John F. Clark 
The startup ecosystem is full of memories of marketers taking the road much less traveled. Many have left secure high-flying jobs to comply with their desires of taking off. It’s approximately believing in a single’s goals and taking them forward, undeterred with the aid of fear of threat and failure.
Sameer Nayar’s story is not specific. He turned into Managing Director and Head of Real Estate Finance for Asia-Pacific location at Credit Suisse, deploying billions of dollars of debt and equity. He left all of it to the mission at the startup route.
At the peak of his career, Sameer made a promise to himself. Inspired with the aid of Apple founder Steve Jobs’ autobiography, he decided that if he persevered to paintings, it would simplest be for himself. He felt he might want to shake up the real property construction enterprise with an era supplying.
“I always dreamt of being an entrepreneur considering my early days but did now not right now soar in,” says Sameer. After resigning from Credit Suisse, he looked at numerous options, which blanketed starting an NBFC or investment banking platform. However, he realized his heart was not in it.
Bringing tech into construction
After some studies, and given his beyond experience, Sameer felt that the real property enterprise become the gap to be in. The marketplace size is $a hundred and fifty billion but what was even greater interesting changed into that this area becomes incredibly untouched by software technology, particularly to control work techniques.
“Any exchange within the actual property industry will manifest via generation. It became like a one-way street, and if one had the patience, the rewards would be abundant,” says Sameer.
During his studies, he becomes amazed to locate that the general public of the real property builders, including the large players, has nonetheless been using Excel spreadsheets to manage their huge and complicated workflow. “This business runs in large part on pen and paper with some huge actual property builders nonetheless signing their invoices manually,” feedback Sameer.
He did toy with the idea of building an e-commerce market for this enterprise but decided in opposition to it, as he becomes keen on fixing the actual-world problems in India. So, in April 2016, he, with co-founder Sarit Sethi started BuildSupply, an organization resource-making plans (ERP) software program for the actual estate industry. The aim is to build end-to-end workflow automation software for the entire production system.
Automated execution to handover
It took about 18 months for Sameer and his group to develop the ERP era answer that automates the whole technique, beginning from inception going all of the ways as much as crowning glory and handover.
Once the design of the mission is prepared, BuildSupply takes over and automates the whole technique, which incorporates portions including invoice of quantity, procurement method, tendering those programs online, invoicing & billing, and labor planning.
“Our software program manages from the complete lifecycle of construction starting from the piece of land going all of the ways up to the give up that constructing,” Sameer says.
BuildSupply’s solution is a complete-scale ERP software program with eleven one-of-a-kind modules for the actual estate industry. Still, it no longer has the capability of sales, finance, and taxation as Sameer says there are lots of different gamers supplying such answers.
The starting become hard no longer due to competition but the “popularity quo mindset” of the actual property industry. The region, which was at ease working in a specific manner, did no longer want to implement a new software program.
Sameer talked to over one hundred twenty actual property builders while developing the generation solution taking numerous inputs. He additionally confronted skepticism on whether or not the product would succeed. “The largest task becomes simple adoption, and we desired to change the whole perception,” he says.
In several of the conferences with real estate developers who had doubts about using BuildSupply’s ERP answer, Sameer’s solution changed into: “Taj Mahal turned into constructed without AutoCAD however nowadays you’ve got it and it a higher way to build.”
Sameer needed to persuade actual property developers that the use of their ERP solution could have an instantaneous effect on their profitability, as there may be complete manipulate on their workflow method.
Taking over the construction space
Today, BuildSupply’s answer manages forty-five million square ft of creation area with 10 actual estate builders on board. It is presently having a presence in 3 locations – Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru. This startup seems like a real estate project that might be Rs 50 crore and above. It has leading builders, which include Godrej Properties, Vatika Group, Tribeca Developers, Omaxe Limited, Nelson India, as its customers.
BuildSuppy gives its product on a subscription-primarily based service, that is, a SaaS model and in keeping with challenge pricing. The average price ticket size of its product degrees from $30,000 to $70,000 12 months.
The BuildSupply founder has now not confronted any direct competition of their product space, although some organizations attempt to make inroads. The majority of the software solution companies in the real property area are largely centered on accounting or the sales factor. “This is huge space, and there may be opposition. However, we’ve got ahead to begin,” Sameer says.
This bootstrapped assignment, which has seed investment from Sameer, had raised a small round of funding in November last from Gree Ventures of Japan. It is now elevating a Series A round that, Sameer says, could be a sizable spherical.
BuildSupply has laid out an ambitious roadmap, which incorporates touching approximately three hundred million of rectangular feet space of real estate construction from the current degree of forty-five million. It also plans to expand into different metros, taking it to ten, which can faucet into around two hundred clients.
Sameer loves to measure the growth of BuildSupply on exclusive parameters: it has grown from ten human beings to 25, 0 customers to 10 paying ones, and zero square ft to forty-five million square toes.
Plans
The founder of BuildSupply additionally has different plans related to the actual property industry. He is looking at potentialities in e-commerce and finance, a $one hundred twenty billion industry. “There are larger inefficiencies in each of these segments, and we will help resolve them through generation,” he says.
In the e-commerce space, he plans to release a reverse auction marketplace that can be used by any participant in the actual property industry. On the finance front, he believes, “We see a huge gap in phrases of finance available for small and medium firms who are a part of dealer atmosphere and now not the real property developers.” According to him, those actual property contractors do not have to get entry to running capital and, therefore, they see this as an untapped market.
