Construction managers negotiate headcount rather than output because progress goes unmeasured
Aviv Leibovici · He spent 5 months working with customers before building—then grew to $10s of millions ARR. | Avi... · PMF Show · Sep 22, 2025 · at 28:23
Aviv Leibovici is the co-founder of BuildDots, an AI construction tracking platform. He explains why traditional construction site management focuses on worker attendance rather than actual deliverables.
0:00 / 0:22exact quote · 22.8s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“If you think about it, they're provided, they're being provided a service to say, do the electrical works. And they never talk about how much work will be done. They talk about how many men will be here. That's what they negotiate. No, no, no. You need to have 12 men here. No, I'm going to have eight. And when you think about it, wait, that's ridiculous. They should be saying, no, you need to finish two floors a week or one floor a week, but they're debating manpower because that's the only thing that they can measure.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Aviv Leibovici
Customer interviews fail because they reveal idealized workflows instead of reality
“I'm a very firm believer, and I actually took that from back then, and it's still true today, that you will only understand the problems that you could solve and the potential solutions if you're there. Everyone in product says that you have to speak to your c…”
Procore dominates construction documentation but does not manage day-to-day building work
“There's project management software. That is the Procore of the world. And Procore is by far the leader of that. And that is typically things where that's where you have all your documentation, be it design, be it other, through your spec, other things. That i…”
Field software fails because multi-tiered construction subcontractors will not self-report progress
“It's very difficult because of the information, because the people actually doing the work are subcontractors of subcontractors of subcontractors, and they're not going to report what's done, what's not done in the now. And then that means that to know what's …”
90% of early Buildots customers got next to nothing from the product
“10% of my customers did fantastic things with it. And 90% of them did next to nothing with it.”
Time-in-app is the wrong success metric for enterprise construction field tools
“And we ended up realizing that even to the level of viewer tracking, Like the minutes that they use this product every week as a metric. And that is such a wrong metric because the thing that you need is to succeed to deliver to them what they need in 10 minut…”
Construction schedules fail as designed, forcing site managers to rely on intuition
“And suddenly you realize that what you're talking about, I am talking about helping them manage a process in which there are different people involved, each with a limited understanding of the process itself. And therefore you have a schedule that isn't really…”