The Gnar Company

Name: The Gnar Company
Address: 117 Kendrick Street, Suite 300, Needham, MA, 02494, US
Telephone: (617) 202-2222
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The Gnar Company

Solving Your Gnarly Problems. Quality Software. Faster. Gnar is a Boston-based Software Development Company offering a Bug Free Warranty.

Gnar’s 100% dedicated, US-based team of experts develops enterprise, mobile & web apps using the most effective technologies to solve your gnarly software problems, including React, React Native and Ruby on Rails, plus ecommerce integrations. Gnar’s Quality Software Faster Process™ enables Rapid Onboarding to deliver production code by the end of the first week. Hire Gnar to provide guidance and e

xpertise throughout the entire product development process or augment your own team for discrete projects. Gnar gets the job done, empowers your team and hands it over to you.

08/21/2026

An article went around recently asking whether AI can write code in minutes and still keep it secure.

The concern is familiar by now. Vibe-coded software ships fast and routinely skips the security and quality steps that make it hold up to daily use.

We asked Frank how he thinks about that risk.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗶𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸 𝗶𝘀 𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗱𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗿.

There's a lot of talk about going to Claude Code, saying make me this, and companies not really needing software developers anymore.

That isn't what he's found.

What works for General Insulation is using AI to move faster on design and direction, then having engineers who actually own the build. The speed is real. The judgment about what's safe to ship is still a person's job.

Fast and secure aren't opposites.

But you don't get the second one for free.

From Episode: I Had a Cheaper Offshore Quote. I Turned It Down. | Into the Gnar EP.9

08/21/2026

Every ERP pitch says the same thing. Rip out what you have. This one will finally run everything.

Frank Granara has heard that pitch before. About ten years ago, General Insulation tried it. New ERP, more advanced, going to fix the back office for good.

It didn't work. He'll tell you that straight. "We were one of those failed ERP integrations," he said. (Ask any distributor who's been through one. They all have a story like this.)

So we asked him how GIC actually runs things today.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗘𝗥𝗣 𝗱𝗼𝗲𝘀𝗻'𝘁 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗿𝘂𝗻 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴.

There's a version of this conversation where the answer is "we finally migrated and now it's all in one system." That's not what he said.

What he said was messier. Keep the ERP for what it's actually good at. Build in front of it or behind it for everything else. Decide, on purpose, what has to live inside that system and what doesn't.

Maybe that's a less satisfying answer than "we solved it." I don't know. But it's the honest one.

And yes, a lot of reporting still happens in spreadsheets. He said it almost like a confession: legacy ERP, spreadsheets, tribal knowledge. That's what's running the business right now. A hundred percent.

From Episode: I Had a Cheaper Offshore Quote. I Turned It Down. | Into the Gnar EP.9

08/17/2026

General Insulation spent a long time evaluating B2B e-commerce platforms for their contractor base. The very best ones. The affordable ones. Every trade-off in between.

Frank ran all of them through one test.

Can a contractor transact faster than they can pick up the phone?

Not just place the order. Pick up the phone, get the order in, find out if everything's in stock, get their price, get a confirmed delivery date, hang up.

𝗜𝗳 𝗶𝘁 𝗯𝗲𝗮𝘁𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗵𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗹, 𝗶𝘁 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀. 𝗜𝗳 𝗶𝘁 𝗱𝗼𝗲𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘁, 𝗶𝘁 𝗱𝗼𝗲𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘁.

The reasoning is simple. We're not going to ask our customers to slow down their process just so we can say we have technology now.

That's a harder standard than most companies hold their software to.

It's also why the tools that clear it actually get used.

From Episode: I Had a Cheaper Offshore Quote. I Turned It Down. | Into the Gnar EP.9

08/13/2026

Nick asked Frank whether he'd ever been burned. An offshore build, a customize-it-later promise, a tool nobody ended up using.

𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗴𝗲𝘁 𝗯𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗲𝗱 𝗯𝗶𝗴 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲, 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗼𝗻.

For Frank it was an ERP integration. He'd seen a real opportunity to build a customer portal that would change how customers manage material through General Insulation. It didn't go the way it was supposed to.

So when the portal came back around, offshore options were on the table again. Cheaper ones.

He didn't take them.

What made the difference was hearing it straight. You can probably go find something cheaper offshore. We're going to give you something you're happy with at the end.

That isn't a comfortable thing for a vendor to say out loud.

It's the reason he said yes.

One big burn. Conscious ever since.

From Episode: I Had a Cheaper Offshore Quote. I Turned It Down. | Into the Gnar EP.9

08/12/2026

General Insulation built a ten-year roadmap. The goal was to become the most technologically advanced material supplier in the industry.

At the time, their ERP was still DOS-based.

So the roadmap started there. And it made a bet. Commercial construction was moving to BIM, Autodesk, Revit, and that would change how material gets ordered and forecasted. They built toward accommodating it.

BIM is real. It gets used on projects.

It just wasn't where their customer base actually lived.

That changed the direction of the whole plan.

𝗪𝗲'𝗿𝗲 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗱𝗼𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮 𝗿𝗼𝗮𝗱𝗺𝗮𝗽 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝟮𝟬𝟯𝟱.

