From Construction to Tech: Trestle's Innovative Solution with Victor Zhang

Welcome to the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast, where we talk with entrepreneurs, founders, and leaders at B2B services, tech, and SaaS companies to learn the systems and processes they've used to create success for their business. We'll also learn from marketing and sales experts to provide insights to help you grow your business. I'm your host, Mark Osborne, and the podcast is brought to you by Modern Revenue Strategies and their 10X ROI B2B Growth Guarantee. Schedule a free diagnostic call to learn the fastest path to double your B2B revenues in just 90 days. Hello and welcome to another episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint Podcast. My name is Mark Osborne. I am your host, and today I'm very excited to welcome Victor Zhang. Now I'm going to read his bio to make sure I get everything right, because he's got, he's got a lot going on. So Victor Zhang, PE, is the co-founder and CEO of Trestle. Now Trestle is a subcontractor and supplier management platform for the heavy construction industry that helps turn past lessons learned into cost savings on future projects. So we're going to talk about some of those lessons learned. Trestle solves many of the problems that Victor experienced during the 15 years he spent working in the heavy construction industry. We're actually going to talk about how his industry expertise led to the business. And he has led estimating teams on some of the largest infrastructure projects in the country, including the international tri-venture of Dragados, Vinci, and Flatiron on the $3.8 Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel project in Virginia. Victor has a bachelor's degree in civil engineering, a master's degree in construction management, and is a licensed civil engineer in the state of New York. Victor, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me, Mark.

So that's obviously a bunch of stuff happening there in your bio. I'm so excited to take our conversation. Why don't you tell us what you really do every day there at Trestle?

Yeah, absolutely. You know, the CEOship in a startup is definitely something new to me. Like you were saying, I spent 15 years in the construction space, so the day-to-day changes very much. You know, I have to say that I'm not technical in any way. My CTO is, thank goodness, and we have a great engineering team. So I take care of everything else here that is not related to the code. Like you mentioned, you know, our product is helping to retain a lot of knowledge that goes kind of uncollected right now. And the easiest way to think about that really is, you know, when you want to go and eat a taco, right, you're probably going to search on Yelp, or you want to go and stay somewhere, you're going to go on TripAdvisor or Hotels.com. You know, we joke that we won't even watch a movie these days without first checking on Rotten Tomatoes. But in the construction industry, there is no system to be able to do that for all the thousands of subcontractors and vendors that somebody works with.

Ah.

And so, you know, all of that is very tribal. You usually pick up the phone, you call someone, and As you know, how you feel about something at the end, right, of that experience with that project really is not the same as what it was like throughout the entire length of that project. And so we've created a system that's able to actually automate a lot of the collection of that information. So you can see, you know, what is it like to work with a particular guy who is maybe installing sidewalk for you instead of just, you know, what was it like at the end of maybe the 6-month, 8-month, 12-month engagement? How was it, you know, every month working with them? Were there ways that they were doing really well that you want to bring back on a future project? Were there teams that were working really well that they brought on, or people that, you know, on the opposite, right? What were the failures? How can you, you know, prevent the same situation from happening in a future project so you don't have the same losses over and over again?

So this almost sounds like it's a project management diary type thing that can help you get better at managing your project. Because you're taking the lessons learned, but at the same time, it serves as a reflection of what it's like to work with a particular subcontractor. Is that right?

Yeah, absolutely. This kind of came about because, you know, as I was running estimating, a lot of the things that we had to do was select between a bunch of different quotes to do one particular type of work, right? Imagine that we had to buy windows. Well, I have 4 different quotes for windows. They're all, you know, different in terms of their scope and also the pricing, but maybe I have experience with one of them, so I'm going to choose them again. Or maybe our executive leadership has experience, but just because we signed that contract and we always use them, right, I still don't know what pitfalls do I have to look out for when I sign that contract. And so, you know, we're really trying to solve for that problem, right? We want as much information collected, centralized for the company so that everyone has access to it. And so this way, you're also not concerned when You know, your 40-year veteran project manager or superintendent retires, he or she takes all of that knowledge, all that past experience with them and off into the sunset. And now as a company, you're kind of starting from scratch again.

