admin In this episode of the AEC Business podcast, Aarni Heiskanen speaks with Oskar Smeds, Chief Revenue Officer at Pictue, a Finnish photo-documentation startup. Oskar began his career as a site manager at NCC and has since worked at several construction software companies, including Congrid and Sitedrive. They discuss what contech startups need to understand about their customers, how newcomers build credibility, and why simple tools get used on site.
From the site to software
Oskar studied civil engineering and worked at NCC as a site manager and site engineer before moving to the company’s office as a development engineer. His first digital safety inspection went badly when his tablet lost connection inside a concrete shelter, and he lost two hours of work. He says busy projects are a poor place to test unfinished solutions, because one bad experience can shape attitudes for years.
At Congrid, he met companies that had been NCC’s competitors and saw how wide the construction ecosystem already is. Later, while selling site logistics services to Kahva through his own company, he returned to site-level work. There, he saw that sites now had ten software tools but still faced the same problems he remembered from his years as a site manager.
What startups need to understand about construction
Oskar says people outside the industry find it hard to grasp how project-based and unstructured construction work is. Each project has its own mix of stakeholders, and decisions may be made on site, at headquarters, or in both places. He recommends that newcomers find an industry mentor, or at least spend time listening to the people who do the work.
Attitudes to testing differ too. Software teams iterate quickly, while construction projects leave little room for experiments because a failed concrete pour has real consequences. Many people on site simply want to do their work well and go home, so a new tool has to prove its value quickly.
Large customers also hold many different views internally. Oskar advises startups to talk to different people inside a company until they find early adopters who also influence their peers. Site staff sometimes see the value of a simple tool more clearly than office developers, who may be further from daily site work.
Building credibility as a newcomer
Startups often struggle to win their first customers because they have no references. Oskar says it helps to speak the industry’s language so field users feel the vendor understands their work. He also recommends investing time in industry associations and ecosystems such as KIRAhub.
Larger companies want proof that a solution is already in use and can work alongside their other systems. Integrations, partnerships and standards add value over time. In the early phase, Oskar says, the story and the people behind the product can matter more than the product itself.
Why WhatsApp spread on construction sites
WhatsApp spread on construction sites because it was free, easy to use, and already on everyone’s phone. Site teams used it for urgent issues, like a truck waiting at the gate or a water leak, and crews used it to share photos. The drawback is that the information is neither secure nor traceable, and photos are hard to find a few days later.
Pictue grew out of this problem. Its founders had to compile a report from more than 50,000 WhatsApp photos to get their invoices paid. They found existing software too broad, too expensive, and too complicated for field users, so they built a simple app that saves each photo with its GPS location as a pin on a map. Other contractors became interested, and Pictue was established as a company in 2023.
Simplicity as a strategy
Oskar says a field user should be able to learn Pictue in ten seconds. Instead of adding features to raise revenue per customer, the team focuses on reliability: performance with 30,000 photos in view, offline use, and safe data capture in a basement or a forest. Pictue now connects to more than ten systems, so field users can send and receive information through one interface.
Oskar also wants field documentation to produce structured data instead of PDF reports, so the information can serve the asset throughout its life cycle. The company aims to become a European standard for field-level documentation. He hopes the focus on usability will also lead other software vendors to ask whether their tools work well enough for people in the field.
Connect with Oskar on LinkedIn, and find out more about Pictue on their website.
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