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Why contech needs more product-led growth companies

Contech is the new fintech: Why it’s time to get in!

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Are you a startup investor or digital innovation lead in an engineering firm? Then maybe you’ll be interested in understanding why it is time for more product-led growth in construction technology. We aim to paint a picture of the world as we see it and how CalcTree is taking advantage of a significant trend in SaaS.

Product-led growth (PLG) is an end user-focused growth model that relies on the product itself as the primary driver of customer acquisition, conversion, and expansion.

. (Head over to OpenView’s website to learn more about the fundamentals of a PLG strategy.)

A simplified comparison of traditional B2B sales-led vs PLG SaaS products. Traditionally you might request a demo. Now, you just sign up and trial a product. Before, there would be an implementation rollout. Now, it's automated onboarding. Where training sessions may have been delivered across the company, articles, chatbots, and discussion forums enable a self-serve support system.

In short, product-led growth companies like Slack and Atlassian are taking advantage of a broader industry shift in buying power from executives and Managers to End-users. The former recognizes that the top-down rollout of new technologies is challenging to do well in the chaos of everyday operations. Execs are now more open to bottom-up organic adoption of tools if their staff love it and helps with doing their work better and faster.

Another simplified visual below depicts the changes to purchasing behaviors in the world of SaaS products. The End User Era is helping drive greater autonomy and, therefore, greater staff empowerment to make the right choices of tools for the job. All are enabled by product-led SaaS companies that reach end-users directly and remove adoption friction. Gone are the days of presentations or phone calls with executives or managers. New customers can now trial products on the web and pay a subscription if the product is valuable.

Runaway successes like Calendly, Zoom, Shopify, and Twilio exemplify this business strategy, so it’s no surprise that PLG companies outperform traditional SaaS and S&P 500 indexes. The graph below shows the average growth of stock prices post-IPO of companies that fit into the different categories listed. Highlighting the superior performance and customer success of PLG companies compared to all others.

PLG means that the company lives and dies on pleasing the end user. This makes meeting user needs the top priority for PLG companies and aligns the objectives of both parties, creating a win-win situation.

PLG companies are typically engineering-heavy since more capital goes into hiring engineers and product teams to build a robust product. This tips the balance of power in the hands of product development, which in turn creates a stronger engineering culture. Consider Google as a good example, its swarm of top engineering talent and the innovations they’ve generated. The benefits of an engineering culture include an appreciation for introversion, deep thinking, and a thirst for solving complex problems for users. We believe that this user experience culture leads to creating a more meaningful product in the long run.

There are always risks associated with any strategy, and here are a few with PLG products: 

PLG platforms often store your data on shared cloud servers. With hacks and data breaches, companies are often rightfully concerned about their data security. However, cloud providers have also evolved and now offer private cloud storage out of the box. It’s easy enough for a SaaS company to extend dedicated storage if this is a concern, typically via an enterprise subscription tier. 

‘If End Users were free to choose what tools they want, wouldn’t this lead to even greater data fragmentation?’ Quite possibly! In the short term, it can. 

However, it can offer greater business and workplace agility in the long term. Here’s why:

We’d argue that being locked into a private ecosystem from a single provider is riskier in the long run. Markets are changing increasingly faster, and so is the rate of innovation. Keeping up to speed with such changes is vital for staying competitive. 

Why is product-led growth needed in contech?

“In construction, decision-making power lives at the end of the hierarchical branches, often down to each individual on a job site! This decentralized decision-making organization is particularly well suited to PLG. Experienced workers, foremen, or project managers are also natural leaders in a community where trust and references are still king or queen. Turning them into champions for a product goes a long way!”

-Guillaume Bazouin, Head of Startup Programs at VINCI’s innovation hub: Leonard. 

Guillaume shared this view directly with CalcTree recently from his vantage point at VINCI overseeing the contech ecosystem. VINCI is the world’s largest construction company conglomerate, employing over 217,000 staff worldwide. 

