Gladius
LoadingThe 10 Principles
The exclusion is the identity. These are the rules we cannot break without becoming the thing we’re replacing.
Per-seat pricing is a tax on the dealer for hiring people. It punishes growth and rewards understaffing the BDC, which is exactly the disease we exist to cure. One rooftop, one price. Hire fifty people. Hire two. We don't care.
Not to lenders. Not to market intelligence firms. Not to OEMs. Not to ourselves for a benchmark report. A customer's information belongs to the customer and the dealer they trusted with it. The day we monetize that trust is the day we become one of the conglomerates we're trying to replace.
The lead aggregation industry is a scam where the same ten leads get sold to five dealers and the customer gets called fifteen times. We will not participate. Gladius helps dealers close their leads, not buy strangers'.
There is a real subprime market and real customers with real credit problems who deserve to buy a car. There is also a category of lender whose entire business model is repossession revenue. We can tell the difference. We will not be the pipe that delivers families to that machine.
If your management style requires secretly recording your team to make sure they're working, your problem isn't software. We will not be a tool of distrust between owners and the people who actually make them money.
Auto-send is a loaded gun. We ship it locked. The dealer chooses to unlock it, channel by channel, with a signature on a one-page document explaining what they just agreed to. If that costs us deals against vendors who ship set-it-and-forget-it spam cannons, good. We don't want those customers.
The moment we fork the product for AutoNation, we work for AutoNation. Every dealer gets the same Gladius. The independent in Tulsa with one rooftop runs the exact software the 200-store group runs. Fairness is a feature.
Feature tiers exist when a feature genuinely costs us money to deliver — not as a manipulation device. If a button is cheap, every tier gets the button. Pricing reflects cost of service, not artificial scarcity.
The day we have more closers than builders is the day Gladius is dead. Founders and engineers sell, until they can't, and then we hire one human at a time. No SDR farms. No Outreach sequences targeting dealers. If the product is what we say it is, dealers find us.
$999 a month is the floor and it should sting a little. The dealer who can't afford Gladius probably also can't afford the eighteen vendors they're already paying for things Gladius replaces. The pricing is the filter. The filter is the product.
The day we break any of these, we want you to leave.
Publicly. And take your peers with you.