The hard part isn’t building something. It’s knowing what problem is worth solving, and worth backing.
The value of a trade tech start up runs deeper than the product.
Software has never been cheaper or easier to build, and trade tech is attracting more money and attention than ever.
That raises a valuable question: if almost anyone can build the product, where does the value actually sit? We put it to Chris Pattenden, Managing Partner of Superseed Ventures (the venture arm of Reece), and three things stood out.
The founder is the one thing a competitor can’t copy.
When a competitor can copy a feature in months, technical advantage rarely lasts long enough to build a business on. What can’t be copied is the founder – their vision and the relationship they hold with the customer. Customers buy into that as much as investors do, and implementation (getting a product set up and making it stick) is valued above the product itself. The hard part is scaling that without the founder in every room.
Understanding one customer beats serving all of them.
Trade is more complex than most people realise. A plumber on an 18-month commercial build and one on a three-hour maintenance call buy differently and need different things from suppliers and software. Features are cheap now, which tempts founders to build for everyone, but the best products focus on one type of customer, and solve one problem properly. A tradie only changes how they work for a tool that fixes a problem they feel every day.
The challenges persist. The answers keep evolving.
Some of trade’s biggest challenges aren’t going away. Housing is still in short supply, skilled tradies are scarce, margins are tight and pricing is under scrutiny. These pressures predate AI, and they’ll continue to demand new thinking. A 100-person trade business can lose a third of its team in a year, while modular building has stalled more than once before returning with fresh money. The businesses that last stay focused on the challenges, and keep finding better ways to tackle them.
The best trade tech is built on the basics.
There’s an irony in where this lands. Trade tech moves faster every year, yet the biggest takeaways are the oldest foundations of any good business: a founder worth backing, a customer you understand properly, and a problem worth solving. Software will keep getting easier to build, but knowing what’s worth building still takes time and the right vision. That’s where the value sits.
