Builk walks where few tech startups tread: Changing the construction industry

Ten years of experience in the construction business and enterprise solutions for the industry — this formed the foundation of the Builk team that today, aims to bring the traditional industry into the Information Age.

Builk Asia is a free management software and professional network for the construction business. With this bold ambition for a traditional industry, coupled with an interesting business model, we had to chat with Patai Padungtin, the company’s principal and co-founder.

SGE: What led you and your co-founders to start Builk?

We are serial entrepreneurs who come from the construction business and enterprise solutions for the construction industry. We have  experience in developing construction-specific enterprise resource planning (ERPs) for leading contractors in Thailand and overseas.

Builk initially came from our passion to help local SMEs in the construction industry access better management tools online. These small and medium contractors have not much budget spending on ERP, but they do need professional Time-Cost-Quality control software rather than a blank spreadsheet.

Doing business with the “Bottom Of the Pyramid” segments becomes our challenge and opportunity. We want to change the construction industry landscape.

SGE: In the media, we seldom hear of IT startups tackling the niche construction industry. Care to share Builk’s experience on gaining users?

Unfortunately, we are in one of the most obsolete industry — people and businesses in the Thai construction industry are not IT-familiar and slow in adopting the technology. Our user acquisition strategy is to educate them with a series of offline activities.

During the first year, we had bi-weekly open house events that offer free training at our office during weekends and went out to meet the contractors on site to hear from them directly. It was tough but worked out well.

After gaining sponsorships, we could manage better and bigger offline activities with their support. Some of these were bundled with the sponsors’ marketing campaign.

We plan to put more effort online into user acquisition after launching the next version of Builk that will include more social features later this year.

SGE: How has Builk’s revenue model (free SaaS model and ad-supported) been working out so far?

Free SaaS with an ad-supported revenue model sounds a little crazy for B2B applications in a niche domain. Also, there is no obvious successful example for us to follow.