The following interview is a conversation we had with Luke Hansen, CEO and Founder of CompanyCam, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $38 Million Raised to Build the Future of Visual Communication for Contractors

Luke Hansen
Thanks for having me, Brett. I’m glad to be here. 

Brett
I want to kick things off, talking about something very important, and that is your mustache. So this is an audio podcast, but were talking about that pre interview, and they’re going to see your face in the imagery. So let’s talk about it. What’s the deal with this big, beautiful mustache? 

Luke Hansen
Yeah, so I like things that are interesting, and I don’t like things that are boring. And so just, like, whatever doing, growing weird facial hair because I was a roofer. That’s part of the story of how CompanyCam to be. My dad owns a roofing company. I was roofing, and my excuse was always, look, I’m a roofer, so I can have a beard. I have mustache. I can look ridiculous. So I did it, this mustache, maybe five years ago and went to a trade show because our customers are contractors, like people that would come to your home and build something or fix something. And afterwards, when I would call people, they would remember me, oh, you’re the guy with the mustache. And I thought, oh, that’s powerful. Like that ability to be remembered. 

Luke Hansen
In fact, I just got off a call with our COO, and I used this line that I’ve come to very much believe that often it is better to be different than it is to better, which what I mean by that is that being memorable, having something that catches attention, that can occupy some space in people’s mind, what a good brand does, is that there is an identity there. There’s a unique place that. That can live in your customers mind that is like your territory that isn’t just, like one of these other 50 things. And there’s a lot of ways to accomplish that. One of them is with a weird, like, when we raised our series B, we raised 30 million. Series B. I had a mullet and this ridiculous mustache. So it was, like, double ridiculous. 

Luke Hansen
But what it is memorable, and it sticks with people. So I kind of believe in that, broadly speaking, try to be memorable, try to be different, and that just being, like, 10% better isn’t nearly as important as being recognizably different. 

Brett
Is there a Founder that’s embraced that approach that you really admire? So a Founder has embraced that idea. 

Luke Hansen
Of being different instead of, you know, let’s say, heavy hitters. Like, I feel like Steve Jobs did that incredibly well at, like, they wanted to be great, but they also want. I mean, they put a handle on their macs. Like, a handle, like, a way to pick it up. Like, no one had ever done that. Know, they made all these different, like, things that were, like, we want to stand out and be. You know, Apple is sort of renowned for their brand and their design, so I would put him in that category. Like, the other person that just came to mind was Elon Musk. I mean, the guy’s, like, selling flamethrowers and, like, 2049 future trucks and going to space, and there’s just a lot of stuff that’s going on there, but there’s, like, just making electric cars. 

Luke Hansen
There’s something about being that is just different. And I’m sure that it’s more broad than that this isn’t exhaustive by any means, but I see that, and I think if this was just a 10% better car, that wouldn’t be that compelling. The fact that it’s so different in so many ways, I think, is what is part of what’s extremely compelling to people. 

Brett
What about books? Are there any books that have had a major impact on you and how we like to frame this? And we got this from Ryan Holiday. He calls them quickbooks. So a quickbook is a book that really rocks into your core influences, how you think about the world and approach life. Do any quickbooks come to know, I. 

Luke Hansen
Would say, more podcasts than books. I do read a lot of books. The one that just immediately pops into my head is, I’m looking at it on my shelf right now. It’s what you do is who you are by the guy from Andreessen Horowitz. Ben Horowitz. And we had a new higher class. We hired five people that started last week, and I meet with them kind of at the end of their first week, and that’s one thing I tell them, is that, which is the lesson of this book, which is that you can write down all the sayings and the phrases, and you can have mission and values and a vision, and it’s good to have. I’m not down on that stuff. 

Luke Hansen
But what you do, how you treat people every day, how you treat your customers, how you expect people to work, how you work. What you do is your culture and your ability to influence that with some phrases is very minimal. Your ability to influence that with how you act and how you treat people. And that’s what is actually real. And I feel like it’s something that you kind of know already, and then someone articulates it really well, which I think Ben Horowitz did in that book, and it was really meaningful. So that’s one that I would highly recommend. 

