Key Takeaways

  • Jake Stauch and his co-founder Alex chose to target ServiceNow on day one in Alex's living room, rejecting the small-business entry path used by Rippling and HubSpot.
  • Enterprise IT leaders regularly rank ServiceNow at the top of two lists: the vendor they spend the most money on, and the vendor they hate the most.
  • Traditional visual workflow automation platforms create six to twelve month deployment delays because drag-and-drop builders are too complex for non-technical staff and too rigid for developers.
  • Serval replaces visual canvases with AI coding agents that write verifiable code wrapped in software development lifecycle (SDLC) controls and enterprise permissions.
  • Serval eliminated dedicated product managers, choosing instead to embed product-oriented software engineers directly with customer teams.

The Living Room Decision to Attack ServiceNow

Most enterprise software startups follow a familiar playbook. They pick an incumbent, build a simpler tool for small businesses, and hope to climb up-market later. Rippling pursued Workday this way. HubSpot did the same to Salesforce.

When Jake Stauch and his co-founder Alex started Serval, they skipped that detour.

“We actually made a list of all the companies. We circled ServiceNow and we said we're going to beat them and we're going to build something much bigger,” Stauch said. “We said that on day one when it was two people in my co-founder Alex's living room and we just said we're going to do it.”

Stauch chose that battle by asking enterprise IT teams two direct questions: “What do you spend the most money on? And what do you hate the most?” ServiceNow topped both rankings. Enterprise clients were paying millions in licensing fees, only to wait on expensive external consultants whenever they needed to adjust internal workflows. Stauch recognized that the dissatisfaction at the top of the market created an opening for an immediate frontal challenge.

Why Drag-and-Drop Workflow Builders Fail

Enterprise automation platforms have spent years promoting drag-and-drop workflow canvases as no-code solutions. In practice, visual builders satisfy neither engineers nor office operators.

“Code was the right way to express automation in the enterprise,” Stauch explained. “That you should just build all automation in code and these drag-and-drop workflow builders is a painful level of abstraction because it's too complex for non-technical users and it's annoyingly abstracted for technical users.”

Visual builders inevitably buckle under complex corporate logic. IT departments cannot hand them over to business teams, yet engineers hate working within their artificial limits. As a result, companies bring in specialized consultants for routine adjustments.

“Every idea you have for doing something cool, you have to go and implement and a lot of times you're bringing consultants to implement it,” Stauch noted. “So, it's always kind of running 6 to 12 months behind where you want it to be.”

Serval discards visual abstractions and expresses all automation as code. When an IT department needs a workflow, AI code-generation agents write verifiable software. By subjecting that code to standard software development lifecycle (SDLC) guardrails and strict permissions, enterprise teams keep full auditability without manual backlogs. Stauch views autonomous background agents as an ongoing moonshot, but targeted code generation solves the immediate bottleneck.

Kill the PM and Embed the Engineer

To keep pace with enterprise demands, Serval changed how it builds product. The company eliminated traditional product managers.

Instead of running customer feedback through product managers, roadmaps, and feature tickets, Serval hires product-oriented engineers and embeds them directly with IT buyers. Enterprise IT departments are technical groups that want to build tools rather than wait on account updates. Putting engineers directly inside customer accounts removes the translation layers that slow enterprise software deployments.

What to Do With This

Review your company's three largest IT platform contracts this week. Identify which platform requires outside implementation consultants or maintains a workflow backlog older than six months. Task one engineer with rebuilding that exact workflow in direct code using an AI coding assistant, testing whether deterministic software can replace the legacy visual tool.