Fieldwire connects different members of the construction field painlessly - so painlessly that they've seen a large part of their early growth through organic word of mouth, something construction is not usually known for. Yves Frinault, CEO and Co-Founder walks through the benefits of immediate, seamless connectivity, and how Fieldwire makes it easier for everyone to just get the job done.
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[00:00:00] Hugh Seaton: Welcome to constructed futures. I'm Hugh Seaton. Today I'm here with Yves Frinauot, co-founder and CEO of Fieldwire. Yves, Welcome to the podcast.
[00:00:11] Yves Frinault: Hey you. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:13] Hugh Seaton: So I want to start the way I always do. Let's talk about what Fieldwire is and what you guys do.
[00:00:20] Yves Frinault: Yeah. So Fieldwire is probably the most field oriented construction management solution you can find out there in the market. Just to give you an idea of the scale of the company. We have over a million projects that have been created on the platform. We're present in over a hundred countries, we support 15 languages, and you're going to see amazing clients like Clark construction you're going to find us on pretty much every continent.
And we're going to be on any type of projects. We are pretty agnostic to verticals. So we do a heavy civil commercial, residential, if it's big enough, industrial. And what we do for our customers basically is we deliver job site performance or at the very least job site consistency.
At the job site level, really at the craftsman level. And in general, the core belief behind the company, is that yes, planning is essential in projects. If you're not good at planning as a construction company, you're probably already out of business or on your way there. So basically most good companies are good at planning.
But really the next step, the next thing that separates the great construction companies from the good ones is how good they are at executing the plan that they had. And that's really just pure execution. And that's where the company focuses all its efforts.
[00:01:40] Hugh Seaton: And what was the genesis of the company? How did you start.
[00:01:44] Yves Frinault: So, I have a very strange past. So I did my military service in the French paratroopers and that's where I started getting interested in communication. And at the time it was really about training soldiers on like radio comms. And I was like, this is insanely difficult.
And so when I went back for college, after my military service, I went to the construction management program at Stanford, I saw the same problem on site, where everybody at school was working on the 3D side of the world. And you could look at, at a construction foreman onsite, and it was back to the stone age of pen and paper.
And I was like, there is a better way to do that. That being said, I didn't think the market was ready. So I actually left the construction industry for a few years. I wanted to learn to build great software and I actually went to the video game industry, where I learned to build really, really good games at a company called Ubisoft.
So I spent five years as basically a project manager there. And what I discovered at Ubisoft was that the collaboration tools that they had available to run big teams, like my last team was probably around like 50, 60 people, were just years in advance of anything that I had seen in construction.
And so when we started seeing the cloud pickup in construction, when we started seeing smartphones be present everywhere. We started the company with the idea that we're going to bring that quality of collaboration tools to the job site directly. And so that's really the Genesis behind the company.
[00:03:10] Hugh Seaton: Talk about doing your homework. That is cool. And so what was your communication can mean a lot of things. What was your entry point? What did you launch with?
[00:03:19] Yves Frinault: So the core, there was this platform that everybody uses in software development, that's called JIRA. It's an Australian company. And really the core of JIRA is task management.
And so what we launched in construction was task management and the idea was it's a way to track work. To assign work to different people and to make sure that you can attach all the tiny minute details that are going to make it so that people have the context that they need when they carry out the task.
And they're also going to be able to indicate that they're completed with the task and through some kind of process you're going to be able to verify that the task is done well. And when you think about what I just described, that's the core of what runs construction. It's always that assignment and two step verification process.
That's, that's construction everywhere regardless of what you do. And so that's what we launched. And since like nobody knew what task management meant in construction, when we started, rather than going to, you know, the big VPs and CIOs of construction companies. Because we came from video games, we're like, we're going to distribute this, like a game, like an app.
