Do you have what it takes to turn an idea into $100m?

The elevator pitch was simple: “software made by tradies, for tradies.” Now the New Zealand-based company has been sold for north of $100 million.

“Tradies,” in case you don’t know, is a colloquial term for “tradesperson.” It’s an umbrella word that includes all types of professions from construction, electrical, plumbing, earthmoving, welding, mechanical, painting and others. If you’re in the so-called “laptop class,” you probably only interact with tradies on the other end of a chequebook. But they are the ones keeping the lights on and the roads clear.

Unfortunately, tradies were somewhat skipped over in the digital revolution. There’s an app for everything that can be connected to software, but it’s tough to make an app for swinging a hammer or changing the oil on a truck. (Maybe AI will fix this one day, but that’s for another article). But surely software could play a much larger role in the daily life of a tradie.

That was what Tradify founder Curtis Bailey thought when he noticed a low-hanging fruit opportunity to use an app to ease the life of tradies. Tradify’s story is a great example of how industry expertise can translate directly into an intangible asset.

In a nutshell, Tradify emerged out of Curtis Bailey’s frustration. He is a carpenter by training but every time he had to put down the tools and do admin tasks, it felt like a huge waste of time. Bailey figured he could fix that problem by creating Tradify, an app for managing and booking jobs with clients. Its users say it saves them hundreds of hours each month.

Back in 2021, the business secured a $10 million Series A investment at a $55 million valuation. Over the next few years, the company went from strength to strength. Then in early October this year, the British software giant Access Group announced it had bought Tradify for more than $100 million (although the real figure is under wraps). It’s not hard to see why Bailey’s idea was successful.

Well, that’s not quite true…

Apparently, it was hard for anyone other than Bailey to see why his idea would be successful. The app looks obvious in hindsight – tradies need an easy way to manage client jobs – but the thing is, no one else in the software world came up with the solution. It took a tradie to fix a tradie problem. There’s a fantastic lesson here on how to spot good ideas.

The way you tell if an idea is worth pursuing is if it makes you angry.

It shouldn’t make you angry that you’ve seen the idea. It should make you angry that the idea was so obvious, simple and useful. Why didn’t I invent it first? Grrrr. Once you’re finished throwing things at the wall, take out your money and support that idea. If you move early on a great innovation, you might just upend an entire industry.

But there’s a vast gulf between a good idea and a good business.

Wander through any construction site or factory and ask the workers about their ideas to make the job easier. They’ll mention a dozen straight away. Those ideas have been boiling in their heads for years but “no one listens to me,” they’ll say with exasperation.

Some of those ideas might be world-changers. But they aren’t good businesses. That’s a non-trivial difference. What made Tradify a great idea and a great business was that Bailey intuitively understood how the limitations of software could be a blessing for tradies.

The reasoning was perfect. Fundamentally, the internet is just a series of glorified spreadsheets. That’s what Facebook is. Even Amazon is really only a giant database. Your own website is a bunch of boxes storing different data. Bailey saw that when tradies managed jobs, they were already using spreadsheets anyway – paper or digital – so, why not standardise this process by creating an app?

Saying this out loud sounds so obvious that you’re probably angry that you didn’t think of it first, right?

Then again, could you have thought about it first? Well, if it was so obvious, why didn’t you invent it first? Maybe industry expertise matters. Maybe there’s something about being an experienced tradie that allowed Bailey to see this “obvious” solution. Maybe.

But one thing is for sure: the internet has been around for decades, yet only a builder came up with a killer app for builders.

That’s the power of industry expertise. And the story of Tradify is precisely why we put industry expertise in a category of its own as one of the most valuable intangible assets.