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Creating a Category in Construction Tech: How Part3 is Building the Operating System for Architects

May 2020 wasn’t an obvious time to launch a construction technology company. The world had ground to a halt, and uncertainty loomed large. But for Part3’s founders, this moment of global disruption created an unexpected catalyst for change in one of technology’s most resistant industries.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Part3 founder Jack Sadler shared how his team is building a new category in construction technology – not by following the well-worn path of construction management software, but by focusing on an overlooked segment: construction administration for architects and engineers.

The pandemic created a unique opening. “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,” Jack explains. This shift transformed what had been an uphill battle of education about cloud security into a moment of accelerated digital adoption.

But why had construction been so resistant to technology adoption in the first place? Jack argues it wasn’t simple stubbornness: “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.” These real constraints had created deeply embedded processes that were difficult to change.

The Part3 team saw an opportunity to create something new. Rather than competing in the crowded space of contractor-focused software dominated by players like Procore and Autodesk, they identified an underserved market: the design professionals who oversee construction projects.

“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. “What we’re trying to do is create a category that actually arms all of those designers with the tools, the data, and the information they need to manage the build phase as well as they can.”

Their go-to-market strategy combines focused product development with targeted category creation. “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,” says Jack. The approach starts with creating an exceptional experience for core users before expanding to secondary stakeholders who collaborate on projects.

This strategy has yielded impressive results. The company maintains a close rate of one-third on qualified opportunities, and perhaps more tellingly, has achieved 175% net revenue retention – meaning existing customers significantly expand their usage over time.

Rather than trying to be everything to everyone in construction tech, Part3 maintains a laser focus on their target market. “We only need to speak from their perspective,” Jack notes. “We don’t need to get sort of washed out in the broader construction landscape.” Their marketing focuses specifically on business model innovation and technology adoption in architecture and engineering, avoiding broader industry conversations where they lack expertise.

The vision extends beyond simply digitizing existing processes. Currently, Jack explains, “90% of what they do is documents, 10% is data. The opportunity is to flip that. The opportunity is to provide this entire industry something that looks 90% data, 10% documents just moving around after the fact.”

This transformation could fundamentally change how architects work. “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,” Jack observes. “We just want to free him up, get him back to design.”

Part3’s story illustrates a crucial lesson in category creation: sometimes the best opportunity isn’t in disrupting the biggest, most obvious market, but in identifying and serving an overlooked segment with unique needs. By focusing specifically on the needs of design professionals in construction, they’re building what could become the essential operating system for architects and engineers – turning what was once seen as boring “construction administration” into a category worth watching.