And so we started running ads and, and craftsman's and foremen and superintendents found us online when they were doing searches on the app store directly. And they started using us. Like we had a freemium model, so they were free to use that first. And then when they wanted to grow the number of people on the app, they would, they would have to find a credit card and then we would start getting projects and it was just started getting the companies.
And the, the core idea was if somebody can find us download our tool, set it up on their own finding enough value that eventually they get to pay. It's very unlikely that what we're doing is not providing any value for them, right? Like the beating heart of the company, since we started it, is that we are very, very close to our customers.
And we have that constant pulse that what we do is valuable for our end customer on the jobsite.
[00:05:19] Hugh Seaton: And let's talk about that value. So the word that we've used when we were talking in the pregame was really connecting, planning and field execution. So this idea of field execution, I think is a really important one.
Talk to me about how you're adding value. So you're, you're creating task lists. I know JIRA really well as a software guy, but you're creating task lists. What's the flow. How does that, how does it go from you know, a plan, whether whatever form that plan might be in into your system. And then how is it? How's it being used.
[00:05:51] Yves Frinault: So in general if you have crews that are running out on site or field engineers, if you're a general contractor running on our onsite, you have sweet things that you want those people to do of like effortlessly onsite. So the first one is the super obvious one that everybody gets is you want them to be able to access.
Up to date information. So that's the basics. Like they want to access their plans, their specs, whatever file they need to be able to look at during the day. So that that's like level one of collaboration. That's just, you have access to the information. Level two is really when you start solving the coordination of work.
So coordination of work that can be between, for example, a GC and a sub, or between the sub and the crew that sort of electricians. Running about the site and basically what they're able to do is for example, they're able to preplan their action plan for the day where all the tasks, all the interventions are preloaded as tasks.
We use the detail, we see inspection checklist with the references. Of the, equipment they have to install and they're able to run that through the site, just follow the progress, document it on the fly with like photos and notes and annotations. And at the end of the day the last step of every construction crew is you generate a progress report to validate that you were done at the end of the day and that you're moving on.
And so if you do those three things really well, you really have crews that move faster. You know, I a plague of construction is that it's consecutive workdays where you do the work during the day, and you do the reports during the night and putting an end to that was one of the big goals we had when we started.
[00:07:30] Hugh Seaton: Actually, I want to dwell on that for a minute. So some of what you're saying here is that that customers of yours will come to you and say, I'm not staying up till 10 o'clock at night, or getting up at 4:00 AM to finish reports. Are you hearing a lot of that?
[00:07:44] Yves Frinault: Yeah. I mean, like we run a survey every year, the company's about eight years old.
We ran that survey from, from the first year where the product was live, which was probably the second year of the company. And the feedback has always been the same. Like we save about an hour a day to each of our user. And you have to keep in mind that the vast majority of our users are people that are performing work. Like you were talking about electricians or HVAC guys doing their work. And what, where are we saving them time? We're saving them time when, when they're on the job site and they need an approval for, let's say a small change that is going to be meaningless in terms of schedule and costs, but they just need to validate that and boom, they're able to get that on the job site without stopping their work.
Or the second piece, of course, that I was mentioning before at the end of the day, because if you've done all of your coordination in the tool, generating the report at the end of the day and so that's a big boost for those guys.
If you think more about general contractors a hundred percent of what a field engineer or like a project manager does is coordination. So the time saving from them are huge. We're talking like multiple hours a day. When I look at the surveys from GCs.
[00:08:54] Hugh Seaton: So, I want to make sure we're clear on this. Who is using it the most? Who are your customers most often? Is it, is it the field, the GCs, or is it sub-trade teams.
[00:09:06] Yves Frinault: In terms of who buys Fieldwire it's 50% GC, 50% subs. But in terms of the users themselves, it's overwhelmingly subcontractors, because when a subcontractor buys Fieldwire, they buy it for themselves.
And so it's 100%.Sub-contractors when a general contractor buys Fieldwire, usually to improve the way they work with their subs. And so for one individual on the general contractor side, they usually have two users in the trades. So it's kind of like a one cert./two cert split for the GC coverage.