That's great. Well, and it's so much more powerful than just a review because as you said, the review sort of summarizes in 150 characters what 6 months worth of working together was like. And people are typically like, well, they were good. You know, would recommend, whereas capturing all the sort of nuance of, well, this part of the project took a little longer than we had scoped. I wish that I had thought about the contingencies of X, Y, or Z. That's really powerful and captures so much of what people are really looking for when they look for review sites is the actual experience of going through the project. So that's really neat. So we were talking a little bit before about how, you know, sort of this came from your experience in the marketplace. Now you had this challenge. And so then you as an entrepreneur identified, well, this is a market opportunity. And we talked about, you know, sometimes there is risk. And, you know, engineers that, you know, are working for a company, they're like, I could build this better, or I could build this other thing over here that I wish I had. But really having an understanding of the customer and what they really need is key to success because if you build what you want, that might not be what the customer wants. Tell us a little bit about the process you went through in sort of ensuring that you were building something that there was a market for and translating your experience into an actual product.

Yeah. Yeah, you know, like I said, I was a first-time founder, and I think we definitely, when my co-founder and I started, we definitely had this idea of, oh, you know, we understand everything there is to understand about construction, right? We're going to go build whatever. And I think we really had a rude awakening on the very, very first product we built. We really didn't follow any of the best practices, right? Talk to customers, make sure that there is actually a market, validate your problem. And so I remember, you know, we had built this very, very, bare-bones MVP and gone out to talk to a bunch of people. And that night at the end of the conference, you know, after nobody had actually wanted to engage with our product, I was sitting there and, you know, really down. And I thought, wow, I really should go back to a problem that I understood. And so, you know, that was kind of the genesis of this idea. And what we did differently the second time around was we went and we actually called up all these connections that I had, having worked in this industry for, you know, over a decade. And it was very easy to get in the doors of, you know, different general contractors because now, you know, through joint ventures and just through working with people and then moving to new endeavors, there was a lot of different companies that I can engage with. And we ended up talking to, I think, about 40 different general contractors. And we said, hey, you know, here's what we're thinking about. How do you solve this problem? Do you have this problem? And once we started to see the pattern and we saw that, hey, there is actually, you know, an issue across the entire sector on how they're capturing these performance reviews and how they're getting this knowledge feedback, then we said, okay, maybe this is something that, that we want to tackle. But I think for us, one of the superpowers we always say that Trussell has is having that really deep industry network. We've seen a lot of people who kind of come into this space and they hear maybe one problem, much like we did the first time around, and they're like, hey, we're going to build it because we think we understand. And without really having the exposure to that network to be able to say, you know, hey, I'm going to call up somebody who works in this space, who lives this problem day to day and can actually give us a little bit of feedback. Now, one of the best things that we do whenever we think of a new idea, when we think of a new feature, I'll call up someone that I used to work with and we'll kind of throw it in front of them right there and then. So we don't have to waste a lot of time building something out for, you know, 2, 3, 4 weeks and then to be able to put it in front of a potential customer only for them to tell us, hey, that's no good. We get that feedback really, really quickly, and that's been super, super helpful for us.

Super smart and obviously right in the heart of those best practices of, you know, agile development and the Lean Startup and all those best practice ideas. So I'm curious if you go the sort of the next step of taking all those conversations, do you formalize that? Because one of the things that we see is that, you know, oftentimes, you know, companies fail to really have a formalized ideal customer profile that, has, has real solid description from a firmographic, but also like the business context they're operating in and a real solid understanding of their persona. They're just sort of like, yeah, I know my customer and they go from there. Did you really formalize all those things or did you just kind of wing it?