Adopting a PLG strategy in construction tech doesn’t come without skepticism. In discussions with tech investors and even contech founders, we've faced it:

However, we back the PLG strategy that our community believes in. Why? Because:

For CalcTree, adopting PLG means, at worst, we have a steady stream of inbound leads that require a low-touch sales model to convert. At best, we become a ubiquitous platform amongst engineers through easy adoption and embedment in the design process.

We see evidence that culture is ripening towards more bottom-up technology adoption in civil and heavy industries. Recent examples:

Engineers don’t like to be sold to. They are a pragmatic breed that will adopt and recommend a product if it solves a meaningful problem. As digital decision-making power shifts to end-users, it makes sense for us to trial a product-led strategy. It’s precisely the belief in which Twilio built a hugely successful platform for over 10M engineers. 

 If you're a developer who wants to explore the possibility of using Twilio for a small proof of concept, chances are, you're not going to need your boss's approval to pay for it or try it out. 

In short, our strategy is to offer a free trial and version of the product for engineers to test. We will work closely with users via our public 

to iron out the kinks to build a great product. 

We will build features to support organic adoption within teams and organizations by offering Team and Enterprises subscriptions to unlock the full potential of CalcTree.

Construction tech is the new kid on the block, offering up the most exciting and tangible challenges for software engineers. Sure, you can make truckloads of money at an algorithmic trading firm or at ‘payment provider’ startup number 1,275; that’s cool. But you know what’s even cooler? Putting humans on Mars, 3D printing buildings, autonomously assembling space stations and solving climate change. 

You mightn’t have heard of contech before, but the abovementioned challenges are merely scratching the surface. It’s just getting started, and the opportunities are crazy good.

The time is now for construction tech. Most industry workers are finally digital natives and incumbents in the sector are ripe for disruption. Despite attempting to digitally transform themselves for years, progress is poor, and large construction companies’ margins continue to shrink. 

On top of this, most of the workforce is now millennials and younger. They’re used to Netflix and Spotify in their personal lives and are sick of using decades-old software tools in their professional lives.

What does this mean? Well, it’s a safe bet the world will keep building stuff, so the entire construction sector is like a pressure cooker ready to explode. Business models need to change, and markets and labour need to get drastically more efficient to meet the needs and demands of the future. 

‍Thankfully we now have the tech and an army of talented software engineers looking for the next exciting challenge!

VC funding floodgates are the most open they’ve been to contech in years. This is because contech and adjacent innovation areas provide the most low-hanging fruit and exciting problems to solve compared to everywhere else. It also helps that the world will experience massive amounts of infrastructure spending across industrial, commercial, space, and energy sectors in the coming years. Whether it be politically or economically motivated or even if it’s just common sense, governments will always be spending on construction to stimulate economies. This expenditure is constantly growing as populations increase. The chart below from McKinsey show’s this strong trend. Compared to other sectors like fintech, this gives contech protection from downturns.

Construction-related spending accounts for 13% of the global GDP

 a Forbes interview with the head of a Berlin-based contech VC firm, Adam Zobler, explaining why venture loves contech. Fundamental, headed by Zobler "has made 61 investments, totaling more than 50 million euros."

The breadth and depth of technologies in use are insane

Alright, the money is there, and the investors can see the opportunities, but what does the tech landscape look like? Unlike many other industries, the array of technology being used and combined in contech is astounding. Here’s a list of the major technology groups in use:

As an engineer, the world is your oyster. Contech offers a playground to work with different technologies at the forefront of innovation. 

