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How OneCrew Found Product-Market Fit in Construction’s Overlooked Middle Market

When Ari Bleemer left Bain & Company to build software for paving contractors, his parents asked: “How quickly are you going to run into the mob?”

It wasn’t the validation he’d hoped for. But it revealed how most people—including Ari himself—initially viewed the opportunity. “When you get that question over and over again, every time you tell someone what you do for a living, you start to question yourself,” Ari admits. “It’s like, should I be building for this industry? Is this real?”

In a recent episode of BUILDERS, Ari shared how OneCrew identified a structural gap in construction software, why they’ve deliberately stayed focused on a single vertical for four and a half years, and how they’ve built trust in a market burned by software promises.

Finding the Gap Between Procore and ServiceTitan

Ari’s insight came from deconstructing the construction software landscape. When Procore IPO’d around 2020, the narrative was “vertical SaaS for construction.” But Ari saw horizontal software masquerading as vertical.

“Construction is not a vertical, you can call it a very broad reaching vertical,” Ari explains. “But if you’re building software for all of construction, you’re building horizontal software.”

The map looked like this: Procore served general contractors coordinating multiple trades. ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, and Jobber owned single-visit field services. But between them sat an entire segment running complete project lifecycles with no purpose-built platform.

“What we believe has really been overlooked for a long time has been the entire middle of the industry where you have a lot of self perform contractors, specialty contractors, trade contractors, subcontractors,” Ari says. These contractors “are actually running a process from start to end. So going out, estimating the work, sending a proposal, then completing the work, collecting payment for it.”

Self-performing contractors needed operational infrastructure for their full workflow—from initial estimate through final payment collection. OneCrew narrowed further within this segment to paving after “meeting a ton of people in the industry, hearing that there was clear demand and that supply wasn’t meeting that demand.”

Overcoming Institutional Software Skepticism

The technical challenge was building the platform. The GTM challenge was overcoming systemic distrust.

Paving contractors had been repeatedly sold unusable software. “A lot of folks in this industry have been told, hey, for $10,000, I can go build you the software of your dreams. And they end up with something completely unusable,” Ari explains.

This created skepticism beyond individual vendors—contractors questioned whether software could work for their operations at all. “Software just not working for them, and it just ends up becoming a money pit that is stressful and costs them money and they’re left with something worse than what they started with.”

OneCrew’s approach: sustained presence over tactical credibility plays. “We’ve spent all of that four and a half years continuing to try to both build trust in us as a business and in our platform.”

The compounding effect was measurable. “When were selling in year one, it was a lot harder when there were zero customers that we had in the industry and when we could only say, yeah, well we’ve been in the industry for a year than it is now in year five.”

In markets with institutional skepticism, time becomes your competitive advantage. No case study or demo shortens the trust-building timeline—only consistent delivery does.

Embedding Domain Expertise Company-Wide

OneCrew made industry fluency a company-wide requirement, not just a sales or product function.

“Part of our onboarding for every single employee, whether they’re an engineer or whatever role they’re playing and is just learning the industry and learning the lingo and learning about what these contractors are going through on a day to day basis, what their challenges are, you know, where, what value we provide to them,” Ari explains.

This extends to sales hires from completely different verticals. “You look at our sales team people, we’re selling everything from software for veterinarians, to cannabis software to restaurants, you know, variety of industries, all of that. But we really care that if you’re gonna be representing one crew and if you’re going to be talking to people in the industry as a representative of one crew, you need to know this industry and you need to show that you care about this industry.”

The outcome: “Contractors come up to us and say like, it feels like you guys actually get it, which there’s no better compliment for us.”

This approach solves a vertical SaaS problem most companies miss—product decisions, customer conversations, and roadmap prioritization all improve when domain context is distributed across functions rather than concentrated in a few “industry expert” hires.

Choosing Depth Over Breadth Despite Product Architecture

OneCrew built configurable product architecture from day one. “There’s a lot that is specific to paving contractors and there’s a lot that’s highly configurable to just project based contractors in general,” Ari explains.

The initial plan: “Within a couple of years we’re going to go into other industries and we’re going to start with paving and then we’re going to go into all of these other project based industries surrounding paving that are adjacent to it.”

They chose not to execute it. “Maybe our biggest strength is our focus on paving and is just really building that trust, that reputation, et cetera.”

Ari is explicit about the trade-off: “Our quickest path to kind of early growth would have been going to a bunch of different industries and picking up, you know, a couple dozen contractors in six different industries. But to build an actual sustainable, durable business, that focus one vertical I think has been super valuable.”

The current strategy: “By the time that we’re going somewhere else, we want to know that we have an incredibly strong foothold in paving and we’re going to continue to grow that side of the business and we’re going to continue to invest in that side of the business.”

Early revenue from adjacent markets often undermines the category authority and reference density required for durable vertical SaaS growth. OneCrew prioritized becoming unmistakably dominant in one segment over spreading growth across multiple segments.

Turning “Too Niche” Into Competitive Positioning

Four and a half years in, the “paving is so incredibly niche” reaction has become market validation.

“I feel very good about the, you know, getting the reaction of, wow, that’s super niche versus the, oh well, you and everyone else,” Ari says.

When AI became the dominant narrative in tech, OneCrew had clear positioning: “We can pretty confidently say that none of the very large AI players are specifically focused on our industry right now.”

His reframe on market size: “Have you been on a sidewalk today? Have you driven on a road today? Have you been in a parking lot today? Did you walk on your driveway? And it’s an industry that nearly everyone in the country is interacting with on a daily basis.”

The strategic insight: markets with ubiquitous usage but zero mindshare from horizontal software players create ideal conditions for vertical SaaS. The market is large enough to support a substantial business, but overlooked enough to build deep expertise and customer relationships before facing well-funded competition.

OneCrew’s journey shows that sustainable vertical SaaS often requires resisting conventional startup playbooks. They chose deliberate trust-building over rapid scaling. They went deeper in one vertical rather than capturing more TAM. They made industry knowledge a company-wide competency rather than hiring a few veterans.

Four and a half years after his parents’ skeptical question, Ari has found his answer: the best vertical SaaS opportunities often hide in the segments everyone else dismisses as “too niche.”