Definitely not in the beginning. I think in the beginning I thought that, hey, I understood the problem, right? This was, this was something that I was trying to solve for myself. I would buy this. So I don't need to go and formulate those profiles. And I think we learned pretty quickly once we started to go out there and actually try to sell a lot of the people, especially people that weren't in my direct network, where the buyer wasn't someone that I knew directly, that we need to have a better understanding. You know, in construction, really, it's kind of like 2 very different ends of the spectrum. When the companies are big enough, there's a lot of red tape, and it's very, very hard to figure out who within that company is the right person to make the decision. But at the same time, even though there's a lot of red tape, usually it is the guy at the very top or the girl at the very top, you know, a CEO, a COO, CFO, who's kind of doing that final sign-off. And so it took us a while to kind of figure that out. We did have to sit down and be like, all right, you know, these are our champions. This is like our path in. Okay, we're talking to these people. We need to get to the next step to the right person that we think needs to be in this chart. But that was definitely some tough learnings we had in the beginning. You know, with any kind of startup, right, if someone's willing to talk to you, especially in the beginning, man, you are just so excited. And it's a little bit of a rude awakening when you realize that you've been spending all this time talking to somebody who maybe doesn't have the buying power, right? Or maybe even the right person to be speaking with.

Yeah, that's one of the things we see is understanding that buying committee. Like, it's not just one person that at the top, like, you gotta sort of figure out your path to get there. And then also each of those different influencers on the, on that path, they have different preferred modes of communication. Some of them you know, would rather see a Loom video of you walking through specs, and others would, you know, sort of rather, you know, have a conversation, or others would rather read a white paper or a report. And so, like, really knowing those people is that path. Interesting that you talked about that your industry is, you know, sort of so based on relationships. And, you know, your industry knowledge was so vital. I know a lot of entrepreneurs have an idea for an industry that maybe they don't have all of that background and expertise. Maybe they don't have all of those relationships. You, you had the benefit of that. And, and obviously the, I, I would say the success ratio of, of companies that work, you know, go with what you know, the, the success ratio is a lot higher. But as people are moving into maybe some tangential or ancillary industries where they've got a good idea, Do you have any advice for other entrepreneurs or founders as they're trying to develop relationships in a new industry or maybe a new sector of their industry or develop that industry knowledge?

Yeah, and I would say, right, this is applicable maybe only for construction, but, you know, hopefully it can be adapted into other industries as well. For us, one of the big things we found that was super helpful was going to a lot of the industry events. You know, this is, like you said, an industry where people like to be face to face. They want to shake hands. We have our whole engineering team in one place here in New York because a lot of our initial customers are here and they want our engineers to be able to go to their office.

Yeah.

And so for us, you know, we really kind of held on to that belief and, you know, we don't take out a lot of, or in fact any kind of digital ads. We know that our market isn't there. But in the past 6 weeks, we've attended 3 different industry conferences. And, you know, when we're there, we know that, hey, this is who we are. This is Trestle. This is what we do, for better or for worse. You know, the first one we went to, it was funny. There might have been 50 different vendors there and only 2 software companies. It was ourselves and then another major, major brand. And the booth next to us was demonstrating new forms of ladders and railing. And then the guys across the aisle from us had these like 18-inch valves for pumps. And so we had a lot of people coming to us and they would look at our banner and they're like, oh man, like we really need to buy some temporary bridge. And like, that's what you guys do, right? Because your name is Trestle. And we're like, no, no, no, we're a software company. But that gave us an opportunity, right, to then stop them and say, hey, this is what we do, right? Get some notoriety there. And then by the time we got kind of to the last convention that we did about 2 weeks ago, it was much easier. You know, we met a lot of the people, maybe not those exact people, but people from their companies. We had a lot more background in kind of what their company did, right? And this way it was much easier to strike up that conversation. Oh, hey, I talked to so-and-so from your company in Ohio 2 weeks ago, and they're like, oh yeah, you know, it must have been this person. And, you know, whether that was the person we met or not was less important than kind of being able to start that conversation. I remember when I was still in industry, one of the things we always did was, you know, at that time we were already getting inundated with a lot of software sales calls. And, you know, pick up the phone and the first thing would be like, did you work in construction? Oh, you didn't? Thank you. I'm not interested in talking with you. And so, like you said, we don't really suffer from that right now because I can go and talk shop with anybody on the floor. But we did find that even for my CTO, who doesn't come from this space, having gone to a bunch of these, it was much easier for him to have these conversations, to feel like he belongs in there somewhere. And he jokes that he's got enough, like, verbal optionality, ammunition, whatever you want to call it, for a conversation. For about 5 minutes, right? So after that, everything he's learned about construction has been like used up already. And then he's like, I need to make sure that by then we've gotten into what it is that we do so we can start talking about that. But, you know, sometimes that's all you need, right, to kind of break through that barrier a little bit, to get a little bit of familiarity in the industry that maybe you don't have past experience in. And we definitely found those, those in-person events to be super, super helpful.

