I’ve had a foot in both worlds, construction and tech, for decades. And the two move at very different speeds.
Tech moves at sprint pace: ship it, iterate, scale. Construction moves at the speed of getting it right, because you can’t undo a steel frame.
That doesn’t mean construction is stuck. The industry is moving forward, and it’s open to a clear argument, even from a startup, as long as the benefits are obvious and the evidence is there.
Where it goes wrong
So what goes wrong when tech and construction meet? Usually it’s a brilliant product, years in the making, with a pitch that leads with the technical detail. All numbers and acronyms. The AI. The integrations. The platform built for the future.
The buyer doesn’t care. Not yet, anyway.
What construction buyers want to know
Contractors, site managers and quantity surveyors are practical people. They want to know three things:
- What does it do? In plain terms, on a real site.
- Who else uses it? Ideally a firm like theirs.
- What happens if it goes wrong? Support, fallback, the cost of failure.
Many of them have been let down by shiny software before, and they’ve got a job to run today. They aren’t going to read a feature list to work out whether you solve their problem.
How to slow down to their speed
Start where they are, not where you want them to be. In practice, that means:
- Learn their language, and use it. Programme, not timeline. Variations, not change requests. Snagging, not bug tracking.
- Make your website about the biggest problem you solve for them. Lead with the site problem, not the platform.
- Have a clear “how it works” page. Step by step, in plain English, with screenshots from a real project.
- Put the technical detail in its own section. Some readers will want it. Most won’t, at least at first.
- Create customer stories that show how you’ve helped people like them.
Customer stories do the heavy lifting
That last point answers the second question, “Who else uses it?”, better than anything else you can publish. A good customer story shows a recognisable firm with a recognisable problem, explains how your product fitted into their work, and puts a number on the result.
The best ones are told from the customer’s point of view, in their words. A site manager saying “we stopped losing half a day a week chasing drawings” is worth more than a page of product claims.
Choose customers who look like your next prospect, not just your biggest logo. A mid-sized regional contractor will trust a story about another mid-sized regional contractor far more than one about a national tier one.
Don’t get in your own way
You might be proudest of the tech. For a construction buyer, it’s the most confusing and least interesting part of the story, until they trust that you can solve their problem.
For how to research and write customer stories that construction buyers believe, see How to Write Construction Case Studies That Win Work.
Get your projects written up properly
Takooba turns completed projects and happy customers into case studies that win the next job. See how it works or get in touch.
Michael Willoughby