TestFit's Go-to-Market Playbook: From Spreadsheets to $750K Wins

Author

Owen Drury
July 09, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 14 minutes

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INDUSTRY INSIGHTS
TestFit's Go-to-Market Playbook: From Spreadsheets to $750K Wins

How TestFit is cracking the code on category creation, pricing evolution, and rapid product development in AEC tech

The bottom line: TestFit transformed from a single-product startup into a multi-typology platform by building "pods" that can ship new features in 6 weeks, evolving from per-seat to usage-based pricing, and solving the hardest problem in AEC tech—getting conservative buyers to change their behavior.


When Laura Paciano joined TestFit as employee number 30 after watching the product demo, her reaction was immediate: "They've got something here." 

Three years later, she's orchestrating go-to-market for a platform that helps customers win deals worth hundreds of thousands more annually.

But getting here wasn't about finding product-market fit once. It was about finding it repeatedly, across multiple building typologies, pricing models, and customer personas.


TL;DR: How TestFit Built a $750K GTM Engine in AEC Tech

  • Pods > Departments: TestFit uses “pods” to launch new features in weeks, not years—tying each to revenue goals.

  • Pricing Evolution: From per-seat to usage-based to unlimited users—pricing shifted to match value and drive adoption.

  • Category Creation: They teach conservative buyers with relatable references (“like spreadsheets, but live”) to trigger behavior change.

  • Persona Mastery: Tailored ROI stories for architects, developers, and GCs speed up sales cycles.

  • Speed Wins: Millisecond-fast iterations enable instant feasibility—transforming workflows from weeks to hours.

  • Culture Matters: Hiring AEC insiders and obsessing over customer pain creates unbeatable empathy.

  • Big Tech Myth: Deep industry knowledge—not generic tech muscle—is what cracks AEC.


The "Pod" Revolution: How TestFit Ships Features in Weeks, Not Years

Most AEC tech companies treat new markets like major expeditions—months of planning, dedicated teams, massive resource allocation. TestFit flipped this model entirely.

Their secret weapon? Internal "pods."

Each pod is a 3-6 month focused team combining go-to-market, product, and engineering. Jack, TestFit's Director of New Markets, runs pods like revenue-generating experiments:

  • Clear KPI: Usually a specific sales number by a specific date

  • Tight timeline: Most pods run 1-6 months maximum

  • Direct feedback loop: Go-to-market leaders talk to customers Monday, feed insights to engineers by Tuesday

"I can go from a meeting with an engineer on Monday to a customer call Tuesday, get an answer, and be back to engineering an hour later," Jack explains.

The results speak volumes: TestFit launched their data center configurator when the market exploded from 30-megawatt buildings to 500-megawatt campuses. They caught the wave because they could ship fast.

TestFit's pod formula is deceptively simple: revenue-first KPIs ("We will close X deals in Y market by Z date"), customer-facing leadership (someone who talks to prospects daily), tight timelines (if it takes more than 6 months, break it down or kill it), and direct engineering access with no intermediaries between market feedback and product development.


The Pricing Evolution: Why TestFit Ditched Per-Seat Licensing

Laura jokes that "on Wednesdays we change pricing"—but behind the humor lies serious strategy. TestFit evolved through three distinct pricing phases:

Phase 1: Per-Seat (The Old Way) Traditional software licensing that AEC was comfortable with but didn't capture value.

Phase 2: Usage-Based Testing Multiple experiments tying price to value creation—the number of sites tested, projects completed, iterations run.

Phase 3: Collaborative Platform (Current) Unlimited users with pricing tied to usage, recognizing that real estate execution requires all stakeholders in the same system.

"You can have an architect who's really happy with the building, but if the developer can't make it pencil, the project dies," Laura explains. "The only way this works is if everyone's in the platform."

The progression reveals an important truth about pricing in collaborative software: if your product requires multiple stakeholders, you need to identify what Laura calls the "collaboration tax"—what happens when key people aren't in your system. Then price for the outcome, not seats filled. Most importantly, remove friction barriers. Sometimes unlimited users at higher per-project pricing wins over traditional licensing.


Category Creation: Teaching Conservative Buyers to Want Something New

AEC buyers don't ask for innovation. As Jack puts it: "No one is asking to spend more time in feasibility. Everyone wants to build buildings."

TestFit's approach to category creation focuses on behavior change through familiar reference points:

The Sonos Playbook (Borrowed from Laura's Previous Life)

At Sonos, Laura learned to explain wireless multi-room audio before the iPhone existed. The key? Reference something customers knew.