That's so it's really wise of you to recognize where your customer is and that sort of the channel that they use for, you know, discovery of sort of new opportunities is these in-person events because that's so important to them and not in digital, but in those conversations instead, which I'm sure there's a million startups that don't know the industry that are out there buying tons of ads, you know, chasing customers that that aren't really interested in engaging with them that way. And also, you know, so smart of you to sort of craft your message as you're going to market around where their needs are and sort of meeting them where they are and sort of, you know, bringing that to them. You talked about, you know, sort of relationship being, you know, such an important part of the industry. And I'm sure you experienced, you know, many people that have worked in an industry, those relationships are sort of an initial source of leads. I'm curious, and you talked about, you know, that from initial conversations when you're proving out the MVP and those things, how did you maximize sort of the network effect? So to move beyond people you knew into people you didn't know, or, you know, or have you been able to, or, you know, how are you thinking about that and approaching that as you're trying to sort of scale your business beyond your own personal network?

Yeah, that's definitely something that we think about a lot. And I would say that we certainly have not perfected it. We do, you know, our product is very much sales-led. We sell an enterprise-level product. You know, we wish we had something that people could just like click on, right? And then find the utility in it and then buy it and pay us the money. But we also think about how we can build some network effects into the product. So maybe I'm jumping ahead a little bit. I would say, you know, moving outside of our initial network, The first thing we did was just to utilize the network we had and see, hey, who do you know that I don't know right now that you can introduce me to? This again, right, is an industry where they have a lot of industrial groups. So, you know, in New York City, we have like the General Contractors Association. There are groups that focus specifically on tunneling or building dams, and they have annual meetings. They have these big holiday parties. And that's a great opportunity to go and say, hey, you know, so-and-so that I used to work with, can you introduce me to that person that I saw you talking to that I don't know? And that's a great way of having that warm intro. You know, I think the, the perfect solution there would be if you get, or if we can get one of our initial customers, right, to then make us that intro, and then they can also become that reference customer for us for this new lead that we're talking to. And then kind of as we're breaking, branching out from there, again, going to these conventions, incredibly helpful. I would say one of the things that I didn't realize, and maybe this is just like the inexperienced novice founder in me, Going to, you know, 3 conventions in the span of 6 weeks allowed us probably upwards of 500, 600 opportunities to refine our sales pitch, to iterate over and over and over again, right? And we found that from one conference to the next, there was a huge difference in how we talked to customers, how we engaged them, what examples we gave, you know, what we told them was interesting and what wasn't interesting. And you can kind of figure out the value props that your customers or potential customers see from those initial conversations, and then kind of, you know, weave them into the next conversation at each subsequent convention. And that also allowed us to kind of engage a lot more customers who weren't in our geographical area. You know, we met people who were out in Oregon or in Salt Lake City who are, you know, very, very far away from me that I've never, ever even worked with. And then on the product side, you know, we're building in a lot of things where we want to really utilize this, this, this great opportunity where the jobs in infrastructure especially are getting much, much bigger. And so companies are starting to partner up a lot more on these big jobs. And so we want a situation where maybe one of the 2, you know, joint venture customer companies is a customer of ours, and we want them to be able to show the person who they're joint venture with who's not a customer, hey, this is what Trestle does. We're also building in some elements where we're going out there and actually collecting references, past work experience for our customers. And what this does is then essentially exposes Trestle by using, you know, our current customers onto, you know, general contractors who aren't our customers. There is a bit of a network effect there as well, but we're always trying to like tweak ideas and see, you know, how can we get out there and get more exposure? But also, you know, understanding the relationship and not straining anyone's relationship in the process.

