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DEEP DIVE
There’s a guy named Dave who runs a pest control company in Ohio. Five trucks. Eleven years in business. Last year he made $600,000 in revenue.
He was also running everything - job scheduling, invoices, customer follow-ups, route planning - out of a WhatsApp group and a spiral notebook.
Not because he’s bad at business. Because nobody built him something better. Or rather, nobody built him something simple enough that he’d actually use it.
That’s the gap this edition is about.
Trades businesses - pest control, pool cleaning, HVAC, mobile detailing, lawn care - are doing serious money. The US home services market is worth over $600 billion. These are not small operators. But the software they use is either way too expensive and complex (ServiceTitan starts at $400–$700/month), too generic (Jobber and ServiceM8 work fine but aren’t built for one trade), or nonexistent.
And that’s exactly where indie founders are stepping in. Building dead-simple tools for one trade, selling them for $49–$149/month, and growing entirely through word of mouth in trade Facebook groups and Reddit threads. No ads. No sales team. No VC.
This is that playbook - broken down practically enough that you could start validating one this week.
The pest control tool doing $880K/year with 3,100 customers, bootstrapped by a guy who just knew one industry cold.
Five trades right now with zero dedicated software, even though operators are billing $5K-$20K a month.
The exact question that gets 30-80 honest answers from a Facebook group in 24 hours, before you write a line of code.
How to go from idea to paying customers in 30 days without touching code and without spending a dollar on ads.
The one pricing decision that keeps trades operators paying for years, and the math that turns this into a $1M+ exit.
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