What we found in Texas

Introduction

Factory is a B2B SaaS platform purpose-built for small-to-medium sheetmetal fabricators. Our software enables fabricators to create quotes, sales, purchases, and invoices, while also managing and scheduling everything related to those jobs through to completion. Factory becomes the central nervous system of the business – the platform where jobs are created, tracked, and delivered, and where business owners finally gain visibility and control across their entire operation. And as we scale, our goal is to become nothing short of the operating system of the industry – the default platform powering fabrication businesses globally.

We currently serve over 150 customers across Australia. In this market, we’ve proven that even the most traditional and offline manufacturing businesses are hungry for simple, powerful tools that modernize their operations. After building a highly capital-efficient business in Australia, we are now preparing for the next phase of our journey: expanding into the United States, starting with Texas.

This document outlines the size of the opportunity, our validation work on the ground, and why we believe the time is right to bring Factory to the U.S. market. This expansion will be the cornerstone of our strategy to become the operating system for the global fabrication industry.

Why the US?

An Enormous and Underserved Market

The U.S. is the second-largest manufacturing economy in the world, and its industrial base is powered by small and medium-sized businesses. As of 2021, there were over 603,000 small manufacturing businesses in the U.S., employing nearly 4.8 million people and contributing more than $277 billion in annual payroll. These small firms account for 98% of all manufacturing businesses, underscoring their massive role in the industrial fabric of the country.

Within this, our sweet spot is companies with 5 to 99 employees – the size bracket most likely to benefit from Factory. There are over 210,000 manufacturers in this size band, forming our Total Addressable Market (TAM).

More specifically, our initial Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM) is the fabricated metal product manufacturing sector, which includes 33,800 businesses generating more than $540 billion annually. This sector typically comprises businesses that fabricate custom sheetmetal components – producing everything from roofing and building products to toolboxes and truck bodies. These businesses often serve industrial, commercial, and infrastructure sectors, and the work is highly bespoke, low-volume, and complexity-driven.

This niche is both massive and underserved. It overlaps directly with our existing customer base in Australia and aligns with our product strengths. Our intent is clear: we don’t just want to compete in this space – we want to own it. Factory is uniquely positioned to become the default platform for this segment.

Tailwinds Accelerating Local Manufacturing

Several macroeconomic and policy trends are creating momentum for local manufacturing in the U.S.:

“America First” and reshoring initiatives: The current U.S. administration is aggressively pushing to bring manufacturing back onshore through its Made in America agenda. These policies aren’t just rhetoric – they’re being backed by real incentives, procurement priorities, and public-private investment. This represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to align with national economic priorities.
Incentives for modernisation: Federal and state-level funding is actively being funneled into programs that help SMB manufacturers digitize and modernize their operations, making it more cost-effective than ever for our target market to invest in software.
Supply chain resilience: COVID-19 and geopolitical tensions have heightened the strategic importance of local, visible, and agile supply chains. Fabricators are at the center of this renewed focus.

Together, these trends create a perfect storm of motivation and means for SMB fabricators to modernize – making this a rare and time-sensitive window for Factory to enter and lead the category.

No Dominant Software Provider

Despite the market size, there is no category-defining software provider serving the SMB fabrication space. Most businesses are still running on Excel spreadsheets, paper job sheets, whiteboards, and a patchwork of generic software tools like Trello, QuickBooks, and legacy ERPs. Even companies using ERPs almost always express dissatisfaction, with many admitting they use only a fraction of the features due to complexity.

While other players do exist in the manufacturing software landscape, they are largely designed for low-mix, high-volume environments such as repetitive component production or large-scale industrial supply. These platforms are poorly suited to the highly custom, job-based workflows of fabricators – where every job is different, every quote is bespoke, and flexibility is non-negotiable.

This is a classic case of a large, underserved market that has not yet been transformed by a modern, purpose-built SaaS platform. Factory is well-positioned to become that platform.

Why Texas?

