Expert responses
The Investor — VC Partner
Delay fundraising until you prove 4% paid conversion from your zero-CAC roofing calculator leads
Your traffic numbers instantly anchored my read on this. I'll admit my bias upfront: when I see a founder who solves distribution before building a bloated product, my baseline probability of their success immediately jumps from the standard 5% seed survival rate to about 30%. You found a zero-CAC wedge in a notoriously stubborn market. Construction tech is littered with the corpses of founders who built beautiful software that contractors never searched for and refused to use. You inverted the equation. But let’s look at the kill shot: your entire thesis unravels if the people searching for "roofing square footage calculator" only want a free answer and refuse to pay for workflow software. If that conversion rate is zero, your CAC isn't cheap—it's infinite. Here is my read on your situation. Funding Strategy From Here The construction management software market is sitting around $11.5 billion right now, dominated by heavyweights like Procore, who just crossed $1 billion in ARR. VCs know this space is lucrative, but they also know early-stage adoption is brutal. I’d give you an 80% probability of raising a highly competitive pre-seed round, but only if you delay raising until you prove the conversion mechanism. Do not go to Sand Hill Road pitching 450% traffic growth. Vanity metrics don't get term sheets. Go to them when you can say: "We generate 500 organic leads a month at zero CAC via our calculator wedge, and we are converting them to paid SaaS at a 4% rate." One major red flag I need to flag immediately: you gave equity to 4 GCs to act as design partners. If you gave away 1% or 2% each, fine. If you gave away 15% collectively to non-founding advisors, your cap table is broken and institutional capital will pass. Fix that before you pitch. Maintaining Product Discipline You say tech is moving fast. Ignore it. The construction industry doesn't care about fast-moving tech; they care about things that don't break, don't require training, and save them from losing money on a bid. My confidence that you will overbuild is high. You have 4 GCs pulling you in different directions. To maintain discipline, use a strict expected value framework based on your wedge. Your users came for a calculator. That means they value speed and highly specific answers. Do not try to build a massive ERP or a Procore clone. Build the exact operational step that happens five seconds after they finish using that calculator. The Test: If a feature requires more than 60 seconds of onboarding, kill it. The Metric: Track Daily Active Users (DAU) on specific features, not total logins. If your 4 GCs ask for a feature, tell them you'll build it, but if they don't use it 3 times a week, you're deleting it. Is This a Credible YC Story? I place your odds of getting a YC interview at 70-75% right now. YC partners love the "free utility to B2B SaaS" playbook. It proves you understand the internet and know how to hack customer acquisition. They are obsessed with founders who talk to users—and having a couple hundred contractor leads plus 4 active GCs proves you are living in the market. However, to get the actual check, your application needs to answer the scalable revenue question. Your YC narrative shouldn't be "we build software for construction." Your narrative must be: "We own the top-of-funnel search intent for contractor math nationwide. Procore pays $500 for a lead; we get them for free. Now we are monetizing that flow." Get five of those calculator leads to pull out a credit card for the V1 you just launched. The moment that happens, you aren't just a credible YC story—you're an incredibly dangerous venture-scale business.
The Skeptic — Risk Assessor
Don’t confuse a content moat for product-market fit—prove paying users before raising or courting YC.