Brett
What about podcasts, apart from this show you’re on, which is, of course, your favorite. What’s your second? 

Luke Hansen
This is number one. I’m always, you know, there’s just a lot of people that I’ve found compelling and interesting. Like, I listened to a bunch of Jordan Peterson stuff when it was kind of early on there, and that I found all very compelling and interesting. And this idea of, I don’t know, kind of this self responsibility, telling the, like, I see a lot of through lines to the kind of cultural people that kind of come up and kind of gather a following around like a message. I think of Gary Vee in this regard. When I was starting CompanyCam, I was listening to a lot of his stuff, and there’s kind of this, like, hey, it’s on. Like, there’s just no excuses. You are capable of more than you’re doing. 

Luke Hansen
It’s a little bit the self help stuff, but if you decide to believe it rather than be cynical, because you can always be cynical. And it’s easy for me to be cynical about a lot of stuff, but that as you start to kind of believe that and try to put it into practice, it really is, I don’t know, simplifying. Like, you just have to take responsibility. Some things will happen that are good, some things will happen that are bad. But if back to what you do is who you are, how you do things now is going to just affect your future. And even from watching my dad owned a roofing company or owns a roofing company, and that’s how I got into tech, actually. It was just trying to solve a problem for them. 

Luke Hansen
And so much of that kind of like management of how you treat people just applies broadly. And what I saw him do was just treat people respectfully, fairly, employees, customers, over a long period of time. And I saw that just work like I was on the employee side of that for a while, but that is just a sustainable way to do things that keeps your life relatively simple. And there’s always a little hustle or a little scam. We could get an extra grand out of the insurance company. There’s all these ways in which you can kind of compromise your values or shortchange a person to your benefit or the benefit of the company. And that may work at the time, but that way of being just doesn’t work well over a long period of time. And I feel like. 

Luke Hansen
I don’t know, I think I’ve internalized that. 

Brett
Now when we talk about technology, Silicon Valley comes to mind. But where doesn’t come to mind is typically Nebraska. 

Luke Hansen
I did change my mind a little. 

Brett
Bit there on that. So I came to Omaha in May for the Warren Buffett event, and I met with a. There used to be an operator. Now he’s a venture capitalist who’s based out of Omaha. And he told me that what the world thinks about Nebraska, they’re wrong. There’s a lot of tech, there’s a lot of amazing entrepreneurs there, and there’s just a lot of people in that ecosystem who are trying to build big things. So from your perspective, what’s it like trying to build a tech company outside of Silicon Valley or New York City or some of these larger ecosystems? 

Luke Hansen
That’s a great mean. So I only know my experience. This is my first company. And there are advantages, which is to say, well, as things go more remote, a lot of the world is kind of flattening. And so many of, let’s say, the great Silicon Valley companies that kind of became platforms in different ways. I’m picturing like Facebook AwS, things that empower you to build such that you don’t necessarily have to be so close to kind of the source and the knowledge that you can do that from anywhere. So I really like it here. And where we have a competitive advantage, I think, is in being kind of outside of the craziness that you can work here and you can work hard and you can care, but you can also, in a sense, maintain the balance that you want for your life. 

Luke Hansen
And that because we’re not sort of living in, you know, it’s twice as expensive as Nebraska, and so our cost structure is just lower across the board. Now, the downside is I don’t bump into, not that everyone’s bumping into, you know, but there isn’t just the person who has scaled SMB SaaS sales team three times before that I can bump into or hire know pick their brain. A lot of that kind of like just this knowledge of SaaS and how to run the business. You can figure a lot of that out. Podcasts, blogs, asking around, but it isn’t like in the water here, which can be good, but it does make it harder. 

Brett
How have you seen it evolve then over the past decade or roughly decade since you started the company? 