Our expansion strategy starts with Texas. Here’s why:

A Strategic Launchpad

8,340 fabricated metal manufacturers
1,300+ businesses with “sheetmetal” or “fabrication” in their name – indicating tight alignment with our ICP.
High concentration of businesses within a 3-hour radius – making go-to-market efforts highly efficient.
14.2% of Texas manufacturing jobs are in fabricated metal products – the largest subsector in the state.
Austin is a fast-growing tech hub, making it an ideal anchor city for talent, partnerships, and innovation. – 2nd highest in the U.S. after California.

Texas is both big and focused. We’re not boiling the ocean; we’re diving into a dense cluster of ideal-fit customers who are ready to adopt the right tool.

A Booming Economy

Texas is seeing 3.5% GDP growth, outpacing the national average. That growth is driven in large part by manufacturing and energy, and it’s being supercharged by infrastructure development, especially in fast-growing metro areas like Austin, Dallas–Fort Worth, and Houston.

The state also offers a business-friendly environment, including:

No state income tax
A simplified regulatory environment
A culture of entrepreneurship and growth
A large number of industry-specific manufacturing associations, providing Factory with trusted, localized channels for influence, lead generation, and partnerships

This makes Texas the ideal launchpad for our U.S. rollout.

What We Learned in Texas

Over two weeks, we visited a variety of sheetmetal fabricators across Texas – ranging from 5-person shops to mid-sized operations with 50+ staff. We spent time on the shop floor, in offices, and with owners. Here’s what we found:

The Operational Challenges Are Universal

From Sydney to San Antonio, the same problems persist:

Jobs are tracked on paper, whiteboards, or spreadsheets.
Scheduling is often managed manually.
There’s no end-to-end visibility.
Sales and purchasing are disconnected from the shop floor.
Teams rely on memory and tribal knowledge instead of systems.

Factory solves all of these problems in a single platform. That’s why we believe our product will achieve immediate product-market fit in the U.S.

The Buyer Mindset Is Even More Aligned

We also discovered some powerful behavioral differences:

U.S. owners are more commercially focused. Many are second or third-generation owners who never worked on the tools. They think like CEOs, not operators.
They have a strong growth mindset. Most businesses we visited spoke about tripling or quadrupling their size in the next few years.
They are pragmatic. Unlike Australian customers, who sometimes defend poor software choices out of loyalty or sunk cost, U.S. buyers are quick to evaluate and adopt better solutions.
They invest in systems, not just machines. Whereas Australian shops often showcase the latest CNC machine, American shops are more interested in process optimization and team efficiency.

Our key insight: we built our business in a considerably harder market. If we can sell Factory in Australia, we can scale it much faster in the U.S.

Sizing the U.S. Opportunity

Let’s break down the near-term and long-term revenue opportunity using conservative assumptions:

Market Opportunity (Staged + National)

Our market entry will follow a staged rollout strategy, targeting high-fit segments first before expanding more broadly. The $10K ACV figures used below represent projected total annual revenue per customer, combining core platform subscription fees with payments-related revenue derived from invoice volume processed through our platform:

Stage	Region/Focus	Businesses	ARR Potential
Stage 1	Texas (Sheetmetal/Fabrication in company name)	1,300	$13M
Stage 2	Texas (Metal fabricators)	8,300	$83M
Stage 3	Ohio, Michigan, or Pennsylvania (Metal fabricators)	14,500	$145M
Stage 4	All U.S. Metal Fabricators (Nationwide)	33,800	$338M
Stage 5	Full TAM (5–99 employee manufacturing businesses)	~210,000	$2B+

With focused execution, each of these regional markets can become a $100M+ revenue opportunity—culminating in a total national opportunity exceeding $2B.

Our Competitive Advantage

Factory is not a generic ERP or job management tool. We are purpose-built for fabricators – simple, intuitive, and fast to implement. Our key differentiators:

Deep domain knowledge of sheetmetal workflows
Lightning-fast onboarding compared to ERP alternatives
Modern UX/UI designed for shop-floor teams, not accountants
Flexibility to handle complex jobs and high variability
Outstanding support and hands-on customer success approach

In short: we speak the language of fabricators, and we’ve already proven we can win.

