The Vertical AI Playbook for Scale, a conversation with Nick Ornitz and Julisa Salas
By Claire Biernacki & Carol Magalhães Isaacs, BBG Ventures
At BBG Ventures we are excited about the promise of AI for vertical solutions; specifically for legacy industries and deskless workers or SMBs. There is growing momentum in vertical AI due to the ability to create highly specialized platforms that deliver tailored solutions in categories with industry specific datasets. To dive deeper, we co-hosted a conversation with Flybridge and Omers for early stage builders about what it takes to build and scale vertical startups. The conversation featured vertical experts Nick Ornitz (CEO, Topline Pro, BBGV Portfolio Founder) and Julisa Salas (former Toast executive, GTM and operations advisor). From early GTM hacks to AI-driven sales automation and how to build a true moat in the AI era, here are some key takeaways from our conversation:
1. Customer Discovery and Pivoting Based on Feedback
Before launching Topline, Nick and his co-founder were working on Dwelling, which virtually connected homeowners who needed home maintenance support to experienced professionals. However, they ultimately realized plumbers and electricians don’t want to spend their time on video calls; they want to be out in the field. What they needed was a better way to grow their existing business — so Nick and his co-founder Shannon set out to solve this problem. The company started as “Pro Phone” because the first offering delivered a second “business” phone line, along with an auto-generated website. Nick and team learned that it would be hard for customers to adopt the phone out of the gate but got their attention with the website, which helped with discovery. Today, Topline Pro uses AI to help home service businesses get discovered, trusted and booked, directly. Their product offering and roadmap have relied on staying close to the customer; a priority for Nick and team from day one.
Even as the company has grown, Topline has tactics to ensure everyone at the company stays close to the customer. For example, they have a slack channel for customer support, the Topline team reviews customer feedback together on Fridays and they even have employees work in customer success temporarily to understand the pain points.
Similarly, at Toast, Julisa immersed herself in the restaurant industry to understand the end customer — talking to managers, staff, and even guests — to understand their biggest challenges. Most restaurant owners want to focus on serving customers and doing what they love — not backend operations. This insight highlighted a major gap: the need for technology that streamlines restaurant management without adding complexity to their workflows. Toast started with the point of sale system given it is the operational backbone of a restaurant.
Takeaway: Look for the hair-on-fire problem! Continue to iterate on solutions until you find the thing your customer can’t live without. Even as you scale, continue to incorporate regular touch points for customer feedback into your workflow.
2. Cracking the Go-to-Market Code for SMBs
Selling to small businesses is notoriously hard — they behave like consumers, but customer acquisition can be tough to crack and expensive if done poorly. We dove into which strategies have worked for Topline, which sells to business owners at the smallest end of the market — solopreneurs.
Even when Topline first launched, selling at only a $20 price point, Nick started a dedicated sales motion. In the early days he started with founder-led sales, applying creative tactics such as targeted facebook DMs into home repair worker facebook groups, building out a database of potential customer profiles, and eventually created a “sales lab” to test new sales tactics (demo vs. no demo, video outreach, sharing examples of how the product works for a similar business). The key is testing a number of strategies and quickly making iterative, data-driven changes based on what works. Focus on homing in on the right customer profile and channel over time to improve connectivity rate.
Takeaway: Use data and iterate to optimize for the right acquisition channels, and buyer, to maximize sales efficiency — done well, this can significantly improve connectivity rate.
3. Considerations for Hiring a Sales Team
The right inflection point for scaling the sales team can be challenging to pinpoint. Founders want to stay close to the customers, and are often the best spokesperson for the business, but they also ultimately need leverage to work on other elements of the business.
At Topline Pro, Nick led sales until they had a proven playbook and a repeatable motion — which meant ~8–10 sales reps. It was then that they looked for a Head of Sales whose background could improve their playbooks, and provide more hands-on coaching to the sales team.
When you first start to build out the sales team, Nick recommends hiring at least two sales reps to be able to compare performance and tactics (vs. just one).
