Abe Woldenberg
VLX is a digital inspection platform. You build forms, collect field data, generate reports, verify assets. The software doesn't care whether the thing being inspected is a steel pipe, a piece of collateral in an ABL portfolio, a hotel room, or a car at a rental lot. It works the same way for all of them.
That's the product. That's also the problem.
When you sell horizontal software, every conversation starts from zero. The buyer in front of you is a specialist. They've spent fifteen years in oil and gas, or equipment finance, or commercial insurance. They have a very specific mental model of what their work is, what breaks in it, and what software has already failed them. You show up with a tool that can do something genuinely useful for them — but "it can do something useful for a lot of industries" is not a sentence that moves anyone. It sounds like "we haven't figured out who we're for yet."
So you figure it out yourself.
I ran demos across about seventeen distinct verticals at VLX. ABL and equipment finance, oil and gas, insurance, manufacturing, mining, construction, hospitality, home inspectors, real estate, field operations, service companies, transportation and logistics, vehicle inspections, quality and compliance, workplace safety, asset verification, remote inspections. Some of these had dedicated landing pages, dedicated email sequences, dedicated keyword clusters. Most of them I had to research from scratch before I could hold an intelligent conversation with a buyer.
That research phase is where the learning starts. Because every industry has a different vocabulary for the same underlying problem. An ABL lender doesn't call it an inspection. They call it a field exam. A home inspector doesn't talk about "compliance documentation." They talk about how many inspections they can get through in a day, and whether the report will look professional enough for the client. An oil and gas buyer cares about GPS-embedded proof, because their inspectors are working remote sites and the chain of custody matters in ways it doesn't for a hotel QA checklist.
Same product. Completely different conversation.
What I learned from doing this long enough is that there are really two categories of thing that change, and one that doesn't.
What changes: vocabulary, the specific operational pain, the economic framing, and who you're talking to. The ABL buyer is a VP of Credit or a Chief Credit Officer. They think in basis points and audit risk. The manufacturing buyer is a VP of Quality or a Plant Manager. They think in throughput, reject rates, and compliance cycles. You can't start the demo in the same place for both of them, and if you try, you lose the room.
What doesn't change: the fear. Every buyer in every physical-world industry is afraid of the same thing, expressed differently. The ABL lender is afraid of getting deceived by a borrower and having nothing defensible to show an examiner. The insurance carrier is afraid of a fraudulent claim that slipped through because the photos looked fine. The oil and gas company is afraid of a field report that can't prove where or when the inspection actually happened. The home inspector is afraid that their client's attorney has a question six months later and the documentation doesn't hold up.
In every case, the actual fear is: something happened out in the field, and we can't prove what.
Once I understood that, the demo stopped being a product tour and started being a conversation about proof. What does proof mean to you? What happens when you can't produce it? What does the failure mode look like? And then — here's what we built for that.
Running the same product across that many buyer types teaches you something that's hard to learn any other way: most of what you think is "product positioning" is actually just choosing which fear to lead with. The product is the same. What you say first, and what you put in front of someone in the first 90 seconds, is the only real lever you have over whether they'll be curious enough to keep going.
I wrote dozens of cold sequences for different verticals. Each one had to earn the right to name the product, by establishing the problem before we got there. You mention the product too early and the first reflex is a comparison to something they already know — which is a comparison you don't win by arguing features. You lead with a specific stat about their world, or a specific failure mode they recognize, and they lean in before the comparison fires.
That discipline — figure out the fear, earn the conversation, then show the product — is the thing I carry into every sales conversation now, regardless of the category. Most products solve a real problem for someone. The hard part is identifying which problem this specific buyer has, in their vocabulary, before they've told you they have it.
Seventeen industries in, I'm still learning how to do it faster.