met last spring when he spoke at Midwest House in Austin. I wanted to catch up about the acquisition and figure out what he wanted to talk about at the at that point upcoming Summit.
Halfway through our conversation - I was like, “You know what, man, I think folks might want to hear about what you’re doing. Let’s record this thing.”
Anyway what follows is a conversation about Robot Sales Club - a company that does something that sounds niche until you understand why it matters right now.
Okay, tell me what Robot Sales Club does? Are you selling actual Robots or are the just Members of the Club?
Haha, no. Robot Sales Club is essentially a fractional business development consultancy. We provide top-of-funnel strategy and go-to-market execution for robotic startups selling into manufacturing and logistics. That’s it. We don’t work outside that world.
The narrow focus has been a huge advantage. Over the past three years, we have gotten to know manufacturing and logistics really well — what drives automation decisions, who the actual buyers are, how they think, what makes them say yes. So we can go to a robotics company and say: we know your customer, we know how to speak to your ICP, and we have the case studies to prove it. That’s a different conversation than a generalist agency can have.
How do you source the companies you work with?
It’s a mix — relationships we’ve built in the industry over the years, trade shows (I go to as many as I can), and increasingly introductions. Once you have case studies, people start connecting you to others. The timing has been good. The market is moving in a direction where this kind of help is genuinely needed.
Why Columbus? Why Ohio? Why now?
Ohio has the opportunity and the foundation already in place. Within six hours in any direction from Columbus, you can reach 150 million Americans — that’s your potential end-user base. There are an enormous number of manufacturers and logistics operations within that footprint. You’re on the ground with your customers, not flying people in from San Francisco or Boston and watching the relationship thin out over distance.
There’s also a cultural piece. Ohio understands manufacturing. It’s in the ethos of the state. As reshoring continues, automation is going to have a real stronghold here. You’ve got the talent coming out of the universities, venture capital that’s becoming more accessible, and a lot of warehouse space. The labor shortage in manufacturing and logistics is real and nationwide. Robotics addresses that directly. Put it all together and it’s a genuine breeding ground for this industry.
I kept thinking there must be a serious translation problem in this space — between what the technical founders are building and what the manufacturer actually needs. Is that the real problem you’re solving?
That’s exactly what Robot Sales Club solves. We’re the high-EQ relationship builders — the communicators and liaisons between what the customer is looking for and what the technical founder is trying to build and sell. Robotics startups can get siloed. They know their technology deeply, but that doesn’t always translate into knowing how to build trust with a tier 2 or tier 3 manufacturer who’s been burned before, or who’s only recently started thinking seriously about automation.
We create simple, tangible strategy. And part of what’s helped us build credibility is having seen the good, the bad, and the ugly in this industry. We know what goes wrong. We know how a younger company earns trust with a manufacturer who has no particular reason to believe you — when you’re not Kuka, not Yaskawa, not FANUC. You’re a newer company, and you have to earn that relationship differently. That’s what we know how to do.
From the outside, the AI and robotics wave in manufacturing feels enormous. Are you actually seeing it on the ground?
Five years ago, if you talked to manufacturers about physical AI in robotics, most of them didn’t really understand the business case. The applications existed, but the adoption wasn’t there. Now, tier 2 and tier 3 family manufacturers understand they need to leverage AI and automation to stay competitive. It’s becoming table stakes.
A concrete example: palletizing — vision systems identifying boxes, moving them down a line. Traditionally that required custom programming and specialized expertise every single time. Now it’s being deployed in much smaller facilities, with far less friction. Same for welding, case picking, quality assurance, sanding. These are applications that lived in large enterprise facilities for decades. They’re moving down market fast.
The example I keep coming back to is welders. I’ve spent a lot of time inside manufacturing facilities, and I’ve met talented welders who were running the same simple butt weld eight hours a day, miserable. That’s a waste of a skilled person. Now you put the robot on the repetitive task and redeploy the welder to do the work they’re actually good at. You pay that person better, you get more value out of them, and the robot handles the grind. That’s the world that’s already starting to happen — and it raises the quality of work, not just the output. That’s how reshoring and reindustrialization actually work. It’s not robots instead of workers. It’s a different relationship between the two.
Tell me about the Vessel acquisition.
Vessel acquired Robot Sales Club to help us move into the next phase — capital, infrastructure, back-office operations — as we scale the vision of attracting robotics companies to Columbus and serving as their sales teams on the ground. We’re expecting to triple our headcount, adding both domestic roles and a European team.
There’s a JobsOhio component as well. We can work alongside them to bring incentives to international companies that want to commercialize in the US and want to build in Ohio. Columbus has the physical space, the proximity to customers, the talent, and increasingly the capital infrastructure to support a real robotics corridor. Ryan and I had that vision from day one. Being part of Vessel means we can actually build toward it at scale.
Robot Sales Club is now part of Vessel Investment Group. More at ohiotechnews.com and connect with Max on LinkedIn.
Yes, we’re rolling it back. December 2–3, 2026 · Bamboo Grand Rapids
Last December 500+ came through to make the first ever Midwest House Summit a raging success - snowstorm be damned.
This year, we back, bigger and badder. Midwest House takes over Bamboo Grand Rapids DECEMBER 2 + 3 for two days of on-stage inspiration, curated connections, and “this can happen here” discovery that’ll have you talking through the New Year.
Early Bird Tickets are on sale now — but they won’t last forever. Grab them while you can, y’all!!!
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