and I want to acknowledge that before I tear into the parts that worry me. But I'm going to tear into them, because that's what's useful right now. --- Funding Strategy: Don't Raise Until You Know What You're Buying Here's the pre-mortem on raising money right now: you take a pre-seed round, you burn through it building features for four design partners who each want something different, and 14 months later you've got a bloated product, no clear ICP, and you're back asking for more money with a story that's harder to tell the second time. What you actually have today is a distribution asset, not a product company. 450% traffic growth in 90 days and national SEO rankings for construction calculator terms — that's genuinely impressive. But let's be honest about what it is: you've built a content moat that generates contractor leads. That's valuable. The product launched last week. You have "a few users." That's not traction, that's a launch. My recommendation: Don't raise for 90 more days. Here's why. Right now your valuation story is "great distribution, promising product." In 90 days, if you can convert even 5-10% of those couple hundred contractor leads into paying users, your story becomes "proven distribution flywheel that converts into revenue." That's a fundamentally different fundraise — better terms, better investors, and most importantly, better signal for you about whether this thing works. The failure mode I'm protecting you from: raising money before you have conversion data means you'll be guessing about what to build, and you'll have investor pressure to guess faster. That's how companies die in construction tech specifically — the market research shows startups in this space collapse most often from "over-reliance on incremental features rather than breakthroughs," building a dozen things instead of nailing one. If you need capital to survive the next 90 days, take a small angel check ($50-100K) from someone in construction who won't care about governance. Otherwise, wait. --- Product Discipline: Your Design Partners Are Your Biggest Risk I know that sounds counterintuitive. Four GCs with 20 years of experience each, coming on as equity design partners — everyone in the room is going to tell you that's a massive asset. And it is. But it's also the most likely thing to kill your focus. Here's the specific failure mode. Four experienced GCs means four different workflows, four different pain hierarchies, four different definitions of "what I really need." Each of them has legitimate, deeply-informed opinions. And because they have equity, they feel entitled to shape the product — which they should, but within bounds you haven't set yet. What I'd do: Pick ONE metric that defines your product's value. Not "engagement" or "usage" — something tied to a contractor's P&L. Time saved per estimate. Error reduction rate. Bid win rate. Whatever it is, every feature request from every design partner gets filtered through: "Does this move the metric?" On the AI/tech speed question — I've seen this movie before. The construction management software market is $11.5 billion and growing at ~9% CAGR. Procore just crossed $1 billion in revenue. The incumbents are layering AI onto their platforms right now — Autodesk launched AI-powered progress tracking for large projects earlier this year. You cannot out-feature them. You can out-distribute them, which is exactly what your calculator wedge does. So the discipline framework is simple: your distribution advantage is your moat. Every product decision should either (a) deepen that moat by making the calculators stickier and more integrated, or (b) convert calculator users into product users. Anything that doesn't do one of those two things in the next 6 months is a distraction, no matter how exciting the underlying technology is. The tech moving fast isn't a reason to build more. It's a reason to build less and let the tools mature before you commit architecture decisions you can't undo. --- YC Readiness: You're Close, But There's a Gap You Need to Close Let me give you the honest math. YC's acceptance rate is below 1.5%. The S25 batch was 88% AI-native companies. 80-85% B2B/enterprise. The mean founder professional experience was 6.5 years. They funded 6 industrial tech companies out of 169 total. What works in your story: Distribution-first is a genuinely differentiated approach in construction tech. Most founders in this space build product and pray for adoption. You did it backwards, and it worked. YC partners notice that. The design partner structure with real GCs shows you understand the market isn't going to adopt software because it's cool — it adopts because trusted peers vouch for it. The calculator wedge is elegant. It's a Trojan horse into daily workflows. That's a real insight. What's missing — and this is the gap that would get you dinged: You don't have revenue. You don't have retention data. You launched last week. YC wants to see that the dog eats the dog food. Right now you can prove contractors visit your site. You can't yet prove they'll pay for your product or keep using it. The other thing that would concern a YC partner: your four equity design partners. That's a lot of equity going out the door before you've validated the product. If each of them has a meaningful stake, you've given away cap table real estate that a sophisticated investor will scrutinize. How much equity are we talking about? If it's more than 2-3% combined, you may have a problem. My honest assessment: Apply for the next batch, not this one. Use the intervening months to get 20-30 paying users, measure retention over 60+ days, and build a conversion funnel from calculator traffic → product trial → paid. If you can walk into a YC interview and say "I built a distribution engine that ranks #1 nationally, it generates X hundred leads per month, Y% convert to product trials, Z% convert to paid, and retention at 60 days is W%" — that's a funded company. Right now, you're one proof point short. --- Bottom line: You've built something real with the distribution play — don't let me undersell that. Most construction tech founders can't get contractors to look at their product, and you've got them coming to you organically. That's rare. But the product is seven days old. The most dangerous thing you can do right now is mistake distribution traction for product-market fit. They're related but they are not the same thing. Prove the conversion, then raise, then apply. In that order.
The Growth Hacker — Growth Experimenter
Your lead gen is gold, but without activation and retention data, you’re just traffic, not a business.
