An old colleague who started Beta Boom posted a call for founders on LinkedIn. Seeing that post made me ask my cofounder Sarah, and another friend, a question over beers: "if you could fix one thing about your work with software, what would it be?"
Sarah, an architect, didn't answer right away. She came back the next day, and her answer was intriguing.
She came back with this: the most frustrating part of her practice is the heartache, for her and for her clients, when she completes a design, it goes out to bid and comes back over budget. And then she has to redesign, trying to keep the spirit while value engineering things out while guessing what will be enough to wrangle a project back into budget.
What she wanted was a tool that could help her evaluate what her designs would cost so she could focus her effort on designing within budget, essentially value engineering up front when it has the most impact and before anyone is emotionally invested in things that can't get built.
There's a chart that's been part of architecture and construction thinking for almost twenty years called the MacLeamy Curve. MacLeamy's chart was originally an argument for IPD and BIM adoption to get the whole team collaborating earlier on a shared model. But underneath that recommendation is the same problem Sarah faces: without reliable cost information, early decisions get made not knowing whether or not they are in budget.
Sarah couldn't find any tools that helped her with that so we decided to build it.
Here's what that looks like inside Constructus: swapping one floor framing assembly for another raises the cost by more than $7,000.
Getting that information was a 30-second check. Imagine how those 30 seconds can reduce the heartache for architects everywhere. What could it mean for your business? Email us at amy@constructus.io.