[00:09:38] Hugh Seaton: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.
Cause you're really talking about work put in place as opposed to supervisory of other people putting work in place. You know so I'm thinking about this one hour a day. I don't know if you remember this, but Steve jobs was famous for motivating people by saying yes. Yes. It's only one or two seconds, but you know, across 10 million people you're saving lives.
So. If you think about one hour a day and there's about 260, I just Googled it while you were talking 260 work days a year, that's 10, almost 11 full days of someone's life. You give them back that's to be celebrated.
[00:10:13] Yves Frinault: It absolutely does. And if you think about how you get to that one hour that's really the craftsmanship.
And I see the difference between. The great pieces of software that people love to use and the pieces of software that people get frustrated by, right? It's in the micro-interaction I'm just able to write very quickly to my supervisor to get an answer. And the cost to me is minimal and I'm doing it rather than, oh, like I have to give him a call and I'm, and I have to, to find 15 minutes to get that same approval.
And so when you reduce the amount of efforts that people have to expand to do simple things, They just move faster, like a lot faster. And people often discard that as, because it's very hard to calculate, but like, what we see is that you can really help people. Reduce the grind of getting their work done with good software.
[00:11:09] Hugh Seaton: You know, what's interesting in the software world, when you talk to developers, as you know, they'll use words like context switching and the idea there is what it sounds like. If I'm focused on one thing and you pull me out of it to focus on something else, it takes you, I mean, there are estimates that are crazy, like up to 40 minutes to get your head back into it. I think 10 minutes isn't a crazy assumption. So that means every time somebody's stopping to do documentation or something like that, and really getting into it, as opposed to just tapping something, you know, there's a difference between really needing to engage with software and being able to get what you want done easily, because then you don't really switch contexts.
It really means you've just kind of doing something in the flow of what else you're doing. And I think that's some of what you're describing, right? As you're trying to be as in the flow of their work as you can.
[00:11:58] Yves Frinault: Yup. And we actually talk a lot about that very specific word, which is context. When we talk about product at Fieldwire. Tasks are essentially a little bubbles of context. You have the task, which is the work that needs to be done. And it's assigned to me, let's say as an electrician I have my checklist in that task, which is all the various inspections I need to carry out to validate that everything works well. I also have the various specs that are attached to that task.
I have maybe a thread of discussion that I had an engineer the week before, because we weren't agreeing on some of the details of that and all of that is contained in that task. And so basically I don't have to look for the information. The information is right there. And at the end of the day, because very often we have customers that are telling us, "we do have Dropbox and we put photos there and we have these other software that we have that we use for chat. And we have these other software that we use for viewing our plans. What does Fieldwire do differently?" And very often we tell them like, once you've experienced how connected it is, like basically you can view photo and you're like, oh, what is this?
And then you click on that photo and it takes you to a task. And you're like, oh, and then you have the entire thread of discussion that went with that task, and then you click on that. It takes you to a plan. That immediate navigation we've taken something that might have taken minutes or even seconds if you were really fast and we've turned that into milliseconds and suddenly you have that perfect context that you've never had on a job site before.
And that's what I think makes our user rave. I mean, if you look at our reviews online, I think those are all jobsite people just raving that they've never had something that good before.
[00:13:40] Hugh Seaton: And I think you're seeing that more and more across construction is that the software that is successful is, is as seamless and simple as possible as opposed to throwing a million options.
It doesn't mean on the back end, you can't have configuration and all that, but out of the gate, it needs to be it needs to be really simple. This idea of tasks being bubbles of context is a really cool way of putting it. I love that.
So I wanted to ask, as you were talking and introducing the company, you mentioned that you're, you're unusually global talk... I just can't help myself, talk a little bit about how you find some of what you do in different countries, one versus the other. Are there differences you see and how you need to go to market or how people use the product or is it all quite similar.
