Growth partner for new software-enabled revenue

Your next line of business
is already inside your business.

You know your market better than anyone. We know how to build the software, shape it into a product, and run it. Neither of us can find this new business alone — so we find it together, by building it and putting it in front of buyers.

Start a conversation → see how it works ↓
The Recognition

Somebody has probably
already asked you for it.

Have you developed expertise that helps you profitably deliver value to your customers — but isn't itself what they pay you for? A tool you built because nothing on the market fit. Data you've accumulated just by operating. A method your people run in their heads. Did you know it could become its own line of business?

Data you've accumulated just by operating

Years of it. Nobody outside your business could assemble it. You've never thought of it as a product because collecting it was never the point.

Software or services you give away

Bundled in to sell something else — hardware, a subscription, a service contract. Free to your customer. Not free to you.

A method your people run in their heads

Or in a spreadsheet nobody else could operate. Your industry has no standard for it. You built one because you had to.

The most successful businesses built this way started with somebody asking. A peer who wanted to license the tool. A customer who asked whether you'd run it for them. An investor who offered to buy it outright. Most owners say no, or don't know what to do with the question, and it goes quiet.

Has anyone ever asked to buy it, license it, or have you run it for them?

If so, the most expensive market research you will ever need has already been done for you, for free. And if nobody has, that may only mean the question hasn't reached you yet.

Either way: something being valuable inside your business — even valuable to others — still doesn't mean there's a business in it. That's the part worth finding out before you bet on it.

Why It Stays Buried

The people who know the market
and the people who can build it
are almost never the same.

You know your business. You know your industry. You know what you do well. You don't know evaluating, extracting, and monetizing a new offering. The potential new line of business requires it all: not on paper, in practice. By building, not forecasting.

You have
  • Twenty years of knowing what your buyers actually do all day — and what they'll never pay for
  • Credibility and access inside your niche that nobody outside your industry can buy
  • The asset itself, and the reason it exists
We bring
  • Product judgment — what to build, what to leave out, what to charge, who to sell it to first
  • The engineering to build it, launch it, and keep running it
  • The discipline to kill it cheaply when the market says no

That's what symbiotic means here: we can only do it together — you can't do it alone, and we don't even know it's a thing.

Three Directions

So who would pay for it?

Our half is the discovery. It begins with imagination and gets concrete fast: real things, shown to real people. There are three directions worth checking, and each one draws on something you already know.

A three-by-three figure. Rows are the three assets: data accumulated just by operating; software or services you give away; a method your people run in their heads. Columns are the three directions: the fix you built for yourself; the people already in your orbit; what your customers keep asking for. Twenty-one unlabelled dots are scattered unevenly across the nine intersections — two hold clusters of five or six, most hold one to three, and two are empty. One dot inside the richest cluster is ringed, marked "one candidate survives".
Figure — the search space Three assets against three directions, and the candidates one search actually turned up. The density is uneven and two intersections are empty — that's one company's search, not a map of good and bad directions. Phase One's whole job is to generate these and then kill them, until one is left — or none is. One candidate comes out of the crowd.
Direction One

Sell the fix you built for yourself

You had to get good at something outside your core business — because it was breaking, or costing you, or nobody sold a solution. Your peers have the same problem, and nobody sells them a solution either. Uses what you know about running your business.

It happens A Dallas design-build firm built its own preconstruction estimating tool in 1996 because bad early estimates were killing projects. It went on sale to the construction market in 2006 — and in 2013 a competitor approached them to co-develop the next one. That's Beck Technology, still going.
Direction Two

Sell to the people already in your orbit

Not strangers — your own suppliers; the integrators and specialists who install and configure your product; your customers' customers. You understand them, you already transact with them, and you have never sold them anything. Uses what you know about your market.

It happens Raven Industries built connectivity and data tooling for its own precision-agriculture equipment, then opened it up — selling it through dealers, and to the equipment manufacturers and developers around it, including for machines it didn't build. CNH paid $2.1 billion for a company doing about $348 million in sales, citing precision-agriculture capability. The buyers were already in the room.
Direction Three

Sell what your customers keep asking for

The requests you've been politely declining for years because they aren't what you do. Some of them are a business — and you don't have to invent anything, you just have to package it so they can buy it. Uses what you know about your customers.

