E26: Building an epic SaaS company in an uncommon niche with Jeremiah Henson

Cache Flow

This episode, Engage Mobilize’s Co-Founder Jeremiah Henson talks about the different types of software used in the oil and gas industry, the niche opportunities that are still available for software development, and how a Founder’s role changes as a company grows.

Jeremiah Henson is Engage Mobilize’s Co-Founder and Vice President of Product where he leads the vision and delivery of industrial workflow management product.

Jeremiah has over a decade of product leadership experience and has worked extensively across business development, program, and product management roles.

His background includes comprehensive knowledge in mechanical design, manufacturing engineering, oil and gas operations, personnel management, and process control practices. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Cache Flow:

• Why oil and gas still use carbon copy paper.
• The benefits of digitalizing field operations.
• Different types of software used in the oil and gas industry.
• The process of getting an SBIR grant.
• The upfront costs involved with growing a startup.
• How a Founder’s role changes as a company grows.
• Different niche opportunities for software development.
• The tech solutions for oil and gas regulatory requirements.
• How oil and gas is responding to renewable energy.

Resources:

• Engage Mobilize
• Small Business Innovation Research Grant
• Square
• Energy Engine
• Brave Browser
• American Battery Technology Company
• Curotec

Connect with Jeremiah Henson:

• LinkedIn

Connecting with the host:

• Brian Dainis on Linktree

Quotables:

• 15:53 - “One of the early engineers we tried to hire he just refused to work for us because he’s like I can’t work in oil and gas it’s just waste, and one of our advisors at the time was like why would you not want to work for a software that’s helping to optimize an industry that you think has a lot of waste in it and I was like that was a great argument and that engineer never did want to work for us still but that was our goal is hey we can make this more efficient.”
• 28:01 - “You saw a pain, a solution and you acted on it, like two or three years before the market realized they needed that solution, which is I think the best possible timing because you had 2 or 3 years to work out all the kinks, get the product ready, get through the RND, figure out your sales and marketing strategy and just in time for when the market realizes they have this need your on the scene with the solution.”
• 36:34 - “It’s fun at times, it’s stressful at times, it’s interesting how the role of a CEO evolves over time and look at somebody like Mark Zuckerburg whose the Founder of Facebook and also the CEO of whatever their market cap is like 500 billion dollar market cap publicly traded company, the level of transitions he had to make to get from where he started to where he is now successfully, some might argue he’s not successful, I personally think he’s pretty successful at what’s he doing. Obviously, there’s steps along the way that were missteps like the whole metaverse thing might have been a misstep last year, but quite impressive what he’s done and how many transitory moments he had to change his role and understand what the most valuable use of his time is along the way it’s quite fascinating to me.”