Yeah, that— so, so many interesting things to unpack there. The first, you know, what we see oftentimes that, you know, companies that will embark on a conference strategy as a way of growth, if they don't have a real plan on how they're gonna work the conference, they kind of just go there and they hide behind their booth and then they go away and they're like, I don't know. We didn't get any customers out of it, whereas clearly you had a really, you know, sort of structured plan of we're gonna start with these people we know, and we're gonna ask for introductions to these people that we don't know, but that we know that they know. So very smart. The other thing that I can tell that you did that some companies fail to do that we always try to get them to do is to not use it as an opportunity to repeat what they already know, but it's as a chance to iterate and learn and to really sort of test new messaging strategies where you didn't just go and say the same thing 500 times. You went and said the same thing a certain number of times, then you and your team got together and said, where did their eyebrows perk up? Where did they seem to get interested? Which of these conversations led to additional conversations? And then by the next time, you had adjusted your pitch, refined that value proposition so that you could do another round of testing, which again is vital. Whereas, you know, we've seen companies that'll sort of bring us in and be like, we've been going to conferences every month for a year and we're not getting anything out of it. I'm like, well, what's your pitch? And they're like, we've been saying this. I'm like, every time for a year? You didn't do any testing? And they're like, well, we thought about it, but we were a little too scared. So really smart that you're doing that as well. So good work there. So you talked about, you know, other mechanisms to try to grow out. the first thing that pops to mind would be, you know, like a formalized referral program. Have you tried that?

Yeah, you know, it's funny you bring that up. That was definitely one of the first things we thought about. And it was not as successful as we had hoped. I think on paper it made a lot of sense. And even when we were brainstorming it, but once we brought it out to the customers, I think in construction, and I'm sure this is true for a lot of industries, there's been a recent push, I think culturally, professionally to say, hey, no one should be accepting any kind of gifts, right? And things like that. And I think there is— Yeah, exactly. And so I think referrals fall into a bit of a gray area here because like, how do you reward that referral, right? And so what we thought about was, hey, we can give a discount to the company. And we actually met with some like pretty mixed responses there. Some people kind of came back to us and said, okay, like, I get it, but like, I don't really You know, I'm not going to really utilize this. And then, and then we had some responses back that was like, oh, well, unless the money is like going into my pocket, like this referral, right? I'm not really interested either. I'm just here collecting a paycheck. And so like, what do I want to save this referral, the money from the referral for? So we found that actually that response to be the most shocking. It was definitely like unexpected. And I think that's when we kind of went back to the drawing board and said, all right, let's like do away with referrals for now. Let's, let's see what else we can do. to maybe offer value instead of like a monetary incentive. Yeah.

That's interesting. Well, and also like, at least, you know, as someone that hasn't really spent a lot of time in construction, there's a perception that a lot of deals get done through under-the-table incentives. And so potentially that was true at one time in the industry. And so people have this expectation of, It's gonna be a personal benefit to me, or I'm not doing it because that's just the rules of the road. But that's, that's very interesting. Well, and we've seen companies, you know, we've put together a lot of different referral programs. You try to get creative in how they do that. Like, you know, we, you can do the, and you talked about some of the big conferences that people go to.

Nice.

A nice dinner at that conference, or hey, maybe we could you know, sponsor your wife also attending and spending an extra day at the hotel so that y'all can make a weekend out of it, uh, in exchange for, uh, being a part of— and instead of tying it to specific referrals, you can say being a part of our, you know, customer, uh, panel or our customer advisory board, uh, is a common thing that we've done. So then it's not a specific you did this, you got that. It's more of a You're an advocate for the company, and these are things we do for advocates and evangelists in the marketplace and some interesting ways to do that. But certainly a lot of nuance.

