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Highlights

The $100 Billion Marreket Nobody Built Software For

Walk past any construction site in America and there’s a 60% chance the equipment you’re looking at — the excavators, cranes, specialty lifters — isn’t owned by the construction company running the job. They rented it from one of roughly 15,000 local equipment rental businesses operating across the country.

Ten years ago, that figure was 20%. COVID supply chain shortages that pushed lead times to two to three years, a high-rate environment that made capex unattractive, and increasing equipment specialization all accelerated a structural shift already underway. Today, rental is the default.

And until recently, every one of those 15,000 businesses was managing their operations on pen, paper, or software built 30 to 40 years ago.

Andy Feis spent five years as a management consultant rotating through manufacturing, mining, logistics, and construction before he saw it clearly. “This is a $100 billion market that runs on paper, pen and paper, or legacy systems that look like they should be on a computer this deep.” He co-founded Renterra to modernize it — and built his go-to-market from scratch with no established playbook to follow.

The assumption that turned out to be wrong

Before making a single sales call, Andy had a theory about where the resistance would come from. Blue-collar, owner-operated businesses. Decades of muscle memory. He expected the fight to be convincing skeptical buyers that change was worth the pain.

He was wrong about the fight. He was right about the opportunity.

“Nine times out of ten when we explain what we’re trying to do or show them the product, it’s like ‘thank God, we’ve been waiting for this.'”

The actual friction, when it existed, was narrower: legacy software users who could see the value but weren’t sure the switching cost was worth it. “I see the value, but is the value big enough that it’s worth undergoing the system change required?” That’s a solvable sales problem. It’s a different challenge entirely from market-level skepticism.

For founders entering overlooked verticals, this distinction is worth sitting with. Assumed adoption barriers often reflect a market that was never sold to credibly — not one that genuinely doesn’t want to change.

Building the outbound engine with no map

With no SaaS precedent in the space, Andy defaulted to the most direct channel available: the phone. He compiled lists of rental company owners, dialed one by one, and asked to speak to the decision-maker. On his busiest days: 300 to 400 calls. Before handing the function off, he’d made more than 10,000 personally.

His first CRM was a spreadsheet and Notion — dropdown fields, manual tracking, nothing automated. That wasn’t a failure of ambition. It was a deliberate choice to start moving before over-engineering the infrastructure.

Phone remains Renterra’s number one customer acquisition channel today. What makes high-volume outbound sustainable in a finite market of 15,000 prospects is something Andy discovered through deliberate experimentation: the same owner can be called every two months with no meaningful memory of the previous conversation. “What might be a very memorable moment for you as the sales rep — when you got told off — they will have no recollection of that a few months later.”

Unlike email, which accumulates a visible record and progressively burns goodwill, phone resets. For local, owner-operated buyers who aren’t living in their inbox, this is a structural advantage that makes high-frequency outbound viable in a way most founders don’t model correctly.

Usage as the post-close north star

Renterra’s most consequential GTM decision wasn’t about acquisition — it was about what happens after the contract is signed.

Their number one post-close success metric is product usage. That single choice cascades into everything: implementation is free, fully white-glove, with unlimited training and unlimited support. The explicit goal is to get customers live and deriving value as quickly as possible.

The original onboarding involved five to ten meetings per customer. All manual. Nothing automated. Andy ran every single session himself. “We do all of the work. Don’t make your customer do anything.”

Over time they engineered it down by 80%. But starting with maximum effort was deliberate — the inefficiency was the point. You can’t systematize a process you don’t deeply understand, and you can’t hold a team to a standard you haven’t personally hit.

“Once we have a customer up and running, using the system well, we have them for a very long time.” Free implementation is expensive. It’s also a bet on LTV that compounds in ways that charging for onboarding never does.

The assembly line model for scaling GTM functions

Andy describes Renterra’s operation as a factory assembly line — and the metaphor has more precision than it might initially seem.

The insight isn’t that every function matters. It’s that the constraint moves, and your investment should move with it. “There are times where you’ll feel like the product is delimiting things in the assembly line. There’s times when sales does. There’s times when customer success does.”

The sequencing at Renterra bore this out directly. Six to nine months of Andy running sales and onboarding entirely solo. Another six to nine months building actual systems with the first hires. Only then did individual functions become scalable in a way that could absorb more volume without degrading.

Marketing hasn’t been activated yet. It’s the next section deliberately being added to the line — planned to include both paid acquisition and educational content — because the other sections can now support what a marketing engine would generate. “We’ve invested very little into direct marketing thus far,” Andy said. A meaningful share of new business now arrives as organic inbound from word-of-mouth, without a dollar spent on it.

The failure mode this model avoids is the one where founders scale acquisition ahead of their ability to implement and retain — getting out over their skis, as Andy puts it, and damaging the customer experience in pursuit of the next growth number.

Renterra grew 3 to 4x in the last year with a couple percent penetration of a 15,000-company market. The green grass, as Andy described it, is still largely in front of them.