Luke Hansen
I feel like I’ve seen everything become more and more democratized. And Covid was like the. I don’t know, was it the straw that broke the camel’s back? But all of a sudden everyone went home and they’re like, I don’t know if I want to go know. And so we have an office, we overwhelmingly came back, but a bunch of our product and engineering team, like the vast majority of it is remote, mostly in the United States, and then a little bit international. But I’ve seen more sort of like good companies be able to kind of get off the ground here because of the infrastructure that’s available. And it’s been somewhat broadly available, but it’s just like more and more your infrastructure, especially at the beginning, you can just sort of spin up without big time expertise. 

Luke Hansen
But then also the digital go to market channels. You don’t need as many of these partnerships, I don’t need to know Drew Houston from Dropbox to get my thing off the ground or be able to get on the phone with like with that comes to selling to a broader range of customers. We are selling to contractors. These aren’t the most technologically adept people. They’re usually, I mean, they’re often quite sharp, and some of them are very tech savvy. Just in general, it’s kind of a lagging industry in the adoption of technology, and there’s just continual opportunity to sell to these, I say niches. I mean, there’s a huge tam in construction, right? 

Luke Hansen
And there’s a lot of areas where if you can make the product, that’s the killer product, know, dog groomers or just something like that, you can have a big, successful, even a venture backed successful business, and you don’t necessarily need to be located in San Francisco to do that. And to me, that both the broadening of who is buying software and the fact that the infrastructure exists, it’s what’s fueling this you can be anywhere idea. 

Brett
Let’s switch gears here a bit and let’s dive into the company. So I introduced you as a visual communication platform for contractors. What does that mean? What does the platform do? 

Luke Hansen
I mean, what it started out was we’re going out to all these job sites. We’re going to estimate your roof. This is when I was working for my dad at our roofing business. And contractors, whether it’s roofers, plumbers, pool builders, they’re all taking photos because they’re out manipulating the physical world. They’re cleaning something, tearing it down, building it. This is what they’re doing, and they’re taking photos. Photos are a version of their insurance policy, a way for them to plan. And were doing that, and we just had a disaster. This is back when people would hand you, like, the little micro SD card from their phone that you slide into the bigger adapter and then into your computer. And I just had this mess, like nothing was organized. What color were those gutters? And I thought, we got to do something about this. 

Luke Hansen
And that’s where the idea came from, was like, what if we just automatically organized all the photos we’re taking by the location? It was as simple as that. Then we could find them and we wouldn’t have to have people uploading them to the drawbox or whatever else. And so at its core, it just uses your gps as a way, at a company level, to get all your photos organized by the right project. And then on top of that, you can create these before and after photos, photo reports, you can comment, and we serve them up in kind of an Instagram style feed so they’re not hidden in folders. 

Luke Hansen
And that, I guess I would say, is the real sticking thing for people is that, you know, when you have a problem of organization, like when you can’t find something that’s a pain that you feel that you’re aware of, you really don’t know what you would do with this capability that we give you to kind of like, see what’s going on at every project your company is working on. And once people get that, once they get that almost Instagram feed at their business, they don’t want to go back from it. And so that’s why we say visual communication rather than just like, it’s a photo app for contractors. It allows them to run their business differently, and it works quite well. 

Brett
What types of contractors are you selling to? Is this like the kind of digitally native next generation that are younger and used to living and spending all their time on apps like Instagram? Or is this also being sold to the contractors who’ve been in this space for 20 or 30 years, and they’re just looking for ways to adapt and evolve? 

Luke Hansen
Yeah, it’s definitely both. I think we get a little quicker uptake, the more you’re just sort of open to technology. And there’s type of people that are interested in exploring, and we do great with those people because they’re like, oh, let me test this out. Click, click. Oh, this is cool. This is handy. I’ll use this. But most contracting businesses, they skew older, they skew male, at least in the ownership. So that’s a huge part of our customer base. And definitely the value of having these records and kind of like knowing what’s going on is the value that we’re trying to sell. And it really cuts across all these trades. So we would say our customers are trade contractors. They’re usually not building a stadium. 