[00:14:28] Yves Frinault: I mean, so maybe we can, we can answer the question of why is Fieldwire so global for the size of the company?
I think it has to do with the way we went to market. We started in a market that was completely new. I mean, today it's a lot more obvious than that that a craftsmen is going to have a smartphone in its pocket. When we started Fieldwire it was still the era where we would go visit a construction company and they would say, oh, you're crazy, your craftsmen is never going to use a smartphone, they can barely use a pen and we would get thrown out sometimes and we're like, you're wrong.
You know, like the one thing in Silicon valley that we have is I don't think we live in the future, but in terms of the adoption of technology from a consumer perspective, I think we're usually maybe a year or two ahead of the rest of the U S and for us, it was just so mind-blowingly obvious that everybody was going to have a smartphone. Right. And the reality is construction is not necessarily an industry that adopts early. I think usually the military gets it, then, then everybody gets it. And then after that, when everybody gets a construction gets into and I think we were doing our best to change that, but sometimes that's a little true.
And so when we started. Basically, we didn't want to have to explain really why what we were doing was valuable. We were very convinced that it was going to be valuable. We had seen it work in other industries and we were like, there is no reason why this doesn't exist in construction. And because we have that really bottom up self service approach of you found it- you find it, you deploy it for yourself without talking to anyone at Fieldwire. And if it works, you know, find a credit card, start paying for it. And if it works for your team, then maybe we get your project. And once we get your project, the reality is once we get two or three projects, because a company or usually between like 50 or a hundred users, usually the, the usage explodes, because at that point we do go traditional and we, we started engaging with the company with a very simple question:
we say we have 50 to a hundred people with your company, there is only two paths forward. Either you saying that what we do is valuable and here's the number or the emails of your own employees and go talk to them either. And then let's expand and let's have everyone.
Either you don't think it's valuable. You should throw us out and, and stop using our software. Unusually, it goes to the first the first way. But so because we have that bottom up approach for us starting a project like in San Francisco, where the headquarter of the company is, was honestly as easy as starting a project in Sydney or in London or in Paris.
We started growing in those random places. Like we have customers in Chile, in Argentina, in Kazakhstan in like the middle east, and we don't have anybody over there selling fields. It's just they have Google over there too. And when you type construction management software, they find us just, just as well as anybody else.
And th the main difference is they're able to start using Fieldwire when they're not able to start using the others. And so they, they start using it. They're like, it works well. The price is competitive. And, and then and then when you, you have those, those projects starting, like, I think Built, for example, in Australia We, I think we got three projects from Built completely independently from each other before we started doing an enterprise agreement with them.
And we still not have anybody in Australia, which we might when they have like we're getting to a scale now where the company is getting pretty big. We're a hundred people now. So we have like opening an Australian office. I'm pretty sure I could find 10 people at Fieldwire tomorrow morning ready to move to Australia.
So that's really the answer, like, do I think the distribution model made it so that for us starting a project, anywhere in the world is equally easy.
[00:18:15] Hugh Seaton: That's interesting. And in the beginning, Yeah. It's well, let me back up, it sounds like you, you very much benefited from the fact that, that you were early as an app on people's phones, right?
So that here they are discovering, it's probably not true anymore, but in the beginning, people are discovering apps and they're realizing that they're useful for other things. And it's almost natural that they'd say, hang on a minute, these guys have something that's useful. And it looks like an app, even though the backend I'm sure is more sophisticated than that.
So that you, you kind of rode a little bit of a wave in the beginning. Is that, does that sound about right?
[00:18:53] Yves Frinault: I think that sounds right. I think the bar for capturing people's attention when we started was a lot lower than where it is now. I'm really happy that I am not starting Fieldwire now.
Because you can petition to be honest, he's fierce. And you have to be really, really good to be a notable player in this market right now. Back when we started there was a lot less competition and you could, you could do very streamlined offering and still captivate people's attention on that.