While Nick is no longer leading the sales team, he continues to stay close to the customer, even in cases that don’t scale such as going to spend a day with a top customer in person.
Takeaway: A strong sales leader can help scale your team, but no one replaces the founder’s connection to the customer. Whether it’s joining sales calls or visiting customers in person, staying involved is key to building long-term trust and product-market fit.
4. Growing ACVs: Moving upmarket vs. sticking to your customer base
ACV expansion is critical to the vertical SaaS playbook, but founders often struggle with industry depth (serving one niche really well) vs. expanding into adjacent verticals to grow TAM.
To start, there is an opportunity to increase prices as you deliver increasing value. For example, Nick learned that he was actually pricing their offerings too low in 2023, and saw growth increase when they increased prices — customers associated a higher price (up to a point) with better quality. Topline has focused on offering additional higher priced tiers of the product with existing customers as opposed to moving upmarket.
Julisa has seen companies do a mix of both — listening to the customer to add on more products, but also expanding upmarket. She explained that as companies acquire more customers — they leverage their customer base to inform expansion into other areas, ultimately offering a full platform play that could be helpful to a broader set of customers.
Takeaway: Don’t assume you need to “move upmarket” — some companies serving SMBs have been successful expanding ACV by layering on adjacent products instead as they get more specific about the variety of their customers’ needs.
5. Building a Moat in a Competitive AI Market
With so many AI tools hitting the market, building a moat is top of mind for startups. Julisa and Nick had a view on tips for creating defensibility.
Prioritize Brand & Reputation: SMB customers rely heavily on word-of-mouth referrals. A single bad experience can hurt retention, while positive referrals can drive significant growth. Nick suggested focusing on customers and product, and not getting distracted by competition — “if we get distracted by competitors, we’ll stop focusing on what we do best. The biggest risk isn’t competition — it’s losing focus on the customer.”
Own the Workflow: The best AI startups Julisa has worked with don’t just offer one feature — they automate an entire process that previously required human effort. Thinking through end to end workflows and automating something customers weren’t able to do before is a big differentiator. Additionally, while AI models are becoming commoditized, data isn’t. Julisa works with companies that are building their own proprietary databases that offer an inherently defensible asset and moat.
Takeaway: Creating net new datasets establishes a clear moat — but customer experience and brand can still be a core differentiator.
6. AI in Sales & Customer Success
For years, SMB SaaS has historically fallen into a stereotype of being tough to scale — SMBs typically have lower ACVs and potential for higher churn than enterprise customers. Additionally, unlocking the right, repeatable GTM can be difficult, making traditional sales models challenging. But AI is flipping the equation:
A large part of Nick’s thesis is the ability to unlock distribution for SMBs. AI tools can help to acquire and support customers, increasing growth and improving retention. At Topline, Nick uses AI to support live coaching during sales calls (ex: Winn.ai) and also uses AI for customer success (ex: AI to engage with customers over text and provide dedicated customer support) Topline also uses an AI Sentiment Analysis — every customer interaction is categorized as positive, neutral, or negative, helping prioritize support and product roadmap.
Having an internal engineering team that builds tools for sales and CX, making those functions faster, can help you achieve scale quicker.
Takeaway: AI allows one CSM to manage hundreds of SMB accounts, creating efficiency for scale. AI isn’t just powering the product — it’s transforming how AI companies sell and support customers.
We’re excited to back visionary founders leveraging AI in legacy and overlooked industries, helping their customers automate workflows end to end. If you’re building in this space — or you are an investor exploring the impact of AI on industry-specific innovation — we’d love to connect. Drop us a note: claire@bbgv.com and carol@bbgv.com.
About BBGV:
BBGV is an early stage VC firm that invests in female or diverse founders who are building for the polycultural future of America. We look for founders using technology to reinvent the biggest areas of the economy such as health, work, financial inclusion, climate safety and consumer.
