Roofing contractor built their own SaaS alternative with Claude

Dhilip Subramanian@sdhilip

Six months ago, I built an AI voice agent for a roofing contractor in Indianapolis, USA. It’s been running smoothly ever since.

Recently, he reached out to me with something interesting.

He’d subscribed to a SaaS platform for managing his roofing business but felt he was paying for features he didn’t need. When the vendor refused to offer a cheaper plan, he opened Claude and started building his own version.

Here’s what surprised me.

He’s completely non-technical. No coding experience, no CLAUDE.md file, no fancy prompting techniques.

He gave me access to his entire Claude conversation history, and I was genuinely impressed. The way he explained his business problems, articulated requirements, and instructed Claude was exceptional. Some of the best prompting I’ve seen, without even knowing what prompt engineering is.

He’s simply an excellent communicator who understands his business inside out.

He asked me to help deploy it. Since his voice agent was already running on Google Cloud, I made a few minor changes and deployed his application there. He now has a working prototype.

His plan? Test it for three months, then potentially sell it to other roofing contractors in his network.

Two things stood out to me.

First, how powerful business knowledge and clear communication have become when working with AI. You don’t necessarily need technical skills to start building useful software.

Second, how small business owners are beginning to challenge traditional SaaS models by building exactly what they need.

Maybe the next generation of SaaS founders won’t come from software engineering backgrounds. They’ll come from industries where people understand the problems better than anyone else.