The Story of SubBase: From Family Business Side Project to Construction’s Financial Infrastructure

The Story of SubBase: From Family Business Side Project to Construction’s Financial Infrastructure

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Eric Helitzer, CEO and Founder of SubBase, a construction materials management platform that’s raised $5 million, revealed how his company started: with a three-month deadline and a very tight leash.

“They gave me three months to figure out how to make this work,” Eric recalls. The “they” in question? The family construction business where he was running operations while simultaneously building what would become SubBase. “I had to balance between building software for something that I thought could be amazing and also running a job and running multiple jobs.”

This is the story of how an operations manager became a founder, how an internal tool became a venture-backed company, and how a problem that’s existed for decades is finally getting solved.

The Accidental Founder

Eric’s path to founding SubBase wasn’t the typical Stanford dropout-turned-founder story. He spent 15 years in construction management, starting right after graduating from the University of Florida with a degree in construction management. The timing wasn’t ideal—he graduated during the post-condo bust downturn in South Florida.

But that challenging entry into the industry gave him something valuable: deep operational experience. He wasn’t observing construction from the outside or consulting on process improvements. He was in the trenches, managing projects, dealing with subcontractors, ordering materials, and wrestling with the daily chaos of getting buildings built.

In 2014, he started using Procore, one of the first major construction tech platforms to gain traction. That exposure to technology solving construction problems planted a seed. “I got sucked in the tech space when we started to see the inefficiencies at the level below where Procore was solving for, which is at the subcontract level.”

The problem was clear. Subcontractors—the specialized trades doing the actual construction work—are “primarily labor and material based as far as their business.” Yet they had no real tools for managing the material side of their operations. “As we started to get deeper into the operations of the business I was at previously, we started to see a very big hole that was not being fulfilled properly.”

The Internal Build

Rather than immediately starting a company, Eric did what many builders do: he built a solution for his own needs. “We decided to build internally software, and one thing led to another, and I left the family business in 2022 to start what is now SubBase.”

But the transition from internal tool to external product wasn’t smooth or immediate. For months, Eric lived a double life. He’d run construction jobs during the day, then run demos on the early MVP. He’d manage project schedules, then iterate on software features. The office became a strange hybrid of construction operations center and tech startup.

The inflection point came when the visitors changed. “We started to see influx of people that were coming to the office to get demos, versus coming to talk to me about new work or work that was ongoing.”

The company that had employed him—and invested in the early software—saw the writing on the wall. In 2022, Eric had to make a choice. “I had to separate the two and decided to take the leap of faith into what is now the construction tech world.”

The First Three Months

Those initial months after founding were a masterclass in rapid iteration. Eric wasn’t building in a vacuum or validating hypotheses through customer interviews. He was building software while simultaneously running construction projects that used that software.

“We had a very awesome product from the get go, but we’re iterating very fast. And what I would do is I would actually take the product to some of our jobs.”

This real-time feedback loop—building features, testing them on actual job sites, seeing what broke, fixing it immediately—created a product that worked from day one. The challenge wasn’t product-market fit. It was everything else: pricing, positioning, go-to-market strategy, and understanding who would actually pay for this solution.

The Pivot to Revenue

About a year after founding, Eric made the decision to start charging. Looking back, he calls it out explicitly: “That was really my fault. That was probably one of the biggest mistakes I made.”

The free tier had created an illusion of demand. People liked the software. They used it. They gave positive feedback. But when Eric started sending contracts, reality hit. “We got into a pigeonhole where we didn’t understand who the real ICP was and we’re getting false positives.”

The companies that signed contracts were different from the ones who’d been happy to use free software. They had bigger material procurement problems. They understood the ROI. They called when things didn’t work because they were actually depending on the system.

This painful transition taught Eric something crucial about construction: “It is not a traditional software sales with these construction folks.”

Meeting the Market Where It Lives

SubBase’s go-to-market approach evolved from Eric’s industry knowledge. Construction companies aren’t won over by slick demos and product decks. They need education, relationship-building, and proof that you understand their business.

“People in construction don’t just want to be sold software. They want to be educated. They want to understand why this piece of software that didn’t exist a couple years ago is going to beneficial now.”

This insight shapes everything—from the emphasis on thought leadership to the focus on in-person relationship building to the recognition that marketing success takes time. When asked what’s working in marketing, Eric is refreshingly honest: “I still think it’s a little too early to be able to pinpoint that.”

The four-channel approach—word-of-mouth referrals, outbound sales, educational marketing, and events—reflects the reality of construction’s fragmented nature. There’s no single winning channel because construction itself resists standardization.

The Vendor Network Advantage

One aspect of SubBase’s model that’s easy to overlook is the two-sided network. Eric isn’t just building for subcontractors—he’s building for the vendors who supply materials.

“We also help vendors. And that’s the approach we took,” Eric explains. This creates a flywheel: subcontractors get better material management, vendors get better order processing, both sides recommend the platform to their partners.

This network effect is amplified by market conditions. The COVID-era commodity price volatility created urgency around material tracking. “You’re in a world where vendors are not holding their material pricing. You have commodity fluctuations that have gone down a little bit that are so crazy that most people needed to gain a hold of that.”

SubBase entered the market exactly when both sides of the network needed a solution.

The Future: Financial Infrastructure for Construction

Three to five years out, Eric’s vision extends far beyond material ordering. “We want to move heavier into the financial piece of material procurement, we want to go deeper into the integrations with our vendors and we want to go deeper into the integrations with our own customers.”

The end goal is ambitious: “I can come into SubBase and not just onboard within minutes, but be able to really loop in my entire ecosystem from the precon planning phase all the way post to payments to a vendor.”

This vision transforms SubBase from a workflow tool into financial infrastructure. Material procurement is a cash flow problem as much as a logistics problem. Subcontractors need to order materials before they get paid for jobs. Vendors need to manage credit and payment terms. Everyone needs visibility into budgets, invoices, and cash timing.

If Eric executes on this vision, SubBase won’t just be tracking material orders—it’ll be facilitating the financial flows that make construction projects possible. That’s a fundamentally different business, with fundamentally different economics.

The Global Opportunity

Eric’s ambition doesn’t stop at the United States border. “This is a global problem that we’re solving for,” he notes.

Construction materials management is inefficient everywhere. Every country has subcontractors ordering materials via email and Excel. Every market has vendors struggling with order accuracy and payment tracking. The workflows might vary slightly, but the core problem is universal.

This global vision makes sense when you consider Eric’s background. He didn’t learn construction from a textbook or a consulting project. He learned it by doing it for 15 years. That operational knowledge translates across borders because the fundamentals of construction don’t change.

Building What Lasts

SubBase’s story is still being written, but the foundation is solid. A founder with deep industry expertise. A product born from real operational needs. A market opportunity measured in trillions. A vision that extends from workflow digitization to financial infrastructure.

The construction industry is notoriously resistant to change, but that resistance creates opportunity for founders who understand how to wedge in rather than disrupt, who build relationships rather than just close deals, and who have the patience to educate a market before they can sell to it.

Eric learned these lessons the hard way—by running construction projects and building software simultaneously, by giving away software for too long, by testing pricing through trial and error. Now he’s building the financial infrastructure that construction has needed for decades.

That’s not a three-month project. It’s a decade-long vision. And for founders willing to play the long game in massive, fragmented industries, that’s exactly the kind of opportunity worth pursuing.