It happens In 1948 a single Ford dealership was asked by Ford and RCA to manage their vehicle fleets. It said yes. That fleet business grew past the dealership it came from and is still running today as Holman.

And one direction that isn't on the list. Building the platform for your whole industry. It's the first idea everyone has and it's the one that eats companies — GE spent roughly four billion dollars and six years on that bet before selling off the pieces. Trumpf and Klöckner made the same wager and let go of theirs. Every example above started narrow: one problem, one buyer, one engine line. We will push you toward narrow.

Where We Fit

We're a growth partner.
Here's what we mean by that.

A custom software firm
builds what you've already decided to build.
We find out what's worth building.
A venture studio
takes equity up front and needs the answer to be yes.
We're paid to run the test either way.
A fractional product executive
brings advice to a company that already has a product team.
We bring the judgment and the engineers.
A strategy consultancy
hands you a plan and leaves.
We hand you a product in front of buyers.
Who this is for
  • Established and profitable, able to fund a search out of operating cash
  • An owner, CEO, or whoever is accountable for revenue that doesn't exist yet
  • Sitting on data, a given-away service, or a method nobody else has
  • Has been asked for it at least once — even if you said no
Probably not a fit
  • Pre-revenue startups still looking for a model
  • Anyone who needs the answer to be yes
  • Teams that just need hands by the hour
  • A decision already made, needing only execution
In Practice

Two searches running now.

A geographic & market-data platform

It never found its market. We took over its development and direction, recombined its core into a second product that is showing real signs of fit, and are now building a third — narrowed to a specific use case, in play with a large brands group for their 2027 fiscal year.

An established software firm's own platform

They could build anything — nearly three decades of custom software behind them. They brought us in to find the profitable market fit. It's already profitable and growing ARR year over year. It hasn't reached software economics yet — the 80%-plus gross margin that separates a product business from a very good services business. We're narrowing into named verticals, one trade at a time, to get there.

Neither has had its breakthrough yet: one is still looking for its market, the other for software margins.

Who's Behind It

Nine industries.
One recurring pattern.

Sean Kennedy
Sean Kennedy Founder

“Through my experience across nine different industries, and across departments and executive teams, I bring novel perspectives to the toughest problems, and help established businesses understand, anticipate, and adapt to create more value for the people they serve.”

22 years from IBM compiler engineering, through Globant's digital practice, to founding Simbiotrek — building software, leading teams, and shipping products in insurance, manufacturing, industrial automation, healthcare, retail, construction, aerospace, automotive, and telecommunications.

Selected work
  • A regional P&C insurer. Ran the land-and-expand transformation from a consumer quote tool through to a full agent portal — and built a claims assessment, mitigation, and repair-management product inside the business. It was never spun out; a later partnership with a vendor transferred it across instead. That's a real outcome: sometimes a product should exist, but the company that incubated it isn't the right one to bring it to market.
  • A Fortune 500 industrial company. Led the customer-experience program in the shift from selling hardware with free software to an as-a-service model.
  • A multi-state fertility care provider. Pivoted the business from local, in-person, and insurance-dependent to self-pay, remote, and multi-state.
  • An enterprise software vendor. Opened a new platform revenue line by extending a pattern already proven on one platform to the next.
  • An established software firm's own platform. Currently holding product leadership — narrowing it into named verticals, one at a time, to find higher-profit market fit.
Most innovation is transfer

The pattern doesn't respect industry boundaries, and neither do the answers. Retail web-commerce thinking is how a B2B buyer got ERP-integrated purchasing; the insurance agent portal that finally worked was a consumer quote flow underneath. The biggest one was a whole business model: a Fortune 500 industrial company carried the software industry's as-a-service model onto the plant floor. That strategy wasn't ours; the customer-experience program that made it succeed was. Most of what a business needs next has already been solved somewhere it would never think to look — and knowing where to look is most of the job.

Start a Conversation

Has anyone asked
to buy it?

If somebody has asked for the thing you built for yourselves — or you've always half-wondered whether there was a business in it — that's the conversation. No intake form, no sales cycle.