5 Go-to-Market Lessons from Part3’s Category Creation Journey in Construction Tech

Sometimes the best opportunities emerge from crisis. When Part3 launched in May 2020, the pandemic wasn’t just a challenge – it became the catalyst that transformed how the construction industry thought about technology. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, founder Jack Sadler shared insights from Part3’s journey that offer valuable lessons for B2B founders creating new categories.

1. Find the Underserved Segment in a Crowded Market While major players like Procore and Autodesk dominated contractor-focused construction software, Part3 identified an overlooked opportunity: architects and engineers managing construction administration. “Construction administration is through the lens of designers. So architects and engineers, you know, mechanical, structural, civil, and the rest of the consultants that design buildings and structures,” Jack explains. Rather than competing head-on with established players, they created a new category serving design professionals’ unique needs.
2. Use Market Disruption as a Catalyst The pandemic accelerated digital adoption in construction, traditionally one of technology’s most resistant industries. As Jack notes, “We saw in the construction industry where it’s notoriously difficult to get people to change what they do, people suddenly adopting things like cloud based software and chat tools like teams and slack and Zoom and conferencing tools.” This shift eliminated what had been a major barrier – educating customers about cloud security and adoption.
3. Build a Platform Strategy Around Core Users Part3’s go-to-market approach prioritizes creating exceptional experiences for primary users before expanding to secondary stakeholders. “What we’re really trying to do here around construction administration is create the de facto platform that connects every one of these professionals that’s involved,” Jack shares. This focus has driven impressive results, with the company maintaining a one-third close rate on qualified opportunities and achieving 175% net revenue retention.
4. Stay Focused in Your Marketing Voice Rather than trying to participate in every industry conversation, Part3 maintains strict focus. “We only need to speak from their perspective,” Jack explains. “We don’t need to get sort of washed out in the broader construction landscape.” They concentrate specifically on business model innovation and technology adoption in architecture and engineering, avoiding broader industry topics where they lack expertise.
5. Solve Fundamental Problems, Not Just Surface Issues Part3’s vision goes beyond digitizing existing processes. Currently, Jack notes, “90% of what they do is documents, 10% is data. The opportunity is to flip that.” This transformation addresses a core problem: “An architect spends a lot of time becoming a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager on any given day, and that shouldn’t be the case. We just want to free him up, get him back to design.”

The construction industry’s resistance to change wasn’t simple stubbornness. As Jack explains, “When you’re in construction, people’s lives and safety to worry about. You’ve got hundreds of millions of dollars moving hands. You’ve got huge waterfall style projects that you can’t agile.” Understanding these fundamental constraints helped Part3 build a solution that worked within the industry’s real needs while still driving transformation.

Part3’s journey demonstrates that successful category creation isn’t just about building new technology – it’s about deeply understanding an industry’s constraints and opportunities, identifying underserved segments, and maintaining laser focus on solving their specific problems. For B2B founders looking to create new categories, the key lesson is clear: sometimes the biggest opportunities aren’t in disrupting the most obvious market, but in serving overlooked segments with focused, transformative solutions.