COCONSTRUCT

Donny Wyatt founded CoConstruct in 2006 in Charlottesville, Virginia. The product was built for a very specific type of contractor: the custom home builder who builds five to thirty homes a year, each one a bespoke project for a client with opinions, change orders, and questions at every stage.

These builders were drowning in communication overhead. Every decision — cabinet handles, tile selection, countertop upgrades — required emails, phone calls, and paper sign-offs.

Wyatt built a client-facing portal that brought all of that into one place. Clients could log in, see the project status, make selections, approve change orders, and track their budget in real time.

For builders, it replaced a pile of email threads with a structured, auditable workflow. Wyatt grew the company slowly and profitably without outside funding for the entire 15 years of its independent existence.

CoConstruct was a subscription SaaS business targeting custom home builders and high-end remodelers. Builders paid monthly fees based on the number of active projects.

The platform handled client communication and decision-making, project scheduling, subcontractor coordination, financial tracking including budgets and change orders, and a built-in client selection tool that made the process of picking finishes and fixtures vastly less chaotic. The model was simple: make the builder-client relationship less painful, charge a monthly subscription for it, keep churn low by making it genuinely indispensable.

The CoConstruct platform centered on its client-facing portal, which let homeowners view project schedules, make finish selections, approve change orders, and track their total project budget in real time. The selections tool was the standout: custom home builds involve hundreds of individual choices, and CoConstruct structured that process into a collaborative workflow that reduced back-and-forth dramatically.

The financial tools tracked builder costs, markups, and client-approved changes, giving both parties a single source of truth on project finances. The platform also handled scheduling, subcontractor communication, and daily construction logs.

Post-acquisition, the technology was merged into the broader Buildertrend platform.

CoConstruct grew almost entirely through word of mouth and targeted marketing to the custom home building community. Wyatt built a product that solved a real pain point for a specific type of contractor, and those contractors talked to each other at trade shows, in builder associations, and online.

The client portal was the killer feature — homeowners loved having visibility into their project, which made builders look professional and reduced "where is my house" calls. That halo effect turned satisfied clients into referral machines.

The company also invested in content marketing and an active blog aimed at educating builders on business management, which built organic search traffic over time.

CoConstruct competed directly with Buildertrend, which was larger and better-funded. The two companies served overlapping but slightly distinct markets — CoConstruct was stronger with high-end custom builders who needed deep client collaboration tools, while Buildertrend was stronger with production builders managing higher volume.

As Buildertrend grew and improved its client features, the competitive differentiation narrowed. Staying bootstrapped in a market where competitors were raising significant capital made it harder to invest in sales, marketing, and product development at the same pace.

The acquisition by Buildertrend in 2022 was the logical conclusion.

CoConstruct was fully bootstrapped throughout its independent existence. Donny Wyatt grew the business from zero to $20 million in revenue without taking a dollar of outside investment.

The only capital event was the 2022 acquisition by Buildertrend, financed by Buildertrend's growth equity from Summit Partners. The acquisition gave Wyatt and his team a meaningful exit and gave Buildertrend a customer base of custom home builders it had not fully penetrated.