Luke Hansen
They’re building like an addition on a house, or they’re redoing the roof or painting it or all these different trades. And what I’ve told our team is like, we are solving problems that affect every contractor, not things that are specific to roofers or plumbers or pool builders or whatever. And that’s a big enough area that you can really do something, but it’s also narrow enough that you can focus and you’re not competing with slack and Dropbox and kind of these products that are sort of for the world, for anyone that has any business could use one of those products. We think of ourselves as like horizontal across this space, but a little more vertical or kind of niche that these are our customers and we’re trying to make the best product for them. 

Brett
This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media, a podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage, and grow their own podcast. Now, if you’re a Founder, you may be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast. I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we’ve built our service to do. You show up and host, and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. Now back today’s episode. Was it hard to find investors that understand this space and were interested in backing a company in this space? A lot of the investors that I have on the show, they’re focused on developer tooling or cybersecurity SaaS, things like that. 

Brett
But I’m guessing that are there investors that just focus on this market, or did you have to convince investors that this is the market that they should focus on? 

Luke Hansen
Yeah, that’s a great question. So there are some investors that just focus on this market, or at least that have a subset of their team that focuses on this market. Early on, we self funded through, essentially, our family roofing business. We just were like, hey, we believe in this. Rather than go try to raise money and give away equity day one, we’re going to fund it for a little while. And so I didn’t have to convince them day one. But even after we had material ARR and were running, they’re like, do contractors really care about photosyst? I mean, that was like, a hard sell. 

Luke Hansen
And that was my joke, is that it’s way easier to raise $30 million than it is to raise $3 million, because by the time you’re trying to raise $30 million, it’s much more of a financial question and a future vision than trying to prove to people that anyone cares about your product. And so that was a little bit hard. But by the time we really went out to fundraise, we had enough traction and, in a sense, data to say, like, this is a real problem. And I would always say, go, you know a contractor, I’m sure you know one. Go ask them, are they taking pictures? Look at their phone. I promise you, they will have pictures of their kids, and then it’ll be all these pictures of these jobs that they’re working on, and it’s all mixed together, and they don’t want that. 

Luke Hansen
They want to keep those separate. And so that’s the route we took. Now, what comes to mind? Like, our first sort official funding was from blueprint equity out of San Diego. And they’re not exclusive to this space, but they know it pretty well. They’ve done a few investments in kind of this general construction space. And I remember when I talked to them, I thought, oh, I’m not having to answer these same skeptical questions. It’s like they already know this, that this is important. And so we’re just talking about almost like, the details, the future. So, yeah, there is some, but it’s not that big. How big is the Tam here? That’s a debate between my CFO and I on a regular basis. We would say the Tam is on the order of like 4.5 billion. 

Luke Hansen
That’s what we think our sort of addressable market is. Now then sort of a more realistic tam of we’re not going to get 100% of the market is probably in the one to 1.5. I’m speaking about, like, ARR specifically, that we think is, like, the obtainable market here. If we can get between 20 and 30% of the contract. And it’s, like, loose, it’s not all connected to where you’re just going to get everyone using the same thing. And I don’t know that we have that level of network effects or can jump start those. So it’s big, but it’s not Salesforce. It’s big enough to be interesting to venture, but not so big that you’re going to get like 100 million free to go make something crazy. 

Brett
Makes sense. What about growth and adoption? Are there any numbers that you can share that highlight some of the growth and adoption you’re seeing? 

Luke Hansen
Yeah, we hit our billionth photo, I believe, yesterday afternoon. So we have a billion photos that have been captured in CompanyCam. We’ve got on the order of 30,000 companies using CompanyCam regularly. We’re projecting that we’re going to end the year, let’s say at approaching 50 million of ARR. And so we’re moving along and we think there’s a lot out there. That’s what’s exciting to me is look, do I want to make money? Absolutely do. I would love to make a metric shit ton of money. But what kind of keeps me going? And I love trying to solve a problem. Hey, can we build this? Can we actually do this other big problem or this space? That’s what’s so interesting and exciting to me. 

