From Architects to Devs: Building Normatia (and the challenge of marketing to a traditional sector)
Hi everyone,
I’m Ricardo. For the past few years, I’ve been running SiloCreativo, a digital product agency based in Spain. We usually spend our days building web projects for clients, but today I want to share something different: a product of our own.
The story behind Normatia starts during a bit of downtime between agency projects. I met up for drinks with some old friends from university. See, before I got into code and design, I trained as an architect.
As we were catching up, the conversation turned to work, and they started venting about the Technical Building Code. It struck me that while I spend my days working with modern stacks and optimized databases, my friends are still navigating thousands of pages of static PDFs to do their calculations. It felt like their workflow was stuck in 2005.
That dinner was the spark. Since 3 out of the 4 members of our agency team are former architects, we realized we were uniquely positioned to solve this. We have the domain knowledge to understand the problem and the technical skills to fix it.
So, we started building.
The Product
We didn't want to build just another PDF viewer. We wanted to turn the regulations into a queryable, intelligent database. We are using Astro for the frontend (performance is non-negotiable for us) and PostgreSQL for the backend, along with some AI vision models to ingest the complex data tables found in legal documents.
Where we are now
The MVP is live. The tech works, but now comes the part that scares us more than the code: Marketing to a traditional sector.
Architects aren't hanging out on Product Hunt or Indie Hackers. They are busy on construction sites or buried in CAD software.
To start, we are going back to the source. We are onboarding those same former classmates and local studios we know personally. We are looking for brutal, honest feedback to see if the tool actually saves them time or if it’s just a "nice to have."
I have a question for this community:
For those of you building B2B SaaS for non-tech industries (construction, legal, medical, etc.), how did you get your first 100 users? Did you rely entirely on cold outreach, or did you find digital channels where these professionals actually hang out?
I’d also appreciate any feedback on our landing page (normatia.com) from a product perspective.
Thanks for reading.
Ricardo.
