7 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building a $5M Construction Tech Platform

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Eric Helitzer, CEO and Founder of SubBase, a construction materials management platform that’s raised $5 million, dropped a line that should make every early-stage founder wince: “We were giving the software away for free because, and we didn’t know how much value we’re providing yet.”

That single decision cost him a year of false signals and misidentified customers. But it also became the foundation for a go-to-market playbook that works in one of the hardest industries to crack: construction.

Here are seven lessons from SubBase’s journey that apply far beyond construction tech.

Lesson 1: Charge Early or Pay the Price in False Positives

Eric’s first and most emphatic piece of advice cuts through the typical founder anxiety about pricing. “You need to start charging much sooner because that’s when you’re really going to find out if you a, are solving a problem, but b figure out who your right ICP would be.”

The problem with free software isn’t just lost revenue—it’s lost signal. When SubBase finally started charging after a year, everything changed. “We got into a pigeonhole where we didn’t understand who the real ICP was and we’re getting false positives. People would say they’d use it, they wouldn’t pay for it.”

The companies that paid? Those were the ones calling when features broke. Those were the ones seeing real value. The free users gave positive feedback but no commitment.

For founders in relationship-heavy industries, this lesson hits differently. You can’t rely on polite interest or encouraging conversations. Money is the only honest signal. Eric learned this the hard way: “That was really my fault. That was probably one of the biggest mistakes I made.”

Lesson 2: Don’t Disrupt, Wedge In

Construction companies are profitable. They’ve operated successfully for decades using email, text, and Excel. When Eric approaches these companies, he’s not selling disruption—he’s selling enhancement.

“We don’t flip it on its back and disrupt it so abruptly. We wedge into their workflow and we layer on the pieces of software that allow them to streamline and organize themselves.”

This approach acknowledges a hard truth: your software is entering an ecosystem that already works. The challenge isn’t proving your technology is better in a vacuum—it’s proving it’s better enough to justify change.

The wedge strategy requires deep workflow understanding. You need to know where the pain points are, yes, but also where the comfort zones are. Push too hard on disruption and you’ll lose the deal. Layer in gradually and you’ll win adoption.

Lesson 3: In Relationship-Heavy Industries, Relationships Come First

Eric’s second non-negotiable lesson for construction tech founders is simple but often overlooked: “Learn the relationship game in construction.”

He elaborates: “It is such a heavy relationship based business that if you don’t start by understanding that first, and no matter what product you’re building, you’re not going to have the success upfront and it’s going to take you a lot longer to figure that out.”

This manifested in SubBase’s early sales strategy. “We would only do on site demos. Like, there was no virtual. It’s, I’m coming to your office and I’m going to show you the system.”

This wasn’t just about showing features—it was about building relationships. Eric took it further: “I almost let myself not leave their offices unless I had a commitment.”

The physical presence, the face-to-face interaction, the refusal to leave without progress—these tactics work in construction because trust is currency. You can’t Zoom your way into a deal when the industry runs on handshakes and reputation.

Lesson 4: Education Beats Selling Every Time

When Eric talks about marketing, he doesn’t talk about conversion rates or lead scoring. He talks about education.

“People in construction don’t just want to be sold software. They want to be educated. They want to understand why this piece of software that didn’t exist a couple years ago is going to beneficial now.”

This insight shapes everything about SubBase’s go-to-market approach. The thought leadership strategy isn’t about brand awareness—it’s about teaching the market why they have a problem worth solving.

“I come from the industry. I love speaking about what we’re doing. So let’s call it that thought leadership approach has been very helpful and it’s really about getting ourselves out to educate the masses that have a problem in construction material procurement.”

The admission that it’s “still a little too early to be able to pinpoint” what’s working in marketing is itself instructive. Educational content plays the long game. You’re not optimizing for this quarter’s pipeline—you’re building market awareness that compounds over time.

Lesson 5: Trial Your Pricing Like You Trial Your Product

Before SubBase had pricing figured out, Eric ran experiments. “We actually started testing pricing by sending out contracts to see, hey, is this worth it? Is it worth this amount of dollars?”

The response speed told the story. “For the most part, when people signed fast, we knew that obviously it was worthwhile. But we also second guessed ourselves to understand, are we underpricing ourselves?”

This approach treats pricing as a hypothesis to test rather than a number to defend. When you’re selling into a new category or solving a problem customers didn’t know they had, you can’t benchmark against competitors—you have to discover value through experimentation.

Eric emphasizes the uncertainty of this phase: “It was very much a question mark half the time until we got into a flux where we can actually show the value and really be able to show what the ROI was when they came into sub base. And that took over a year for us to figure out.”

Lesson 6: Use External Catalysts to Your Advantage

SubBase entered the market at exactly the right moment, but not by accident. Eric understood how external forces were changing buyer psychology.

“Covid really boosted the awareness of material price changes. Most people that were buying lumber pre Covid didn’t really care that pricing was fluctuating a little up and down because it didn’t really matter as much.”

The post-COVID reality changed everything: “You’re in a world where vendors are not holding their material pricing. You have commodity fluctuations that have gone down a little bit that are so crazy that most people needed to gain a hold of that.”

The lesson isn’t about timing luck—it’s about recognizing when market conditions create urgency around your solution. Before COVID, material price tracking was a nice-to-have. After COVID, it became essential. SubBase positioned itself to capture that shift.

For founders, this means constantly scanning for external catalysts: regulatory changes, economic shifts, technology adoption curves, or industry crises that suddenly make your solution urgent rather than interesting.

Lesson 7: Industry Playbooks Don’t Exist—Build Your Own

The venture capital world is pouring into construction tech, attracted by trillion-dollar opportunities. But Eric warns that most investors get it fundamentally wrong.

“A lot of them are coming without prior knowledge, and they’re trying to, in my opinion, and I’ve talked to a lot of investors, they’re trying to take what other industries have done and bake it into construction, and that’s not the way it is.”

The problem? “Every project in construction is unique. Every process in construction could be tailored to a specific company because the projects are so unique.”

Eric drives this point home: “Construction isn’t a playbook.”

This creates both challenge and opportunity. The challenge is that you can’t copy-paste a go-to-market strategy from SaaS or fintech. The opportunity is that deep industry knowledge becomes an insurmountable moat.

The fragmentation and customization that makes construction resistant to technology also makes it resistant to competition once you’ve figured out the wedge. Your 15 years of industry experience can’t be replicated by a smart team from Google who decides to tackle construction. They’ll try to apply a playbook. You’ll understand the nuances.

The Through-Line

These seven lessons aren’t tactics—they’re principles born from experience. They’re what happens when you spend 15 years in construction management, build internal software, see what works, leave to start a company, make mistakes, and adjust course.

Eric distills his entire go-to-market philosophy into two core rules: charge early to find your true ICP, and learn the relationship game in your industry. Everything else flows from there.

For founders building in relationship-heavy, change-resistant, fragmented industries—whether construction, manufacturing, healthcare, or logistics—these lessons provide a framework. Not because they’re the only way to build, but because they’re tested against reality.

The construction industry represents trillions in market opportunity. But opportunity without execution is just potential. SubBase’s go-to-market journey shows what execution looks like when you respect the industry’s resistance to change, lean into relationships, charge early to find signal, and build your own playbook instead of copying someone else’s.

That’s the difference between building a company and building a company that lasts.