Go-to-Market Strategy for the U.S.

One of the most powerful assets we’ve identified in the U.S. market is the prevalence of strong, highly localized industry associations – many of which are region-specific, trade-specific, or aligned around SMB manufacturing verticals. These associations serve as a trusted source of information and influence for fabricators, and they present a high-leverage go-to-market channel for Factory.

Through partnerships, co-branded webinars, educational content, and event sponsorships, we can reach thousands of highly qualified businesses through channels they already trust. This not only accelerates lead generation in a cost-effective way, but also helps us build credibility and brand equity in a local, grassroots manner – state by state, region by region.

Our U.S. go-to-market strategy is designed to be focused, capital-efficient, and insight-driven.

Phase 1: Remote Customer Acquisition from Australia (In Progress)

Our first step is acquiring our initial cohort of U.S. customers remotely from our HQ in Australia. This allows us to:

Test and learn: We’re actively refining our early go-to-market motion, including messaging, sales cadence, and onboarding workflows tailored specifically for U.S. fabricators.
Validate onboarding assumptions: Ensuring our platform is just as easy to adopt for U.S. teams as it is for Australian users, and surfacing any country-specific onboarding tweaks required.
Pressure-test product/market fit: Although our two-week research trip and numerous factory-floor conversations give us high confidence in strong alignment, this remote launch phase allows us to uncover any unforeseen ‘gotchas’ – before scaling investment.
Build case studies and social proof: Early adopters will help us generate real-world proof points for broader expansion and marketing.

So far, signs are highly positive. Operational workflows and pain points in U.S. shops mirror those we’ve seen in Australia, and the appetite for change is even stronger.

Phase 2: On-the-Ground Expansion in Texas

The next step will be building on that momentum by establishing a small but highly effective team in Texas – a local presence designed to scale GTM efforts and drive deeper market penetration. This will include:

This expansion will be founder-led, with our CEO personally relocating to Texas to lead the charge. This hands-on leadership ensures our U.S. strategy is delivered with the same intensity, customer focus, and product insight that fueled our success in Australia.
Hire a lean, high-impact launch team focused on customer acquisition, onboarding and support in Texas.
Double down on vertical-specific marketing, leveraging trade publications, online communities, and fabrication-specific social advertising.
Build strategic partnerships with fabrication associations, QuickBooks consultants, and other local influencers.
Localize the onboarding playbook, applying learnings from Phase 1 to deliver even faster time-to-value for new customers.

This two-phase approach ensures that we de-risk the expansion, sharpen our positioning, and maximize the ROI of every dollar we spend in the U.S. This is not a spray-and-pray expansion. It’s a surgical strike designed to create momentum, build case studies, and expand from a position of strength.

Closing: Why Now?

The timing for this expansion may literally never be better:

The U.S. government is prioritizing domestic manufacturing like never before. Its Made in America movement is reshaping the industrial landscape and injecting billions into the sector. This is a once-in-a-lifetime macroeconomic alignment for a platform like Factory to become foundational infrastructure.
The U.S. manufacturing sector is ripe for digital transformation. Despite the size of the market, software built specifically for SMB manufacturers has been largely ignored. It’s a greenfield opportunity – no entrenched incumbent, no legacy expectations, and massive upside.
These businesses won’t operate like this forever. The wave of digitization is coming, and we have the opportunity to be at the front of the queue – establishing Factory as the default choice before others catch up.
Fabricators are actively seeking better tools – they know the status quo isn’t sustainable, and they’re ready for change.
American SMBs are in growth mode – they’re investing in systems that scale with them, not tools that hold them back.
Factory isn’t starting from zero – we’ve already proven our product, playbook, and pricing model. Now it’s about scale.

We are not entering the U.S. to test the waters – we are entering to win.

If you’d like to be part of building the operating system for the world’s fabricators, then let’s talk.

Paul Lutkajtis
Founder / CEO
paul@factory.app
+61 401 044 111

Operate with confidence

Factory is making news in major publications for our contribution to industry.