Founder Stories: Tracy Young of PlanGrid (YC W12)

PlanGrid just seems like one of those companies that every time I hear about it, even knowing nothing about the construction industry, just makes sense. They solve a hard problem and they charge money for it. I like those simple (conceptually!) businesses. I am rooting for them.

I really like founder stories. I just finished reading Jessica Livingston's Founders At Work which has many similar stories, although they are typically further along in their careers. Reading founder stories at an earlier point is just as interesting I think.

Thanks for the comment! To clarify, yes blueprints are large. But just like people were happy to give up the inconvenience of fold-up paper maps for google maps, construction folks are almost universally excited to give the inconvenience of cumbersome paper plans for a tablet and an app.

Interestingly, this question is the exact first question PG asked us during our initial YC interview in 2011.

I still remember the dinner when we found out that Antoine Hersen had passed like it was yesterday.

I think it is safe to say that the entire YC batch took home the advice Antoine gave to the Plangrid team that night.

I knew nothing about construction until a business consulting gig got me very involved in a build-out of an office space that had once been a wet lab. I became acquainted with the giant rolls of blueprints that get passed around, often with minute annotations and special symbols (for instance, for the electricians) on different versions of the plans.

It seems to me that there are a number of parties that would have to be brought on board to make mobile software work -- besides the supervising construction engineer/company, certain subs (millwork, HVAC, electrical, etc.), furniture suppliers (who really need accurate plans), architects, and the clients. I would expect different learning curves for the different groups ... maybe architects are more used to working with blueprint software while some subs are more old-school.

Good luck!

"Assuming they have some kind of beta, do whatever it takes to figure out sales by yourself....After YC, we brought on a VP of Sales, but he couldn’t sell the product."

I agree, the founding team should be intimately involved with the sales process early on. CEOs as sales reps is a common theme amongst start-up success stories.

It's also really important to understand the difference b/t start-up vs. corporate sales people. It sounds like they hired a corporate sales person i.e. someone who can't deal with the uncertainties of selling a new product.

Mark Suster explains the difference much better than I can.

http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2014/04/03/helping-startu...

i spent 2-3 days a week for 9 months volunteering at habitat for humanity so i could learn construction. i loved it when we unrolled the blueprints and discussed the work for the day. changes were constant due to so many little unanticipated issues (bugs) and we sometimes temporarily marked up the drawings by hand with notes from the architects/engineers rather than waiting for official blueprint updates. plangrid seems like a great solution for this use case. my concerns would be around the fragility of tablets on a construction site and of adoption and use by construction workers. plus it was so fun to turn those huge pages and see a whole new perspective on the project. =)

> Who better to sell the product than the founding team?

and

> You can't rely on others to sell the product you built.

Agree 100%, we had the same epiphany a 6 months ago; actually _selling your product_ is one of the most important jobs as a founder.

Also, I don't think you can [reasonably] pay someone a salary, and expect the same level of understanding & drive that the founders posses. And, it also seems that understanding & drive are much more important than clever marketing plans when selling B2B software.

Funnily enough, we're selling to the same market, although we help with the estimating & quantifying side of dealing with Blueprints - https://groundplan.com/

Is their selling point revision control for blueprints, or is it viewing them on mobile devices? On the latter point blueprints are very large, so I can't see how viewing them on a mobile device is useful.

That is one hell of a story.