You remind me of actually something we did in one of these conferences. You know, it's our first time and we talked to a fellow founder who was incredibly helpful in like, you know, giving us tips on what to do. One of the things she said, and you alluded to, was just like, get rid of the table altogether, right? You should be out there grabbing people. Like, no one should be standing behind the booths. And so we always thought about that, but we wanted to be able to kind of engage people as easily as possible. And, you know, everyone does like a raffle, right? Or some kind of giveaway. And so we were doing that. But instead of just having people kind of sign up or drop off their business card, we had it so that they had to actually interact with a part of our product. And that was their way of entering the raffle. And so that was something nifty that we kind of thought about on the spot. It just so happened that our product, you know, was able to facilitate this. They essentially had to leave a review of our booth using the mobile review.

Oh, in the same way that they would leave a review of a supplier.

Exactly. And we got a lot of engagement through that. And that was something that, you know, people, I think, thought was very like unique, innovative. They got and they got firsthand experience. And so I think, you know, there's a lot of ways of going about like interacting with customers. And I think the more creative, right, the more, I don't know if I wanna call it gimmicky, right? But there needs to be some kind of a hook. And so, yeah, I don't know. I enjoy conferences. I would go back to more if it wasn't, you know, a multi-day event.

Yes, it can be exhausting, but Definitely glad that they're back. So what's something that you're most excited about on the horizon for Trestle?

Yeah, we are, we got some really exciting stuff that we're building. We have some customers who came to us and were kind of like, hey, you know, we were on your website and we think you do X. And we were like, why did you think that? Because that's not what it says on our website. And it was, you know, something that was on our product roadmap and we had it kind of slated further on. But now all of a sudden this like overwhelming need kind of came knocking on our door. And so we're like, this is amazing. Great. You know, we've kind of ramped up our team to meet this need. And so for us, you know, we really couldn't be any happier. And this new product definitely has a lot more of that network effect built into it. So on one hand, you know, obviously really excited to have new customers. On the other, also really excited to test out a lot more ways of marketing, you know, getting ourselves out there. And hopefully we can think of even more unique ways. We got a couple of things in mind. that we're really like, you know, antsy to try out. And I think this is definitely something that like is getting me really excited. You know, obviously what we're building right now, the current customers we have, like they've been amazing to work with and we want to continue. But like any opportunity to like do a little bit more experimental stuff is also just super, super exciting.

That does sound interesting. Well, I can't stop my head from going to what other industries could you extend this type of software to even outside of construction, because, you know, we work— I've worked in martech for a long time. And, you know, the engagements that you have with martech vendors tend to be, you know, kind of 3-year-long engagements. And there's the data collection piece, and there's the analytics piece, and then there's the other piece to have this sort of like watch-outs as part of implementing projects to guide the people that are leading these engagements on the other side would be super interesting and engaging for that industry. So I'm sure there's lots of applications there. So if any of our, you know, audience is listening and they're thinking about why should I work with Trestle, give us a little bit of like why you're different, why you're special, a little sales pitch.

Yeah, absolutely. I would say if you're any company that's working in the construction engineering real estate space, We know this market probably better than anybody out there. You know, I lived this problem and in this world for most of my career up until recently. And, you know, we're building something that is very specifically targeted for this market. You know, I would say an example of that is when we first set out on this, we thought Yelp for construction, how difficult can it possibly be? And once we started to actually work with the initial customers, right, we realized the complexities required here and what they wanted to be able to do. And so now we've built out a system that really is specifically serving this market's needs where you can target, you know, a project manager on a specific project with a specific set of questions, and only he or she gets those questions on a set cadence. And so that now has kind of evolved into something that just doesn't exist in the market that is, you know, allows you to collect so much more detailed information and it's so frictionless in how we do it. And so that part of it, you know, we're really, really psyched because we ended up, you know, through these relationships, through working with the customers, building something that is just so unique. And that in itself, you know, is something that's just incredible.

Victor, this has been awesome. Thanks so much for taking the time. So if our audience wants to get in touch with you, what's the best way?

LinkedIn is the easiest, Victor Zhang, PE. You can also email me. My email is victor@gotrestle.com, all one word.

Yeah, fantastic. Victor Zhang from Trussell, thanks so much for joining us today and look forward to continuing the conversation.

Awesome. Thanks so much for having me, Mark.

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