The one thing that was really strange when we started, because we started as a full platform with a web portal and a mobile iPhone and Android portal was that very often. In people's mind, they didn't think that you could access Fieldwire on web. And so we had many users that would exclusively use us on mobile, and then they would say, oh, this is a little bit weird to do on mobile.
And then we were like, yes, because it's just very cumbersome to do it on mobile. So we recommend you do it on the web portal. And they were like, there is a web portal? And so that happened so many times. We literally, we have. Pictures where there's a phone and a laptop on the same image on an icon, because we have to convey this idea that yes, it's not just on mobile.
[00:20:06] Hugh Seaton: Yeah. Well, I think also back then, the idea of being responsive and having things in both places was still kind of sinking in, but I'll tell you, it says something about your design and your UX, that at a time when it's true, people were kind of exploring and getting comfortable with, with apps. So maybe you benefited from that, but at the same time, they weren't used to using construction technology like they are today.
So the fact that you introduced probably a lot of people, this is the first time they'd use something other than Excel, I think it's is pretty cool. And again, who knows, I'm sure you're getting people from both now. There's still a lot of people that use Excel, but I'm sure you're getting folks at switch from other other platforms, but in the beginning you were talking people out of paper and Excel and that's a, that's a heck of a jump.
[00:20:50] Yves Frinault: No for sure. The other thing I think we did well, is as a startup, we could afford to be really radical in our approach. And our approach was we are going to get adoption in the field or die trying really that was, that was the approach. We were a very burn your ship approach, which was, it has to work for the field guys.
If it doesn't work well in the field Then, then it doesn't work. where every other more established company at the time usually had a desktop app or like a web browser app and was trying to expand on mobile. For us mobile was the that's how we're gonna exist and win. And it really has forced us to be very good on mobile from the get-go.
And, and I think it has carried us over the years.
[00:21:40] Hugh Seaton: That's fantastic. So let's get back to some tactical stuff here. Let's say that you're a pipe pipe fitting contractor, and you want to start using Fieldwire. How does that usually go? What should, what does somebody do to go from one to, let's say five people.
How does that normally go?
[00:21:56] Yves Frinault: So in, in every company and, and I'm speaking from experience, I would say for maybe you have like 10 project manager or 10 field engineers at this pipefitting company. You're usually going to find one or two that are a little bit geared towards trying new sayings, trying to improve processes and things like that.
And in the general, that's what we call champions at Fieldwire. And those are usually the ones that are being proactive and asking themselves the question. Could we do this thing better, or we really should change this old software a year that nobody really remembers why we picked it in the first place.
And so in general, if there is enough leeway in this company the champions are going to look around. And so usually they're going to find us quite easily, like on Google, on the app store, like they could type, like, I don't know, like punch list or like construction management software. There's a lot of queries that are going to return Fieldwire.
And then they're probably going to try a couple tools and install them like Fieldwire's going to be very easy. They can just sign up for it. And they, they will immediately find themselves with the free version of the app both on their browser and mobile. And then they're probably going to be able to run around.
You know, within I don't know, like a couple minutes they can load a, a set of construction plan and we're going to do the versioning automatically and, and boom, you have a team of three to five people running onsite. Just assigning tasks, taking photos, looking at they're looking at their plans. And, and usually they're going to try to configure a Fieldwire, like basically, you know, the basic organization of Fieldwire to fit kind of like the pipe fitting work that they, that they do.
And, and at some point usually either they start they can start finding, they can find a credit card to just basically add more people or there they're going to start generating enough, enough usage on the platform that it's going to show up on our dashboard. And then we can have somebody that's going to call them and be like, Hey, do you need any help?
So we have this amazing team that we call the construction team, which is made of ex-construction people, usually a lot of field engineers and project managers, coming both from the trades and from general contractors and that's the primary interface with our customers. And and usually if the, if the usage is sophisticated enough or the company is big enough, we can help them like, think about how they can do it.
And so the crazy part is that for every person that buys Fieldwire after having talked to somebody on the team, there's another person that we've never talked to. That buys Fieldwire, and keeps being mind-boggling to me that that there is this vast amount of customers that, that start using Fieldwire and paying for it. And we just can't figure out who they are before they before they start paying us. So that's that's always an interesting piece.
[00:24:39] Hugh Seaton: That's really cool. Mean that's the, that's the way freemium works, isn't it? Is it your, you have some number of people using it and then but wow. That's a real Testament to how easy it is to, to sign up. That's kind of why I asked is, you know, to illustrate how easy it is to get rolling with it.
Awesome. So we've got a couple minutes left and I, I would like to turn our attention to, especially someone who's been at it now for eight years, where do you see this going?
What, what are, you know, without getting. Roadmaps and all that, but you know, where do you see the field going? Where do you see, you know, where you'd like to see yourselves going?
[00:25:13] Yves Frinault: I think the market has matured a lot. And, I think it's good. Uh, I think we went from a market where everything that is on mobile is exciting and the market went to this I would call it over fragmentation where every company is using like five to 10 apps and it's a little bit of a nightmare for everybody. And some of them now we're realizing are, are very pretty, but not producing real results for the companies. Others are working well, but they're not good, like wide enough in their, in their, in their use case.
And so we're really entering this age of reason and consolidation in the market. People are starting to have good expectations in terms of what they want. They don't also have unreasonable expectation. Like these apps should do everything from filing my taxes, calculating the right bid for my project and also ordering lunch.
So they understand that there is a set of real realistic expectation for a certain set of users. And so I think this is a very exciting moment in the market where for example, people have understood that the needs of the field and the needs of the office are slightly different. And, and they need to pay attention to both sides.
I would say that five years ago, the needs of the field were grossly underestimated. It's not the case anymore. And so I think we're going to see this very interesting convergence between what we call field management and project management. And so the idea is that finally bridging that gap between the field and the office, we're seeing that happen, especially at the subcontractors level, they're very effective at doing that. And most of them are doing that because they're building up their capability to integrate software effectively together.
At the, at the GC level, it's sometimes a bit more complex because owners very often come with a set of requirement on use this, use that and sometimes it makes it a bit more difficult for GCs, but they're, they're building up their capability.
So I'm very excited about, about this era. I think construction now is very serious about software. I think there's a lot of understanding of what makes a good selection of software. And in general, we boil it down to three things, which is, does it adopt like if software is not used, doesn't matter what it does because nobody's using it.
The second thing. Does it scale, meaning that are you going to be able to put it on all your projects? And it's not going to be too cumbersome on the small ones and it's not going to be like, like undergunned for the big ones. And the last thing is, does it do what you expected it to do? For the users that the software is for.
And if you can find a software that does those three things well, I think you you're going to do fine and so more and more we're seeing companies able to run very good selection processes on software. They're giving a little bit of leeway to their champions to, to experiment and find things.
And when, and then they look at the winners of, of those local experiments and they try to scale them and develop them. And so I think it's a very healthy process.
[00:28:20] Hugh Seaton: I think you're right. And it's really exciting to hear you say it from the perspective of someone who's seen this change from really early days to increasingly sophisticated and professional innovation teams that are sort of the, the inbound way of trying out new things.
Yves this has been a fantastic conversation. I really enjoyed learning more about what you guys do. Thank you.
[00:28:42] Yves Frinault: I appreciate it. Hugh it's a, it's a, it was a bit off the cuff, but I, it was it was a, it's very enjoyable from my perspective as well. And by the way, like from your last question, in terms of where we're going as a company we, we keep growing, we're hiring a lot.
We're hiring everywhere in the U S we're hiring in Europe. If you know good engineers, construction engineers, salespeople, operation people, and they're passionate about this space. Please send them to us or they can reach out to me directly on LinkedIn. That would be good as well.
[00:29:10] Hugh Seaton: That's great. Awesome.