Cohesive Built a CRM That Knows How to Cold-Call a Landscaping Company

The Macro: Blue-Collar Businesses Are the Most Underserved Market in SaaS

I keep hearing the phrase “vertical SaaS” at conferences and in pitch decks, and 90% of the time it means software for dentists, software for law firms, or software for restaurants. These are real markets. They are also markets that have been thoroughly picked over by thousands of startups. What almost nobody is building for is the plumber, the pest control operator, the janitorial company with fifteen employees, or the landscaping crew that does $2 million a year in revenue.

This is a massive oversight. There are roughly 6 million blue-collar service businesses in the United States. Most of them manage their sales process with a combination of phone calls, text messages, handshake deals, and maybe a spreadsheet. Their “CRM” is a notebook in the truck. Their “marketing automation” is the owner’s wife posting on Facebook. I am not being condescending here. These businesses often do excellent work and make good money. But their sales and marketing infrastructure is decades behind what even a five-person SaaS startup takes for granted.

The incumbents in field service management, companies like ServiceTitan, Jobber, and Housecall Pro, have built strong products for scheduling, dispatching, and invoicing. ServiceTitan raised $8.6 billion at IPO. That’s real. But these platforms focus on operations, not sales. They help you manage the work after you’ve won the contract. Getting the contract in the first place, the prospecting, the outreach, the follow-up, the local marketing, is still largely manual.

Traditional CRMs don’t solve this problem either. Salesforce is built for B2B enterprise sales cycles. HubSpot is built for inbound marketing funnels. Neither one understands the reality of selling commercial janitorial services to property management companies in a specific metro area. The vocabulary is different. The sales cycle is different. The decision-making process is different. Blue-collar service sales are hyper-local, relationship-driven, and often won or lost based on response time.

The Micro: McKinsey Meets HVAC in the Best Possible Way

Cohesive is an agentic CRM for blue-collar service businesses. The product automates sales and marketing outreach to local businesses for companies in janitorial, pressure washing, landscaping, HVAC, pest control, and similar trades. The keyword is “agentic.” This is not a database with a pipeline view. It’s an AI system that actively runs outreach campaigns, qualifies leads, and manages follow-up sequences on behalf of the business owner.

The founders are Kevin Zhang and Nam Nguyen. Kevin is the CEO, previously leading product at Charthop, an a16z-backed HR tech company, before that at McKinsey, with an economics degree from Duke. Nam is the CTO, who built LLM-powered systems at Microsoft and was a founding engineer at Starlight, a fintech company. Both have CS and quantitative backgrounds. They’re a two-person team based in New York, part of YC’s Spring 2025 batch.

The McKinsey-to-blue-collar pipeline is unusual but makes a certain kind of sense. Kevin understands how to analyze a market and build a GTM strategy. Nam knows how to build AI systems that operate autonomously. The question with any “elite background” founding team going after blue-collar markets is whether they actually understand the customer. The answer, based on 350 paying clients, appears to be yes.

350 clients is a strong signal this early. Blue-collar business owners are not the kind of buyers who sign up for products because they look cool on Twitter. They sign up because the product makes them money. If 350 businesses are paying for Cohesive, it means the outreach automation is generating leads that convert into actual jobs. That’s the only metric that matters for this customer segment.

The product sits in a space between a traditional CRM and an AI sales agent. It handles the prospecting, the messaging, the follow-up cadences, and the lead qualification that would otherwise require the business owner to spend hours each week on sales activities. For a landscaping company owner who’d rather be running crews than cold-calling property managers, that time savings translates directly to revenue.

The Verdict

I think Cohesive found an underserved market that’s large enough to build a big company and specific enough that the incumbents won’t move quickly to address it. ServiceTitan could theoretically add AI-powered sales features, but their roadmap is focused on operations and they just went public, meaning their product priorities are tied to existing customer demands. Salesforce could build a blue-collar vertical, but Salesforce can’t even make their core product simple enough for their existing customers, so I wouldn’t hold my breath. Jobber and Housecall Pro are closer competitors but are still primarily operational tools.

The risk is that the “agentic” part of the product has to work extremely well. When you’re sending automated outreach on behalf of a pest control company to local businesses, the messaging has to feel human and relevant. One tone-deaf automated email to the wrong person can damage a business relationship in a small market where everyone knows everyone. The AI has to understand local context, seasonal timing, and industry-specific language. Getting that wrong at scale would be worse than not automating at all.

The two-person team is ambitious given the scope. Building an AI sales automation product, supporting 350 clients, and iterating on the product simultaneously is a lot of work. I’d expect them to hire aggressively once they close their next round.

Thirty days, I’d want to see revenue per client and churn rates. Are businesses staying because the product works, or churning after the first month? Sixty days, the question is whether Cohesive can expand across trade categories without losing quality. What works for janitorial might not work for HVAC. Ninety days, I’d want to see the outreach-to-closed-deal conversion rate. If Cohesive is generating measurable new revenue for its clients, the product will grow through word of mouth in trade associations and local business networks. This is the kind of market where a product that works spreads fast, because the owner of one landscaping company talks to the owner of another one every week.