Luke Hansen
And I hear a lot of people talking about like before they’ve even been raised, this is how we’re going to do it. This is how we’re going to exit. They’ve got this whole plan in their mind. And I run much more on what are the things that we need to do to make this company valuable? And I probably err too much on that side of like, look, I don’t care about your pro forma, I don’t care about a whole bunch of this stuff. There’s practical things we need to build, there’s practical story we need to tell, selling. There’s all this actual on the ground practical. We have to do this. And now where we’re at, we’re eight years in, we’re better at forecasting and projecting and things like that. 

Luke Hansen
But I feel like early on you have real problems and the main problem is no one gives a shit. No one gives a shit about your product, no one knows about it. It probably doesn’t do everything you need it to do. And like gosh, those are the things you need to solve. And if you make something valuable, you will be able to figure out how to capture a bunch of that value. I say that a lot. If we create value, we will be able to capture it. We don’t have to have the entire formula before we start. Let’s create a bunch of value, and then a version of it will work itself out. 

Brett
Let’s imagine five years in the future. You have a huge exit. You have your metric shit ton of money. What would you do with your time? What would you be working on if your money just didn’t matter at all? Or where would you put that money? What types of things would you be investing in? 

Luke Hansen
That’s a great question. So the joke around here, I made this joke to my wife and my mom. It didn’t land as good as I wanted it to, but my ten year old was. They were talking about, what’s he going to be when he grows up? I said, he’s not going to have to work. He’s going to be smoking weed on the beach. We’re going to be set. For me, I know myself well enough to know I’m going to want to do something. And so what I want to avoid is there’s always a trap of, the next guy’s richer than you, they got a nicer car, watch, plane, whatever. I’m sort of actively trying to stay away from any of that because it’s easy to kind of imagine and tell yourself a story about the future. 

Luke Hansen
But I just love building stuff, and so I imagine myself, I’m probably going to be selling bidets, to be totally honest, we should be using bidets in this country. It is just a disgrace that we’re not using them. There’s one company out there, tushy. I’m plugging them right now. They sell bidets, but I think they mainly target women in their marketing, which makes sense for bathroom products. But I think that there’s an opportunity to sell bidets to men in this country, and I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time. So that might be what I do, or I’ll probably have some other actual good idea, or I hope I do. But I just see myself taking a little, know, traveling this stuff that’s then, you know, building is fun. It’s really fun. 

Brett
Hey, that’s one of the highlights whenever you go to Europe, is that you get to experience bidets there. I was just there and I was asking my fiancee, is this okay that I enjoyed a bidet and on it, but I’ll share this interview with her and let her know it’s normal. 

Luke Hansen
Yeah. Tell her that she needs to get with it. I mean, this is the future, and we are like these across the pond peasants who don’t exactly. Sorry, we are the barbarians in this story. 

Brett
So funny. That’s such a unique answer as well. I love it. Now, in terms of your competition, is your main competition just them using their iPhones and not having purpose built tooling or who is that main competition? 

Luke Hansen
Yeah, our main competition. I mean, there’s a handful of copycats, and over the years, people have tried to kind of rip it off. So we have, like, I would say, a very small competition. It’s very rare that someone’s in our sales funnel and they’re like, well, we’re thinking about using XYZ competitor to you. There’s a few that exist, but that’s not much of it. It is overwhelmingly the good enough solution. The hey, well, we’re organized in Dropbox, so we’re not really feeling the pain or, yeah, we got the photos on our phone, and that’s sort of good. Like, that is basically the competition. Or we’re getting more now into kind of, like, forms and checklists and some of this. And so you’re competing with paper, which is often the good enough solution. But, yeah, that’s been simultaneously one of our best assets. 