"As soon as there were iPod docking stations, we said 'It's like that, but you don't have to dock anything,'" Laura recalls.

TestFit uses the same strategy: "We're replacing spreadsheets and connecting design to numbers."

The Three-Step Education Process

  1. Identify existing pain (even if they don't know they have it)

  2. Reference familiar tools (spreadsheets, CAD workflows)

  3. Show the transformation (geometry connected to live pro formas)

The magic moment: When prospects see their jaw drop during demos—TestFit tracks this using Gong to identify exactly when customers "see the magic."

For any company trying to create a new category in conservative markets, this approach scales: don't ask what customers want—observe what they struggle with. Reference their current process explicitly, show transformation through live demonstration, and track that emotional moment when they understand the possibility. Henry Ford's famous insight applies perfectly here—customers would have asked for a better horse, not a car.


Multi-Persona Mastery: Serving Architects, Developers, and GCs Simultaneously

TestFit serves radically different personas with opposing priorities:

  • Architects: Want design freedom and technical capability

  • Developers: Need speed and financial modeling

  • General Contractors: Focus on constructability and business development

The challenge? Each persona has different decision-making timelines, budgets, and success metrics.

The Hidden ROI Problem

Quantifying value varies dramatically by persona:

  • Developers: Easy math—time savings = faster bidding = more deals won

  • Architects: Harder math—opportunity cost of free feasibility studies

  • GCs: Unexpected use case—using TestFit for business development to create their own deal flow

"Our salespeople love when someone is paying someone else to do something and we can say 'now you don't have to,'" Laura explains. "But when it's about what you could be doing with those two hours instead—that's much harder to quantify."

The solution lies in creating persona-specific ROI calculators, developing different sales materials for each stakeholder, training sales teams on persona-specific objection handling, and tracking which persona types convert fastest to focus efforts there first.


The Real Estate Workflow Revolution

TestFit isn't disrupting the real estate development process—they're making it dramatically more efficient.

Traditional workflow:

  1. Find land → 2. Send to architect (2 weeks) → 3. Send to GC for pricing (2 weeks) → 4. Iterate (repeat steps 2-3) → 5. Make bid decision

TestFit workflow:

  1. Find land → 2. Test in TestFit with all stakeholders live → 3. Make bid decision (same day)

The impact? Developers can pursue more opportunities, architects can focus on design instead of free feasibility studies, and GCs can create their own deal flow.


The Infrastructure Advantage: Why Speed Matters

TestFit's technical foundation—built in C for millisecond response times—enables their go-to-market strategy. When Jack says customers can run "a few thousand iterations per millisecond," he's not just talking about performance. He's talking about enabling a new way of working.

"Innovation is never asked for," Jack quotes from a recent industry post. "No one is asking to click and draw—that's not exciting anymore. People want to generate and then edit."

This insight drives a critical principle for category-creating software: invest in fundamental performance early, design for real-time collaboration instead of sequential workflows, make iteration so fast it changes behavior, and build for generation plus editing, not just creation.


The Builder Mentality: Culture as Competitive Advantage

Everyone at TestFit is "a builder at heart"—but this isn't just startup culture speak. It manifests in their approach to customer empathy and rapid iteration.

"We have amazing empathy for all the customers we touch," Jack explains. The go-to-market team doesn't just sell—they absorb customer pain and translate it directly to product development.

This builder mentality shows up in their hiring strategy, which reveals an important truth about AEC tech: hire from the industry you're serving, train technical teams on industry workflows, build customer empathy into your product development process, and resist the urge to hire "proven SaaS talent" without industry context.


The Big Tech Myth

The biggest misconception about AEC tech? That big tech companies can easily dominate the space.

"Google had Sidewalk Labs, which created [a company] that's effectively nothing now," Jack points out. "It's really hard for big tech to understand what to do in AEC."

Laura adds the technical reality: "You can only apply LLMs to structured data, and we do not have structured data in construction. Everything is a prototype."

The lesson: Domain expertise beats technical capability in complex, relationship-driven industries.

Key Takeaways:

  1. Structure for speed: Build pod-like teams that can ship features in weeks

  2. Price for collaboration: If your solution requires multiple stakeholders, remove seat-based friction

  3. Reference the familiar: Help customers understand innovation through current pain points

  4. Hire from industry: AEC credibility can't be taught—it must be lived

  5. Build for behavior change: Make new workflows so obviously better that adoption becomes inevitable

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