The biggest software opportunity of the next decade is not another tool for enterprises. It is the operating system for the local business on your corner — and there is room for a category leader in every trade.
I have spent twenty years on one idea, approached from three directions. I founded Yodle to help local businesses get found. I founded Punchey to help them get paid and stay organized. And through Stevens Ventures I now invest in founders chasing the same prize. The idea is simple to state and hard to execute: own the operating layer of local business.
Why “horizontal” software keeps failing Main Street
For years the conventional wisdom was that small businesses would adopt the same general-purpose software as everyone else — a generic CRM, a generic scheduler, a generic payments tool. They mostly did not. Not because they are behind the times, but because a tattoo studio, a pet grooming shop, and an auto-detailing business do not run the same way, and a tool built for “everyone” is built for no one in particular.
The person behind the counter does not want a platform. They want their day to work. They want the booking, the deposit, the reminder, the payment, the review request, and the rebooking to happen without them thinking about it — in the specific language and rhythm of their specific trade. General software cannot do that. Vertical software can.
The pattern I keep investing in
Look at the companies clustered around my work and the strategy is not subtle:
- TattooPro — the operating system for tattoo studios.
- GroomPro POS — point of sale built for pet groomers.
- DetailPro — software for auto-detailing businesses.
- Punchey — payments and operations for service businesses broadly.
Each one takes a single trade seriously enough to build the whole system it runs on, not a feature it tolerates. That is the bet, placed many times: in every meaningful category of local service business, there is a vertical operating system waiting to be built, and the company that builds it well becomes the default — sticky, beloved, and very hard to displace.
What I look for as an investor
Because I have actually been the customer — I have taken payments at a dealership and sold software to small businesses — I tend to weigh things differently than a purely financial investor. A few of the questions I care most about:
- Does the founder know the trade in their bones? The best vertical-SaaS founders often come from the industry they are now arming.
- Does the product make the day work, or just add a dashboard? Software that creates work loses. Software that removes work wins.
- Is payments in the model? The operating layer and the money layer belong together; that is the lesson of Punchey.
- Can it become the system of record, not a side tool? Tools get switched. Operating systems get kept.
I learned this thesis the hard way, in a Ford dealership and at a company that scaled to fourteen hundred people. I am betting the next decade on it. The corner store is not too small to deserve great software. It is exactly the right size.