Subbase

Eric Helitzer spent over a decade in construction, starting in 2008 and working in the subcontractor world from 2011. By 2014, he noticed the digitization wave hitting general contractors, but subcontractors were left behind with manual material procurement processes. The real catalyst came in 2020 post-COVID when material management became chaotic, pricing fluctuated wildly, and he realized subcontractors desperately needed software to manage purchasing. "The problem that we saw for today really came about in 2020, really post the COVID error where material management was influx. Pricing fluctuations were happening, and that's where we really saw the opportunity to build software for subcontractors."

Eric wasn't a technical founder. He partnered with a technical advisor from Silicon Valley who wanted to break into construction tech and saw the fragmentation firsthand. They met through a mutual contact and became co-founders. The pre-seed investment came from the company Eric was working for at the time (where he ran operations), plus capital from his technical advisor. "It was just the two of us at the start, and it was both actually part-time." Eric took the role full-time in late 2021 while his co-founder worked part-time from the Valley. They raised "under a million" in this pre-seed round, using all the capital for engineering and product development. "Coming from a non-technical background, I needed to put more technical people in place that were able to build and take the vision we had of the product and put code to it."

The first customer came through a scoping meeting. Eric was on the general contractor side awarding a job to a subcontractor. He called the subcontractor into his office and showed them the early MVP. "He was so blown away with the software front... the next week we were in his office, onboarded their team and we didn't charge anything for it." That free customer became a crucial design partner. Eric later admitted this was a mistake in retrospect: "One, I felt that the platform wasn't fully built out yet and I really didn't want there to be any friction... We wanted to bring on a true design partner who was going to use it enough and we did not want any friction for there to be any, anyone to say no."

The first paying customer arrived shortly after: a plumber smaller than their target market who loved the idea. "We threw a number out there that we thought was fair and immediately he said, yes, that's fine." That number was "about a couple hundred dollars a month" on a monthly contract. Eric remembers sending a screenshot of the charged credit card to his investors saying, "Hey, someone's paying for subbase." It was a pivotal moment despite the low price point. "We did not charge early enough. We spent a year giving the software away for free, testing and really iterating until we started actually charge."

Giving away the software for a year was the biggest regret. By the time they started charging, they'd underpriced. But the free customers taught them where the real pain existed. They eventually shifted from tiered pricing to a custom, volume-based model: customers paid based on transaction volume. The average customer Eric targeted paid $20,000–$30,000 per year (not the $10,000–$50,000 range he initially mentioned). These customers were processing thousands of invoices, hundreds of purchase orders, and millions in transaction volume annually.

The team's composition became critical. Rather than hiring pure sales reps early, Eric built around product, engineering, and heavily emphasized customer success and implementation support. "One of the biggest challenges I saw in the industry early on was that support from day one, implementing new software into construction is not an easy thing to do." This focus on hand-holding became a competitive advantage.

As of September 2024, Subbase had nearly 100 paying customers and a 20+ person team. Eric was targeting $1 million in ARR for the year ("Right now, 1 million is the target"). The business remained heavily founder-led on sales, but he had just hired a head of sales to scale go-to-market.

In March 2024, Subbase closed a $4 million seed round (combining a seed and a SAFe conversion). The capital was distributed across go-to-market expansion, bringing in senior product and engineering talent, and accelerating product development. "Between the seed and the safe converted, we've raised a total... of $4 million." Eric sold approximately 15–20% of the company, consistent with the market at the time. The investor was a phenomenal construction tech partner who understood how to scale in this traditionally software-resistant industry.

Eric's next frontier was the enterprise segment—larger subcontractors and contractors still operating entirely manually. "That's where the biggest pain is for a lot of these companies that you would be surprised have never seen solutions that can offer digitization." He was also exploring lending and inventory financing products down the road, but remained focused on workflow optimization first. The company was built on Retool and Redash for internal tools and analytics, and Eric emphasized how data-driven optimization kept customers engaged and using the platform more.