Conversation
Highlights

How Dextall Learned That Removing User Control Kills Adoption—Even With 1000x Better Technology

When Aurimas Sabulis ran a commercial window company, construction sites revealed a pattern: “Regardless of who the general contractor or developer is, job sites are an interesting beast to say the least. I was looking at it and I was thinking, there has to be a better way. We’re doing the same things that we’ve done 50, 100 years ago.”

Prefab seemed like the obvious answer. But in the U.S., less than 1% of mid-rise projects use it. In Scandinavia? 75%. Aurimas knew previous attempts had failed for a reason. When he founded Dextall, he focused on the problem everyone was ignoring.

The Three-Year Coordination Tax Nobody Sees

Construction site chaos—installing materials in rain, workers on scaffolding in freezing temperatures—is visible. The real inefficiency happens earlier, hidden in office workflows.

“For a 20 story building on average, from the design inception until all the architectural drawings are done and approved, it’s easy three year period of time,” Aurimas explains. During those three years, teams value engineer the project three to four times on average. Each time, the design completely changes. Manual coordination, back-and-forth revisions, disconnected systems.

“Nobody is seeing that. But this is where probably the gold mine is. This is where the backbone of the prefab is.”

Most prefab companies focus on manufacturing efficiency or installation speed. Dextall saw the bottleneck was earlier—in the design-to-production handoff that no one had connected.

When Your Users Reject a 1000x Improvement

Dextall built software that could collapse 3-4 years of design coordination into one day. Roughly 1000x faster. The team believed they’d created “the best thing to sliced bread.”

Architects said no.

“They said, look, you created an unbelievable software for fabrication and engineering, but we really don’t care. They said, well, hold on. It’s like, why don’t you care? Don’t you care about the timelines? They said, look, we want to control the design.”

The software was technically superior. It solved the timeline problem. But it removed architects’ agency over the creative process—the part they cared about most.

“That was sort of a wake up call for us that we have to tweak our software and give the control of design back to architects. And that the software has to be smart enough where that then it can connect to the physical world and sort of create that efficiency.”

The rebuild separated concerns: architects control design in their familiar workflow. Dextall’s system captures that design and handles the backend connection to manufacturing specifications, material sourcing, cost calculation, and production planning. Architects keep creative control. Dextall gets the efficiency on the backend.

The expensive lesson: “Certain things are there for a reason and that’s it. And as much as you want to, as much as you have a better mousetrap, it’s just not gonna work.”

Why Two-Story Physical Mock-Ups Closed Deals That Animations Couldn’t

Despite having sophisticated 3D models and animation videos showing exactly how their system worked, Dextall struggled to get genuine customer buy-in. Prospects would look at drawings and say they understood. Then keep asking the same questions.

“We created 3D drawings and we showed them 3D drawings and we would ask them, does it make sense? They’re like, yeah, it does make sense. And then sometimes as you keep talking to the clients, you keep hearing the same questions and you’re realizing they still don’t understand.”

They produced professional 3D animation videos. “Yeah, it’s kind of cool. But you know, still something was missing.”

Finally, Dextall built physical two-story mock-ups—”massive things”—and brought customers to see them.

“They looked at it, they’re like, oh my God, now I get it. I said, look, we’ve been talking for months and now you’re getting it.”

The pattern only fully resolved after completing actual buildings at scale. “Only up until we build our first buildings, like real buildings and some legit sized buildings where we would bring the clients and then they would say, man, I get it now. I said, look, we’ve been talking for two years at this point.”

Aurimas’s takeaway: “In this physical world, if you try to disrupt this physical world, the touch, the feel, the emotion still is a huge deal. You can’t really replace the touch, the feel of the physical thing.”

For software founders, demos and screenshots work. In construction, manufacturing, or industrial sectors, tangible proof isn’t optional—it’s the only thing that moves deals forward. Budget accordingly.

The 6-40 Story Focus: Why Market Segmentation Matters in Physical Products

Dextall targets buildings between 6 and 40 stories with steel, concrete, or mass timber construction. This specificity isn’t arbitrary.