Luke Hansen
When I was talking about being different, this product, it’s simple to understand, but it’s also something of a new, especially when we started a new category. It’s not just accounting software, or I always used to call it, like, run your business software, just a vertical SaaS for painters that just runs your painting business. And you put everything in there. It’s like a productivity tool in a sense, for our customers. And so we never had much luck with Google Ads or areas where there had to be intention. At the beginning, we did extremely well on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, where we can show you and we can try to get your imagination going of, oh, I didn’t really know that my problems in this kind of category could be solved in this way. And so that was sort of tricky. 

Luke Hansen
It’s a benefit because you don’t have a bunch of competition, but you’re doing more kind of like education, and you don’t have as many people just like typing into Google, and you pay $10 to pop up on top. 

Brett
In terms of the growth that you’ve seen, what do you attribute to that growth? Obviously, let’s separate the mustache, because I know that had a huge impact, but let’s separate that. What else have you done to rise above that noise and grow in the way that you have? 

Luke Hansen
Impossible to separate the mustache. No, I believe very much in product. I’ve added plenty of arguments around here, just in general, do you really have to have the best product? Do you have to try to have a consumer grade experience? And other companies make money and they don’t have the best product. And I’m like, no, we’re going to be the best. If we are the best, we’re never going to lose. If were smarter with sales and marketing, we may do better, but having the best product, that solves a real problem for real people that they care about. It’s hard to understate how important that is. And I’ve heard an interview with Mr. Beast recently, and he was talking about that, the quality of the idea, like theme of your video. 

Luke Hansen
Between that and kind of just the thumbnail, the title, that’s 90% of the value. If you get that right, you are way ahead and you should spend way more time thinking about that, like the quality of the idea and in this case, the quality of the product. So that was huge because we’ve seen through referrals, there’s a lot of things that have just scaled as our business has grown. And people love to talk about things that they like and things that make them sound smart. And so if people like your product and they feel smarter because they use it, and they can tell someone else about it, and they’ll feel like they’ll sound smart when they talk about it, that’s a huge win. 

Luke Hansen
And I’ve seen that in our case, people will talk about us when they’re speaking at some event for flooring companies because they like it and it makes them sound smart and it’s like something to offer. And so I think I’ve lost track of the question. I’m rambling. 

Brett
No worries. I like the rambling. Let’s dive a bit deeper into funding. So, as we mentioned there, 38 million you’ve raised so far. What have you learned about fundraising throughout this entire process? 

Luke Hansen
Well, that having a good business, good product, good people on your team, good customers, is. That’s the number one thing. Like when it comes down to fundraising, you are talking to someone whose main job is finance. Now, everyone’s ready for a good story. I mean, we’re podcasting here. You don’t want just someone reading a spreadsheet. You want to be able to tell a compelling story about the future. You don’t always have to have the numbers. And early on, it’s all the story. And what I would say is, you’d better believe that story. And even beyond investors, I would argue it’s harder to hire the first three to five people than it is to get the first round of to get some seed investment. 

Luke Hansen
Because that investor parting with 25 grand, 5100, even a million for certain people organizations, is a lot smaller of a decision than someone quitting their job and coming and working for you in somewhere that is unproven. The people that you want, they have opportunities. They could go do a lot of different things, work at a lot of different places, and your belief in the future is just so important. As a Founder, it doesn’t mean you know exactly how it’s going to play out, but that you have that conviction that this is a real problem and that we have a real solution and that we’re capable of a lot. In our series b funding, we talked to a ton of people. You’re getting grilled on Zoom because it was still kind of COVID time. 

Luke Hansen
And I decided going in, I remember thinking like, I believe in the future of this company more than any of these people disbelieve in it. So I’m going to listen because these are smart people that have seen a lot of things and can give you some really good advice. But I’m just going in with this. I believe more than they disbelieve, and I know that I do. I know that I believe in this more than their doubts. And so that confidence is actually contagious, and it’s contagious to your employees, it’s contagious to your investors. And I don’t know. I don’t know if you can really manufacture it. A lot of people have this idea that entrepreneurs are these sort of wildly positive, everything is glowing and going to work out perfectly type of thing. And I don’t really think that’s true. 

