This YouTube opinion video uses the Ship of Theseus paradox to frame a dispute in which Profit Rhino reportedly contacts past customers claiming they still use Profit Rhino price-book intellectual property inside platforms like ServiceTitan. The speaker critiques Profit Rhino's approach (calling for a pivot rather than legal threats), explains that Profit Rhino cannot directly delete price books hosted by ServiceTitan, and advises users to alter identifiable elements (e.g., task codes) or move to alternatives like PriceBook Pro to avoid trouble. The video mixes philosophical analogy, practical software guidance, and channel promotion.
In Western philosophy, there's this thought experiment, a paradox, known as the ship of Theseus.
It goes something like this.
There's this guy Theseus, and Theseus has a ship, Theseus ship. One day Theseus dies, as people sometimes do, but his ship lives on. As the ship gets older, parts of the ship start to rot. And so the crew replaces those parts piece by piece, until eventually every single piece of the ship of Theseus has been replaced. The question is, is this ship still Theseus ship?
If not, when did it stop?
What is the essence of shippiness that it lost or still has? If we built a new ship with all of the old parts that we took off, is that now the ship of Theseus? Are there now two ships of Theseus? Is there even such a thing as a ship? Or maybe is a ship just a shape that pieces of wood and metal and fabric can be formed into? There is no right answer, just several.
Ways of thinking about it.
That's what makes it a thought experiment, a paradox.
What does any of this have to do with anything?
Why am I giving you a philosophy lesson? Well, I'm glad you asked. I give you the price book of Rhinoceros. Let's say there's this guy Rhinoceros, and you buy from him a price book, a spreadsheet that you import into your software. Every month Rhinoceros collects an additional fee from you in exchange for continuing to use his price book. But piece by piece, you change the price book. You take pieces out, you put new pieces in, you make additions and subtractions, you make hundreds and hundreds of permutations of the price book till one day you decide you don't really need Rhinoceros and you're not sure why you're still paying him, so you stop. But are you still using Rhinoceros price book? Let's take a look at a price book item. At what point is this no longer Rhinoceros Tyrannosaurus Task? Now that I've changed the task code, now that I've changed the title and the task code, now that I've changed the title, the task code and the.
Description, now that I've changed the payroll.
Settings, the answer is unknowable. Perhaps it would have been better to have not gotten on such a rickety looking ship in the first place.
This video is in response to several reports that have been coming out from previous Profit Rhino users saying that Profit Rhino has been contacting them, you know, making accusations that they're still using their intellectual property inside of Service Titan or some Other software. I thought long and hard about whether I wanted to make this video because honestly, Profit Rhino strikes me as the kind of company that would be willing to start a fight. And I'm not looking for a fight. Profit Rhino. I'm not looking for a fight, but I am gonna make a little opinion piece here. To me, this just seems like a really poor use of Profit Rhino's time right now. There are major market disruptions happening that bring their business model into question. Service Titan and other softwares like it coming onto the market, you know, busting into the scene in the first place, that is already a huge shakeup. If you were Profit Rhino and now with Service Titan coming out with PriceBook Pro, which, I mean, let's be honest, we saw that coming, right?
It's.
It's not the most surprising move. It puts Profit Rhino and things like it as they stand in a tight spot. But that doesn't mean the Rhino has to go extinct.
There are ways to save yourself, or.
Really one way, and that way is to pivot. You have to rethink what your business is and what it's going to do and the value that it's going to provide. Maybe focus more on education or consulting or. I don't know what the answer is. I just know that if Profit Rhino doesn't pivot and it just focuses on trying to go back and get people who used it in the past and try and get money out of them for still using it and threatening to delete their price books and all this stuff just seems a lot like behavior of a company that's doomed. Again, that's just my honest opinion. I'm not trying to start a fight with anybody. If you've gotten one of these notifications, check who it's from. If it's from Profit Rhino and they're saying that they're going to delete your price book or something like that, don't worry too much. If your price book is in ServiceTitan or something like it, Profit Rhino has no direct ability to touch your price book or anything related to your account at all. Service Titan does. So wait and see if you get A notification from ServiceTitan of Profit Rhino tells Servicetitan, hey, we have reason to believe that Company X is using our intellectual property. It is Service Titan's obligation to perform some sort of check on that, because as a company that may be illegally hosting intellectual property, they have to do something about it. But what exactly are they going to do? I mean, like I said, this is a literal philosophical paradox. To say that the lines are blurry here is an understatement. Just thinking in terms of what I would do, like if I were service Titan and I was in this position, I would probably scan for task codes. So if you've used Profit Rhino in the past, and let me be clear here, be honest, I mean, be real. Have you changed your price book? I mean, is it still just. It's Profit Rhino, you haven't really messed with it. It's still that. If that's the case, you should do something different. You should take that out and you should go to PriceBook Pro or build your own or something like that. But I mean, if it's been years, you haven't used Profit Rhino in years and your price book has gone through permutation after permutation and maybe you just left the task codes, but the descriptions and you've changed all this other stuff, I would expect that. Just make sure the task codes are different and I think you'll be okay. Anyways, that's all I got for today. Please, nobody sue me. Please do me a favor and hit that subscribe button. Subscribing to my channel really helps me out, helps the channel grow, helps YouTube know that this channel is gaining traction and it will push the videos out to more people. Subscribers are really the main metric for me to know how well things are doing. I know a lot of you guys come here from Facebook and that's awesome, but I can't guarantee that I'll always be posting these videos on Facebook. Typically, I post my videos in the Service Titan Mastermind group, but not all of my videos are going to be strictly Service titan related. And I don't want to do the moderators there the disservice of posting unrelated content. But all of my content I do believe is valuable. So if you want to make sure that you catch everything, please, please, please make sure you're subscribed. If you like this video, you want to see more stuff like it, be sure to hit that like button and give me that feedback. And check out the description below for the wait list to join the Service Titan Coaching Group. If you're interested in that. See you guys next time.
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