$875 million with a 'boring' SaaS product

So I'm a product manager in a B2B SaaS industry that most people would generally consider 'kinda boring'...

It's risk management and compliance. Still awake? Good. Then like me, you see the fun in product-building no matter the niche!

Recently I was listening to a podcast about the story of PlanGrid, the YC-backed startup in the construction industry that sold to Autodesk for $875 million.

And it really inspired me to keep on building products that might not be the 'sexiest', but solve real problems for real users.

The Story

PlanGrid was founded by Tracy Young in 2011 who saw a massive opportunity in the construction industry.

Now I've never worked in construction, but I think everyone knows what a blueprint is. It's the technical drawing that sets out the specifications for a building.

Well back in 2011, all these would still be drawn up by architects and engineers and handed out to workers on site. It would create an absolute nightmare in terms of version control.

Imagine moving a wall 100 feet in one direction and having to update every single blueprint that has a dependency on it. No thanks! And what's worse is that means all work has to stop until every drawing is updated and distributed to the team. That's money down the drain...

You can see where this is going... That's right, PlanGrid was the first company to digitise all these huge, highly technical drawings and put them on an iPad.

For reference, back in 2011, the cloud was not all the rage it is today. So turning up to a construction site with a bunch of iPads and convincing one of the least technically-native industries to start using them every day seemed like a hard sell.

In fact, one of the key stumbling blocks the team came up against was that iPads could get damaged or completely destroyed on busy construction sites. Something most of us probably have never had to worry about when building our products...

Or maybe we do...

But PlanGrid made it work, and very quickly too. From day one the founding team used their connections within the construction industry to get buy-in from some initial customers that harshly felt the pain of the problem.

Fast forward just 7 years (!) and PlanGrid sells to AutoDesk for a whopping $875 million.

The moral of the story

There's a lot indie hackers can take away from this. Chiefly though is the idea that we always have to be building something 'sexy'. It's just not true. Software is literally everywhere if you just look between the cracks.

Plus, the sheer amount of barriers in the way of PlanGrid's success in terms of dealing with a largely entrenched industry shows us that validation is so important.

The best problems to solve are the ones that cause the most pain. If customers are willing to jump through hoops to use your product, then you know you're onto something.

It's something I think a lot of founders miss and I'm focusing on it a lot more as a product manager, and as I build my own products too.

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