Defining a Category While it's Still Being Built with Eoin Hamilton of Overpath | #34

It's really rare to be in a situation like this where, you know, usually, you know, kind of going into a role, the, the category is, is formed for years, in some place decades.

Um, you know, you, you've seen what has gone in the past.

You've seen kind of similar playbooks of how things work, but it's, it's very interesting to see this happening in, in real time.

Uh, and we're speaking in terms of things changing on a weekly basis, where a lot of maybe in, in B2B, uh, I suppose B2B technology is moving quicker, but even like, you know, other like fintech or anything like that, certain stuff has just had a certain way to go over the years.

So it's, it's interesting to hear about what you're experiencing in real time, um, as it's kind of forming and shaping, which is exciting.

And you kind of mentioned a good point there, Eoghan, in terms of a lot of companies, and it doesn't even just count for software.

It's any work around that, you know, since AI has, um, over the last few years, uh, mainstream anyway, people have been looking at ways of building custom solutions to solve their problems.

But I think we're now coming to a, a scenario where these tools aren't maybe working, the custom builds, uh, where it's like, you know, we had this problem, we went into Claude, and we fixed it, but they're, they're shortly finding out that tokens are a huge cost.

Uh, who's gonna fix it if it's broken? It might not integrate nicely into other tools with APIs and all that type of stuff.

What's your take on that in terms of people building, you know, their own products, and I'm just, I think the value is still there in going with someone that is doing all the hard work for you, and you pay the monthly subscription to use that tool from a team that is, they're doing it every day.

What's your kind of take on that whole scenario where people are building?

History repeats itself.

Like, this has been going on since day dot, since technology existed.

There's always been like internal custom technologies that companies will build, right? Like, so, you know, I even remember back in, uh, an old business that I was in, um, like, uh, it was just like ISO certifications, not the most pretty and sexy thing in the world, but, uh, we, the way our business worked, we needed something that was more custom-built.

So we, uh, SugarCRM, if anybody remembers that, that was some- It was like an open source platform where you can build and like modularize your own CRM.

You can do stuff like that with Salesforce as well, but, but that was like such a huge cost.

So there was, there was always something like that where like you had the option of building it yourself.

It just mean- meant that you're going to need, need to main- maintain that.

And now because of platforms like Lovable, Cursor, uh, like ChatGPT, the LLMs, all those things, it's just that m- bit more easy, and slightly technical, uh, sales reps are now building their own solutions themselves that they will use just literally for themselves or maybe their, like, their, their close partners.

That will always happen, but it is the main- maintenance of this.

We even saw it in, in, in Hyker.

In my time in Hyker, like, uh, you had local tourism offices that were building their own trail app, and like there's probably like political reasons as, as to why they were doing that.

Uh, but the, ultimately, they always came back around to, okay, there's already a dedicated team here that are building a sophisticated and cutting-edge platform that is just going to, uh, be so much better than anything that we can do.

Uh, and, and, and, and it's gonna be more cost-effective because as you rightly pointed out, tokens, they're getting more and more expensive.

Um, so, and, and, and you're even seeing pricing models of, uh, companies like ours that are shifting away from token usage and literally is going back to like a really simple price per seat model.