The 2025 roadmap is done. They're moving into 2027 now. Not because long-term thinking stopped mattering, but because the AI conversation changes direction every couple of weeks.

Planning five years out assumes you know what the tools will look like.

Right now, nobody does.

From Episode: I Had a Cheaper Offshore Quote. I Turned It Down. | Into the Gnar EP.9

08/11/2026

Buying software used to mean picking the least bad option.

You sit through the out-of-box demos. You compare. You find the one that gets you to 80% and you tell yourself that's fine.

𝗪𝗲 𝗱𝗼𝗻'𝘁 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗺𝗶𝘀𝗲 𝗼𝗻 𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝘀𝗼𝗳𝘁𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘀𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝘆𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲.

Frank's point is that the 80% trade-off doesn't have to be the deal anymore. You can design what you actually need and have it built, faster and more efficiently than that used to be possible.

But the part he kept coming back to wasn't speed.

It was risk.

A company like General Insulation doesn't have an R&D budget. A software project that runs long or lands wrong isn't an inconvenience. It's real money that was supposed to go somewhere else.

So a firm price changes the math. You know what you're paying. You know what you're getting.

And you stop compromising on the product you actually wanted.

From Episode: I Had a Cheaper Offshore Quote. I Turned It Down. | Into the Gnar EP.9

08/10/2026

𝗪𝗲 𝗹𝗼𝘃𝗲 𝗯𝗼𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗯𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗲𝘀.

Nobody is making a documentary about insulation distribution. But Frank Granara's company keeps half the buildings you've ever walked into from cooking or freezing.

This episode is about what happened when he tried to modernize it.

Frank had a cheaper offshore quote in hand for a customer portal. He turned it down. That call came out of an earlier ERP integration that burned him badly enough to permanently change how he buys software.

We get into the whole thing.

Why customers kept calling to ask how many linear feet of pipe insulation they'd ordered across two years, and what that question revealed about the business. How much of the operation still runs on spreadsheets, the ERP, or calling Dave because Dave knows what to do. Why a ten-year software roadmap made sense a decade ago and doesn't now.

And the test Frank puts every B2B e-commerce tool through: can a contractor transact faster than they can pick up the phone? If not, it doesn't ship.

He's also not trying to replace his customer service reps with AI. He'll tell you exactly why.

If you run a business that works and you're trying to modernize it without breaking it, this one's for you.

New episodes every other Monday.

From Episode: I Had a Cheaper Offshore Quote. I Turned It Down. | Into the Gnar EP.9

08/09/2026

Nick asked what separates B2B software companies that are growing from the ones that are stuck.

Cam's answer started with culture, not strategy.

Growth is a mentality. It has to run from the CEO all the way down to the individual contributor. When it doesn't, the company usually has one of two problems.

Either it's cultural, or they're not thinking through the chess pieces in the right order. They're too focused on here and now and not focused enough on where they want to be in eighteen months.

𝗧𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲'𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗻𝗲𝘄𝗲𝗿 𝘀𝗽𝗹𝗶𝘁.

Cam is seeing a bifurcation between companies that are AI-enabled and companies still trying to figure out their strategy. The AI-enabled ones show more growth persistence.

Not because AI is magic.

Because they've been asking two specific questions: How do we deploy this in our own business, and how do we make our customers more successful with it?

The stuck companies are still deciding whether to ask.

From Episode: What Makes SaaS Companies Grow (Or Stall) with Cam Salem | Into the Gnar EP.8

08/07/2026

Mike asked Cam how he's reconciling AI cost against people cost.

The honest answer is that it's still a black box.

The market moves too fast to model long-term pricing with any confidence. Right now the kings of the mountain, OpenAI and Anthropic, are pricing for customer acquisition. How long that lasts is anybody's guess.

Then there's open source.

Cam thinks that thread is going to shape a lot of the decision-making at the top, whether or not it ever takes real share.

So his firm plans around one assumption.

Downward pricing pressure at some point, even if the discounting we're seeing today goes away.

Which means waiting for prices to settle isn't a strategy.

Building workflows that get cheaper as the models do is.

From Episode: What Makes SaaS Companies Grow (Or Stall) with Cam Salem | Into the Gnar EP.8

08/06/2026

Mike asked Cam where the actual value-add comes from after the check clears.

It isn't just the partners.

Cam Salem and his partner Jack have built a bench of operators, and deliberately not CEOs of large software companies. They go one layer down. SVPs of sales. Customer success leaders. Directors of product management.

People with a specific, hands-on skill set.

So when a problem shows up at a portfolio company, they can deploy someone who can say I've seen this movie before, here's what we need to do.

That lands differently.

Cam is honest about why. He and Jack have never sat in the CEO chair. They have good pattern recognition, but the same advice coming from them carries less weight.

Knowing what you don't know is the point.

The decisions get driven forward by people who have actually made them.

From Episode: What Makes SaaS Companies Grow (Or Stall) with Cam Salem | Into the Gnar EP.8

Address

117 Kendrick Street, Suite 300
Needham, MA
02494

Telephone

(617) 202-2222

Website

http://www.thegnar.co/

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