Below six stories, U.S. construction typically uses wood framing. “So you have to sort of understand which market does your product fit. And so our product fits steel construction, concrete construction, or mass timber construction.”

Above 40 stories enters skyscraper territory—all-glass facades that Aurimas calls “glass boxes.” “That represents a very different typology of the product.”

The segmentation creates focus. “You can’t boil the ocean. If you want to build a business in the construction world, if you want to build a business in healthcare, you ultimately cannot change everything. You have to really figure out what is your niche.”

Within that niche, 99% of projects would go traditional without Dextall. The market opportunity is massive—but only if they stay focused.

Stacking Proof Points to Move Upmarket

Aurimas had street credibility from delivering complex window projects, which opened initial doors. “But at the same time we still had to prove that this is a viable product.”

Dextall’s upmarket progression was deliberate: “We started with very small projects. We started with projects that are, you know, nine stories, 10 stories, relatively small footprint. And then just kept adding and adding. And now we’re working on projects, you know, 30 story, 40 story projects that have massive footprint.”

Each successful delivery de-risked the next larger commitment. Now they work with “the largest general contractors, largest construction managers in the United States.”

The approach works because in risk-averse industries, references matter more than capabilities. Proof velocity—getting the smallest viable validation that enables the next commitment—beats trying to land a trophy customer that “proves everything.”

Choosing Which Battles to Fight

Mature industries have hundreds of entrenched practices. Dextall’s strategic filter: “Is this the fight worth fighting?”

“There’s so many nuances that you don’t want to go and tackle all hundred nuances, maybe try to tackle three or four and just tackle one at a time. Because if you’re going to try to tackle all of them, it is a fundamentally flawed sort of thinking and you’re going to fail.”

When they push on changing certain processes and face resistance, they evaluate: “Or we actually concentrate somewhere else and make bigger inroads. And then we’ll come back to that when we have deeper trench within the customer base.”

This isn’t compromise—it’s sequencing. Some battles require market position you don’t have yet. Fight the battles essential to your value proposition. Defer the rest until you have more leverage.

Layering SaaS Distribution Onto Enterprise Sales

After years of traditional enterprise sales—cold calling developers, architectural lunch-and-learns, job site tours—Dextall is launching their software as a standalone SaaS product for architects.

“We now are evolving and again supplementing our old school methodology with this new approach, what we believe can be significantly more scalable. But at the same time we now have respect and credibility with the architectural firms.”

The software creates independent value for architects while generating backend efficiency: “We can gain 90% efficiency on the back end if the architect uses the correct software.”

The sequencing matters. Software-led distribution only works after proving the full integrated value chain. Credibility from delivering physical projects now enables software adoption: “They now believe that what we can develop actually can truly work in the real world as well. Not only in this sort of isolated architectural design world, but actually can work in the real world and there’s a real connection there.”

Building Toward a Prefab Operating System

Aurimas’s three-to-five-year vision: “Architect no longer will have to draw a building. Architect ultimately will prompt engineer the building. And it’s going to be an art of proper prompt engineering.”

Architects will describe what they want. The system generates designs with real-time feedback on cost, embodied carbon footprint, and feasibility. “Once that is done, the system will tell them what’s the cost of it and whether the developer is going to even afford that.”

Approved designs go directly to production “with the click of the button” as manufacturing specifications. “What we call it ultimately Lego blocks. Right? Like a Lego block system that comes in and you just connect it together.”

“We think that we’re really are on the precipice of creating a true prefab operating system. And rather than boiling the ocean, we’re taking an approach towards one part of the building which is significant. And we think that we can really create this full on operating system that can further be replicated in other parts of the building.”

For now, they move carefully. Aurimas calls construction “a millimeter business”—precision matters and they can’t afford multiple answers to the same question. The AI skeptics on their team were “hardcore software engineers who created genius products for us” and are only now finding where AI makes genuine impact beyond operational efficiency.

The foundation is being built for a future where prompt engineering replaces three-year coordination cycles. But Dextall learned the hard way: the best technology means nothing if it removes user control. The winning approach preserves what users value—creative agency—while adding efficiency where they don’t see it.