Luke Hansen
I think a lot of good entrepreneurs are actually very skeptical people, and they’re very critical of ideas. And I know this was the case for me. I tried to tear this idea down when I was thinking of starting this company every which way, like, okay, what about this? What about this? Maybe it couldn’t work for this. Why has no one done this already? In trying to run through all of these ways that you’re wrong about something and that you build that confidence and that conviction by assaulting your idea and your plan so much that when it comes out the other side and you can’t actually tear it down, that you’re like, okay, I have taken every tool at my disposal and run it against this, and now I really believe in it. 

Luke Hansen
That is the foundation for you to hire people that believe in it. That is the foundation to raise money. And then the further you go down the line, the proof is in the pudding. You’re not raising on hopes and dreams on your series b like you are on your seed round, but your belief and your ability to tell the story and your conviction about the future is definitely important and I think helped us because you really want to invest in someone who really cares and who really believes in it. They got to be a true believer. They can’t be the skeptical. I mean, they can be a skeptical person, but they got to be committed to what they’re doing. 

Brett
Confidence is contagious. 

Luke Hansen
I love that line. 

Brett
I’ll be sealing that and using that going forward. Final question here. We’re almost up on time. Let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture vision here? 

Luke Hansen
I think we have an opportunity to be the mediator on the homeowner to contractor relationship in doing a project. There is no actual good process, standard process around that you as a homeowner can know, oh, this is going to happen, then this is going to happen. And I can see it all happen. So we think we have a real opportunity to take our kind of like visual communication value prop that we are giving to the contractor and include the homeowner in that. And that has a lot offshoots and related to that. 

Luke Hansen
I’m extremely excited about AI and what it unlocks in terms of how we’re going to be able not just to build software like it will write code for you, but I think these large language models are going to fundamentally change the way that we interact with software and the ability to treat the software that you’re using as a smart person who knows what’s in the database and can just interact with you the way that you would talk to your CFO or your lawyer or something, that is going to happen. And that because I would say we own that on the ground data capture, the photos, the form info. We’re in a really unique position to kind of use these large language models to make that more valuable for our customers business. 

Luke Hansen
So those are the two kind of like big things that we’re aiming at. And I think they’re both achievable, but everything is always harder than it sounds at the front, so we’ll have to see how it goes. Amazing. Well, I love the vision. 

Brett
I love the approach that you’re taking to building the company, and I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. It’s going to be a hit with our audience. So really excited to get it out there. Now, before we wrap up here, if any founders listening in just want to follow along with your journey. Where should they go? 

Luke Hansen
So our socials are at CompanyCam on everywhere. CompanyCam as in camera. I am at profay Luke Profeluke on Twitter if you want to harangue me about anything otherwise, yeah, we’re posting more. We’re doing TikToks. We’re going out to work. I’ll be doing landscaping work tomorrow, all day. I don’t know if I mentioned that, but we’re going to go be the new guys for a day or one of our customers businesses, and they’re going to put us to work doing the worst work they can dream up. And so there should be some fun stuff happening in that regard. And I think what you will count on if you follow along with CompanyCam is that it will not be boring. It may be offensive, it may be lame or cringe, but we’re going for not boring. 

Brett
We used to have internally this idea of, we talk about it a lot, called OTL marketing or on the line marketing. And we said, one side, it’s boring as fuck, and on the other side is prison. And you want to try to get as close to that line as you possibly can and ug that line of controversy and use that to generate buzz. 

Luke Hansen
That’s the line I’m stealing from you. Otl marketing and boring or prison. That is perfect. Yeah. I love it. 

Brett
All right, Luke. Well, hey, man, thanks so much for taking the time. This has been a lot of fun. 

Luke Hansen
I appreciate it, Brett. Thanks, man. 

Brett
All right, keep in touch. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s. 

Luke Hansen
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Brett
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Luke Hansen
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Brett
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Luke Hansen
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Brett
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