Alright, let's get into it. You've cracked the hardest part first: getting attention. Most founders build a product nobody knows exists. You've built a lead-generation engine. That's a massive advantage. But it's also a liability if you mistake top-of-funnel traffic for a business. The real work starts now. (1) Your Funding Strategy Forget raising a round right now. You'd be raising on vanity metrics—traffic and leads. A savvy investor will see right through that. They'll ask for your activation and retention numbers, and you'll say "we just launched." That's a weak hand to play. Here's the experiment I'd run for the next 60 days. Your only goal is to build the data for one slide in your future pitch deck. That slide is titled: "We can turn free traffic into active users." Your hypothesis is: "Contractors who find us via our calculators can be converted into sticky product users." To prove it, you need to track a cohort. Take the next 200 qualified leads that come in. Your goal is to get at least 20 of them (a 10% conversion rate) to become what you define as an "activated user." An activated user isn't someone who just signs up; it's someone who performs the core action of your product—maybe it's creating their first project, uploading a blueprint, or assigning a task. Then, you need to see if at least 50% of those users are still active 14 days later. Once you have those numbers, you have a story. You can walk into a room and say, "We have a machine that acquires leads for free. We know how to convert 10% of them into activated users, and we retain half of them. Now we need capital to turn this working engine into a real business." That's how you get funded. (2) Maintaining Product Discipline Your product discipline problem is a direct result of your distribution success. When you have hundreds of leads, you have hundreds of opinions. You need a filter. That filter should be a single, obsessive focus on one metric: your activation rate. Your four GCs are your secret weapon, but don't treat them like a feature committee. They are your user-testing panel. Don't ask them, "What should we build?" Ask them, "I watched your foreman log in. Where did he get stuck? What was the one thing he tried to do but couldn't?" Every Monday, you should have one product hypothesis. "We believe adding a project template will increase the percentage of users who start a project within 24 hours from 15% to 25%." Then you spend the week building the cheapest possible version of that template, shipping it, and seeing if the number moves. That's it. Nothing else matters. Ignore the fancy AI integrations, the mobile app, the new reporting dashboard. Fix the single biggest leak in your bucket: the gaping hole between signing up and doing something useful. (3) The YC Story You're close, but you're not there yet. The story right now is: "I built a popular blog with calculators and I have a product." The story YC wants to hear is: "I found a brilliant, non-obvious wedge into the construction market. I used it to get my first users, and in the four weeks since launching, I've run six experiments that have doubled our activation rate. We learn faster than anyone else in this space." See the difference? It's about velocity. YC bets on teams that can iterate. The calculators and GC partners get you in the door. The proof that you can take user feedback and turn it into product improvements at a blistering pace is what gets you the check. My honest assessment? You've built a fantastic asset with the distribution channel. Most startups would kill for that. But an asset is not a business. The next 90 days are about proving you can build the business behind it. Focus entirely on converting and retaining that first batch of users. If you can show a steep upward curve on activation and retention, your YC application will be undeniable. If not, you're just another project with a lot of traffic. Get to work.
The Strategist — Competitive Expert
Raise just enough pre-seed to prove sticky revenue—over-raising now kills leverage and invites scope creep.