You can work across loads of exciting industries

 is one of the most exciting and rapidly growing industries today. With the world increasingly moving toward sustainable energy sources, a massive demand for skilled labour exists. From designing and constructing solar and wind farms to operating and maintaining them remotely, there is loads of demand for tech expertise in areas like IoT and AI/ML. You can check out this 

 to understand the enormous challenges facing the renewables sector.

 are other industries with immense potential. While it’s not precisely contech, many industry challenges and required skills overlap, so I thought I’d include it too. As we continue exploring and learning more about our universe, the demand for talented software engineers grows. Startups and large companies are taking on challenges like designing and building spacecraft and developing new propulsion systems, which require large amounts of complex simulations and data processing. AI/ML applied to computer vision, and mechatronic optimization are huge challenges the sector faces, and any ambitious coder would eat up. There is a massive infrastructure supporting every single space program. Ambitious plans already include building infrastructure on Mars itself. There couldn’t be a better time to get behind one of humanity’s greatest missions. 

 is also booming thanks to the increasing demand for new infrastructure and mega-projects worldwide. From highways and bridges to hospitals and schools, there is a great demand to deliver critical projects more efficiently. From robotic remote construction to process automation, AR/VR, and real-world scanning to form digital twins of any physical structure, some pretty exciting things are happening in traditional construction, and a huge void of technical talent to make it happen. In particular, when it comes to new-aged mega-projects, there are some insane technical challenges traditional players just aren’t equipped to solve, so they’re screaming out for tech talent. Never heard of a ‘mega-project’ before? You can read more about them 

 and their sub-sectors also have tremendous technological challenges in front of them. As the world faces increasing resource management challenges, there’s greater demand for talent to help deliver reliable and efficient services. It’s essentially the world's biggest optimization challenge, and tech talent will be at the center of solving this. Utilities like power generation and distribution, distribution water treatment, and waste management must be digitized and optimized to handle the increasingly decentralized nature of resource exchange. With finite resources, part of the challenge will involve designing and implementing full-cycle resource management solutions.

There are also loads of big fish and cool startups to work for

If you want to work for some of the biggest and most well-known companies, you'll want to focus your search on a few key names. Autodesk, SpaceX, Trimble, Bentley Systems, Esri, Spatial Business Systems (SBS), Google, and Microsoft are all leaders in the contech space in one way or another. They're always on the lookout for talented software engineers. So if you have the skills they're looking for, don't hesitate to apply. You could be working for one of the biggest names in the business in no time.

If you're looking for even more exciting opportunities in a fast-paced environment, plenty of cool startups are emerging too. Here are just some of the startups making waves in the construction tech space:

You’re probably already familiar with most of the languages in use

Coding languages and frameworks form the backbone of construction tech. Most startups build their solutions for the web, but desktop or hybrid solutions are still necessary for some scenarios. As a software engineer, you might focus on working with static or live data, mathematical or numerical calculations, documents or collaboration management, and more.

‍The most common coding languages and frameworks used in construction tech projects are; javascript, react, python, node js, java, dotnet, dotnetcore. Some of these languages are pretty mature and have been in use for years, and some of them, like the JavaScript ecosystem for web applications, continue to evolve daily. Python is also gaining users in the sector fast. It’s popular with the more tech-savvy workers already in the sector, who self-teach themselves to code and start tackling the problems mentioned above. It’s easy to learn, and its growing ubiquity in the space makes it a perfect language to get started on for traditional engineers. If you’re a gun Python developer, these workers would love to have you on their teams!

 is the latest knowledge and calculation management player for traditional engineering design and construction. We’re an Australian-born, remote-first, venture-backed company, and our mission is to overcome data fragmentation and help traditional engineers build and share their creations faster.

In traditional engineering, projects all begin with a conventional design process. Architects, civil, mechanical, electrical, and geotechnical engineers, contractors, and builders work together to design structures down to the last bolt before a shovel even touches the ground. This process is slow, expensive, and a complete mess, literally and digitally. It’s rife with data fragmentation and complexity, and we’re solving that.

So we’re strategically placed at the forefront of the project lifecycle. We’re in the box seat to become a critical piece of digital infrastructure for all projects. As a potential CalcTree software engineer, you’ll be front and center to learn about different projects, designs, and construction processes. As our technology bleeds downstream and is utilized for endless projects, your challenges will be vast and complex, potentially varying across all the technologies we mentioned above.

Additional factors why CalcTree is a fantastic place to start in contech: