The tool looks sick. I think the copilot vs black box approach is great. I found the demo to be enjoyable and satisfying to watch despite having no experience in the concrete estimation industry.
This is out of my wheelhouse but had a couple of thoughts. When you clicked P1, it found all of them. What happens if it doesn't? This would have been good to see in the video.
Also, I'm sure people familiar with these documents will have no trouble but was thinking it could be cool to do some effect to make references glow/be more noticeable at least temporarily when you are skipping around to them. Maybe some zoom controls too.
Anyways, good luck!
A friend works in construction and they have details of how much materials each part of a construction needs. Most of it comes directly from the (not sure the name) SW they use to calculate the structure/ draw the plans.
I was going to say, I don't understand what this does that Revit doesn't already do better. I guess it's a fun demo, but I doubt this was a problem that needed solving.
Do you doubt the tool is solving a concrete problem?
We'll see if it solidifies a foothold
Looks like a useful tool but I don't know anything about construction.
Love the transparent AI helper implementation though. I feel like you don't even need to say it's AI because it's so helpful but not in your face but maybe that's what people are searching for.
If the AI miscalculates, and building crashes and people die - who is held responsible?
The plans are the input here, not the output. The AI prepares cost estimates. It isn’t responsible for what is getting built.
So basically you built an estimation wrapper ready to use - without any guarantees whatsoever? Someones still needs to double-check?
why is that different than other LLMs
Estimation is by definitely not final. Did you watch the demo? It’s a workflow tool.
You can trivialize anything like this, salesforce is just a Postgres wrapper, doesn’t mean it’s not valuable.
I wonder if this approach to starting a vertical business the founders have 0 experience in has ever panned out. I know YC pushes the B2B SaaS angle as hard as possible, searching for "underserved" niches, but seems like if you don't have true industry experience, it can't possibly work out.
Sad because I’ve been in construction for 6 years, have a degree in civil and built the exact same product. We applied for S26 but haven’t heard back, and I think we have more revenue than these guys. It’s kinda sad what YC is doing nowadays. They say they want founder problem fit but ignore it when it’s right in their face.
https://buildwise-psi.vercel.app/
I know you don’t judge a book by its cover, but a vercel extension does not look professional nah ?
it’s a good point. Their product likely is legit, but i even judge individual contributors who use these site builders for their resumes or portfolios and stick with the subdomain. It’s that last mile effort towards completeness i think.
Travis Kalanick had zero taxi experience and Brian Chesky had zero hospitality experience.
Now they created new models to existing paradigms, because I do tend to agree that founders that have verticalized experience tend to be far more successful (but perhaps arguably less 'disruptive')
Those were consumer apps, not B2B. No deep niche experience needed, Uber had to fight regulations but wasn't something industry knowledge would've helped with a ton