(1) Funding strategy from here Raise just enough to buy time-to-product/market fit, not the other way round. You already proved acquisition economics; what you haven’t proved is repeatable retention and monetisation. Close a $750k–$1.25m pre-seed SAFE in the next 60 days, led by angels who built or sold into E&C (they open doors to the regional GC networks that matter). That ticket keeps the team <6 heads for 15-18 months at burn <60k/month—long enough to (a) ship two paid modules, (b) hit 30-40 paying companies, and (c) show ≥50% logo retention at 6 months. Only then go after a $3-4m seed; investors are rewarding capital efficiency again after the 2024 contech funding pull-back Deloitte flagged, and vertical SaaS rounds are clearing at 10–14× ARR if churn is low. Over-raising now invites scope creep and an ugly flat round later. (2) Staying disciplined on product Anchor every sprint to a single metric: “minutes saved per foreman per week.” Anything that doesn’t move that metric is a distraction. Concretely: • Derive the roadmap from the calculators’ usage logs—look at which inputs users export to spreadsheets or re-enter elsewhere. That’s latent demand for automation you can monetise. • Run a nine-week cadence: 2× four-week build cycles plus a one-week “commit / kill” review where modules with <30% weekly active usage by design partners are cut immediately. Brutal, but it prevents zombie features. • Keep the core as an API layer, push AI or BIM integrations into plug-ins. That lets you adopt the next LLM or drone photogrammetry SDK without refactoring the workflow engine every quarter, a lesson Buildots used when they layered their 2024 AI progress-tracking release on top of an unchanged data model. (3) YC readiness Story is 80% there: you’ve nailed wedge distribution (top-ranked calculators, 450% traffic jump, a few hundred leads) and enlisted four seasoned GCs with skin in the game—credibility most contech founders lack. What’s missing is evidence that contractors don’t churn once the calculator ends. Get 20 paying companies using the v1 module three times a week for 60 days and you’re a fundable YC narrative: “We turned free calculators into the system of record for crews, hitting $15k MRR in under 18 months.” Hit that line and the application writes itself. My take: raise a tight pre-seed, weaponise your usage data, and prove sticky revenue before talking to YC. You’ll keep control of the cap table and walk in with undeniable leverage.
The Operator — COO
Don’t raise on traffic alone—lock in paying customers and retention first or you’ll waste investor time and your runway.
Good. Let me give you the straight read on all three. --- Funding Strategy From Here The 450% traffic growth in 90 days is a real number — don't undersell it. But here's the systems-thinking problem you need to solve before you walk into any investor conversation: traffic and leads are top-of-funnel signals, not retention signals. The second-order question every serious pre-seed investor will ask is "what happens after the contractor uses the calculator?" Right now you launched the product last week and have a few users. That's not a funding story yet — that's a funding setup. Here's what I'd do operationally: give yourself a hard 60-90 day window to convert that distribution moat into product metrics. Specifically, you need weekly active usage data, some form of retention curve, and ideally one or two paying customers — even at a low price point. Construction software benchmarks suggest that if you can show even $3-5k MRR with strong week-2 retention from your design partners' networks, you're in fundable territory for a pre-seed round of $500k-$1.5M from angels and construction-focused micro-funds. The design partner structure with four experienced GCs taking equity is actually a meaningful signal — it de-risks the "does anyone actually want this" question. Use them aggressively before you fundraise. Get them using the product weekly. Get them to pull in two or three of their subcontractors. That's your proof-of-pull, not proof-of-push. Don't raise too early. The trap I've seen kill companies at your stage is raising on distribution metrics before product metrics exist, then spending 18 months trying to find product-market fit with investor pressure on the clock. Your distribution advantage is durable — it compounds. Use it to get to real retention data first. --- Staying Disciplined on Product When Tech Is Moving Fast This is the hardest operational problem in software right now, and I'll be blunt: most teams fail it not because they lack discipline but because they have the wrong constraint mechanism. Here's the framework I'd install immediately. Your four GCs are your product constitution. Every feature request, every AI capability you want to bolt on, every shiny thing — it has to pass one test: does it make a GC's crew faster or less likely to screw up a job? That's it. If you can't draw a straight line from the feature to that outcome, it goes in the parking lot. The second-order effect of fast-moving tech is that it creates optionality anxiety — the fear that if you don't build the AI feature now, you'll be behind. That's almost always wrong. The construction industry is notoriously slow to adopt. Your moat isn't being first to use the latest model — it's being the tool that's already embedded in their daily workflow. Switching costs compound over time. Depth beats breadth. Operationally, I'd run a strict 6-week sprint cycle with a frozen scope rule: once the sprint starts, nothing new enters it. New ideas go into a prioritized backlog reviewed with your design partners monthly. This forces you to make real tradeoff decisions rather than scope-creeping everything in. Your design partners are also your forcing function here — if all four of them are asking for the same thing, that's signal. If it's one of them, it's noise. --- Is This a Credible YC Story Yet? Honestly? You're close, but not there yet — and the gap is specific and closeable. What you have that YC loves: a real problem from real operators (not a solution looking for a problem), a distribution wedge that's proven and defensible, design partners with skin in the game, and a founder who sequenced correctly — distribution before product. That sequencing instinct alone puts you ahead of 80% of applicants. What's missing: revenue or a clear path to it within weeks, not months. YC's bar in 2025 is demonstrated traction, and with four batches per year now, the competition is stiffer. "A few users" after one week is fine, but you need to be able to say in your application "we launched X weeks ago, we have Y active users, Z are paying, and here's our week-over-week growth." The $15.2B in proptech funding in 2024 means the space is hot, which helps — but it also means YC has seen more construction pitches. My honest assessment: apply to the next batch you're eligible for, but spend the next 45 days getting 3-5 paying customers, even at $99/month. That changes your story from "we have distribution and just launched" to "we have distribution, launched, and people are paying." That's the difference between an interview and a rejection. The bones of this story are strong — the GC design partners, the SEO moat, the workflow integration. Now you need the revenue line to make it undeniable.
