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From Construction Sites to Tech Innovation: How Skillit’s Founder Built a Construction Labor Marketplace by Understanding Both Sides of the Market

Digital marketplaces are notoriously difficult to build, but what happens when you combine deep industry expertise with technological innovation? In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Fraser Patterson revealed how his background as both a carpenter and general contractor helped him identify and solve one of construction’s most pressing challenges: hiring skilled trade workers.

The Birth of a Different Kind of Assessment

While many startups begin with a hypothesis, Skillit emerged from firsthand frustration. As Fraser explains, “I was struggling to hire retained skilled workers… there was no way for my recruiters to source workers easily. They couldn’t filter job boards to get the exact workers they want. They didn’t know how to assess the skills.”

But his unique position as both a former carpenter and general contractor led to a crucial insight: knowledge could serve as a reliable proxy for skill. “If you were to ask somebody, say, a physics question… you might be able to kind of fudge your way through a bit of convo about calculus,” Fraser notes. “But when you understand things about construction… like the true dimensions of a two x four, that’s unlikely that you’re staying up at night reading nailing patterns or something before you go to bed. That’s reliable indicator of your level of skill.”

Building the Growth Engine

Rather than pursuing rapid expansion, Fraser took a disciplined approach to marketplace growth. “Building a labor marketplace or any kind of marketplace is pretty insanely difficult to get off the ground,” he acknowledges. The solution? “Really leaning into those constraints and deciding to apply those constraints to focus… we’re going to start in one region with a handful of trades. That’s all we’re going to offer.”

This focused approach has yielded impressive results. The platform achieved 540% year-over-year customer growth, with half of those customers acquired in Q4 alone. Worker adoption grew 1000% year-over-year, demonstrating strong product-market fit on both sides of the marketplace.

A Product-Led Growth Strategy

Skillit’s go-to-market strategy centers on building something users genuinely love. “I think what I care about the most is building at this stage a product that our customers love,” Fraser emphasizes. “I really believe that engagement and retention are fundamentally the most important growth engine we have… if you solve for engagement, if you’re actually solving something the segment of the market loves… then we build this super efficient growth engine.”

The platform operates on a subscription model for employers while remaining “free and frictionless” for workers. This approach has helped create what Fraser calls “network effects baked into it,” with features that enable “recruiters to collaborate with one another and share with their subcontractors who have the same recruiting challenges.”

Content-Driven Customer Acquisition

Skillit’s marketing strategy focuses heavily on content that addresses specific pain points. “We have a really strong content strategy writing specifically about the challenges that we know our customers are facing,” Fraser explains. This content naturally intercepts potential customers when “they’re searching for solutions to finding trades in their respective regions.”

The company combines this with targeted outbound efforts and leverages organic growth through referrals. But perhaps most importantly, they’re building viral loops into the product itself, capitalizing on the natural network effects of the construction industry.

The Future of Skilled Labor

Fraser’s vision extends beyond just solving the immediate hiring challenge. “The big vision here is, can we use that proprietary data and that digital infrastructure to help train and upskill the talent network… to become increasingly valuable to employers?” he shares. “I think we can make skilled labor one of the greatest assets on earth… and I think we can ultimately help the world achieve its housing, its infrastructure, its clean energy goals.”

In an industry that’s traditionally been resistant to technological change, Skillit’s success demonstrates the power of combining deep industry knowledge with focused execution. By understanding both sides of the marketplace and maintaining disciplined growth, they’ve created what Fraser describes as “a category of one” – a testament to the power of solving real problems in innovative ways.