One narrow document-extraction workflow
// What
Pick the single document type your customers handle most. Build extraction → review → export. Nothing else.
// Why
Proves the value loop on the most-trafficked path before you generalise.
Change my answers
// Playbook · vertical-saas
Specialist SaaS / vertical software
Vertical SaaS is fertile ground for AI: small audiences, deep domain language, and customers willing to pay for time saved. The trap is reaching for AI before you've solved the structured-data problem.
// Starter projects · sequenced
Sequenced. Sized. Honest.
From a confidence-building first step to a transformative bet.
Personalised in-app intelligence
// What
Match every piece of incoming information against the user's profile/portfolio so they only see what affects them.
// Why
Personalisation > generation for most vertical use cases.
TRANSFORMATIVE£££12–20 weeks
Embedded co-pilot for the core workflow
// What
AI that sits inside the workflow your customers already do, not a separate chat. Domain-tuned, audit-trailed, with confidence scores on every suggestion.
// Why
This is where the durable defensibility lives.
// Casework that grounds this
Built it for them.
CASE / 01
EGPK.info — personalised aviation alert SaaS
Glasgow Prestwick pilot community + flying clubs
NOTAM, weather and traffic ingest fanned out as per-pilot alerts so subscribers only see what affects their flying.
CASE / 02
VenueGuard — multi-tenant venue compliance
Independent venues needing event-safety paperwork
Vertical SaaS that turns the FRA/event-plan tedium into a guided flow with auto-generated docs.
CASE / 03
Dispatch — bring-your-own-key comms gateway
Anyone with notification fatigue across SMS/email/push/Slack
Customers bring their own Twilio/SMTP/Slack creds; we run the routing, dedup, escalation and audit trail.
// Risks worth flagging
- LLMs hallucinating domain facts in regulated industries is an existential risk; never ship without confidence + citation + human review.
- Vertical buyers smell generic AI a mile off. Your training data and prompts need real domain depth.
// Watch out for in pitches
- Don't ship 'ask anything' chat as your AI feature. Ship narrow, audited, in-workflow help.
- Stripe + magic-link + Postgres covers vastly more vertical-SaaS than people think.
// The honest take
The vertical-SaaS founders winning with AI are the ones who use it surgically inside an existing workflow, not as a standalone feature you have to remember to use.