Jul 29, 2026 · 22 min · 11 segments
In this episode, I was lucky enough to interview Brad Gardner, Founder and CTO of Seven Hills Technology. Growing up in the Cincinnati area, Brad developed an early appreciation for practicality…
Brad GardnerGuest
Jay AgnerHost
How did you guys survive the great kind of axing of generic custom software development shops in the 21, 22, 23 timeframe where it seemed like they all just started to get eaten alive if they didn't focus on something very specific, which a lot of them tried to do, or they picked three verticals and they weren't really great at any of them.
And my current business partner is like, do we niche down? Do we focus on something on a specific industry and a specific expertise? And I'm kind of the opposite.
And yeah, you end up doing the same thing, like the same kind of work that we do for one business generally transfers pretty well to a different type of business in a different industry.
There's a little bit of an uphill climb to like learn the lingo and learn how to talk and learn the things that are important to them, but.
We typically don't do as much work at the like bleeding edge, like industry defining kind of work.
like we're focused a lot more on the operational software that gives you a, keeps you like lean and mean and operating well.
Well, I mean, has that been commoditized at all recently? The operational part, the less creative part? I'm
What I'm really enjoying is seeing companies enter the market that wouldn't have gotten in the market before where like, you know what, custom software isn't really for us.
How did you guys survive the great kind of axing of generic custom software development shops in the 21, 22, 23 timeframe where it seemed like they all just started to get eaten alive if they didn't focus on something very specific, which a lot of them tried to do, or they picked three verticals and they weren't really great at any of them.
And my current business partner is like, do we niche down? Do we focus on something on a specific industry and a specific expertise? And I'm kind of the opposite.
And yeah, you end up doing the same thing, like the same kind of work that we do for one business generally transfers pretty well to a different type of business in a different industry.
There's a little bit of an uphill climb to like learn the lingo and learn how to talk and learn the things that are important to them, but.
We typically don't do as much work at the like bleeding edge, like industry defining kind of work.
like we're focused a lot more on the operational software that gives you a, keeps you like lean and mean and operating well.
Well, I mean, has that been commoditized at all recently? The operational part, the less creative part? I'm
What I'm really enjoying is seeing companies enter the market that wouldn't have gotten in the market before where like, you know what, custom software isn't really for us.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