The PM — Product Manager
Skip the big seed — convert pilots fast and hit traction milestones to keep leverage and credibility.
1) Funding strategy from here Don’t raise a big seed yet. You’ve nailed distribution; now prove the conversion engine. The seed market has polarized toward larger, AI-leaning rounds and is unforgiving to non-AI SaaS without crisp traction. Data points: in 2025-26, traditional seed rounds shrank as mega-seed deals grew, and AI startups commanded a valuation premium north of 40%. That means you protect your optionality until you can show paid usage and retention. Here’s what I’d do: convert your four GCs to paid pilots (discounted annual prepay beats equity), and close 6–12 additional SMB contractors with fast cycles. Use simple SAFEs from a few contech-savvy angels only if you need 6–9 months of runway to hire one engineer and one PM/ops generalist. Keep your cap table clean; equity-for-design-partners is rare and risky—industry guidance favors 30–50% discounts for 12–24 months over ownership. Stakeholder impact: this path reduces founder dilution, sets clear expectations with design partners (no bespoke forever work), and keeps your team focused on revenue, not pitch theater. Milestones to unlock a proper seed: 10–20 paying customers, $10–25k MRR, 80% 3-month retention, and a repeatable top-of-funnel → paid conversion. 2) Staying disciplined on product Pick one ICP you can own (e.g., self-perform GCs or a single trade like concrete) and ruthlessly deprioritize the rest. Anchor on a North Star that matters on-site: hours saved per job or % reduction in rework/change orders. Every roadmap item must show how it moves that metric and for whom. Use a tight 6-week cadence: week 0 commit, 4 weeks build, 1 week hardening, 1 week measure/kill. Maintain a “kill list” of features that didn’t move the metric—publicly with your design partners—to build trust and prevent one-off demands from hijacking scope. Instrument the SEO wedge: target 5% of calculator users to trial and 20–30% of trials to paid within 30 days; ship only what improves those two numbers. Integrations: do the smallest valuable Procore/Autodesk sync (read-only import) to anchor workflows; don’t chase broad platform work yet. AI: only where it’s safe and verifiable (takeoffs, unit conversions, spec lookups); avoid hallucination risks that create field rework and erode trust. Human impact lens: your users value reliability over novelty—fewer late nights, fewer busted budgets—so prioritize accuracy, speed, and auditability over shiny features. 3) YC credibility today You’re close. The narrative is strong: a proven distribution wedge (450% traffic growth, top-ranked calculators), insider problem definition via veteran GCs, and a just-launched product. YC increasingly optimizes for traction—measurable usage/revenue growth beats everything. If you can show, in the next 4–8 weeks, a working funnel (calculator → trial → paid) with real dollars and low churn, you’re a credible YC story. Punch up the market scale and path to a platform: Procore alone serves ~18k customers with >$1B revenue—ample room for a focused, modern vertical tool to wedge into estimating/procurement and expand. Tidy the cap table narrative around design partner equity, show why discounts/early access align incentives better, and outline the $100M ARR path (ICP, ACV, sales motion, expansion). My call: run a 60–90 day execution sprint to hit the milestones above, then apply. If you hit them sooner, apply now. Conservative take: skip a big raise, prove conversion and retention, then choose between YC and a targeted seed. That keeps leverage with you.
