I'm Luke Sophinos, a vertical SaaS founder, operator, and investor, thanks for being here...

VSG is the leading voice on all things Vertical SaaS - we support founders, operators, and investors with Research, Content, and Investment Products.

I was previously the Founder & CEO of CourseKey, which I founded in my college dorm room and scaled to become on of the largest vertical software business for Trade Schools in the United States. I sold the business to Providence Strategic Growth (PSG) in 2024.

On the advisory side, I support vSaaS businesses and studios like Atomic.vc -- the pioneer of the venture studio model and creator of Hims & Hers (NASDAQ: HIMS) as well as OpenStore, among many others. I've co-founded two different Vertical SaaS businesses with Atomic - both currently in stealth but backed by top-tier Silicon Valley VC's. You'll here about them soon enough :-).

I'm also an early-stage investor in 15+ vertical SaaS companies including Joy (vSaaS for weddings), Supermove (vSaaS for moving companies), Gemist (vSaaS for jewelry stores) and Betr (Sports betting), to name a few.

And finally, I am an aging Thiel Fellow, class of 2016 :-).

But enough of the credibility stuff.

I know what you're going through. I've lived it.

I've had <1 week of cash. I've done big layoffs. I've made multiple phone calls to make payroll. I've walked into meetings where the outcome was life or death. Quite frankly, I've made every mistake in the book over the last decade.

However, through the help of so many others, we persevered to build something special.

So why start VSG? After 10 years as a VC-backed founder, I felt operator support was tied to traditional SaaS, and, quite frankly, was lacking for vertical SaaS founders and operators. We're a different breed - different GTM motions, different investor requirements, different Customer Success approaches, the list goes on.

The status-quo out there is about building and investing in giant horizontal SaaS solutions. I don't subscribe to that. Our community doesn't either.

So welcome to VSG. It is my hope that these resources will help one of you build, operate, or invest in the next great Vertical Software companies. Dive in to any area we can help below: