Krystle Khoo

## Key Points - Ellington Industries (ellingtonind.com). ~$1.5M revenue, 20-25% margin. 20 workers, 3 in office. 1 estimator (Krystle) + 2 remote takeoff specialists + 1 admin. - Previously tried to fund building AI estimating themselves, gave up due to difficulty. Then funded $25K for AI transcription/progress tracking. - First fear was survival (winning jobs) -- estimating was #1 priority. Now that they win enough, the fear shifted to execution. Protect margins over increasing revenue. - Uses FastWrap: $2K/seat first time, $1.5K/year after. 3 seats = $6K. Robust catalog and labor math but no open API, cumbersome dashboard, hard to do value engineering or regenerate reports for customer options. ## Pain Points Mentioned - Project management is the new pain: communicating changes to field crews is extremely hard. Owner changes mind, need to order 20% less material, field needs to know instantly. - Field clarity: sending information about what to do to the person on site. Things change constantly. - FastWrap is cumbersome: no open API, can't easily generate options for customers, dashboard not user-friendly for value engineering. - Remote takeoff specialists cost $10/hour but managing them adds overhead. ## Product Feedback - Pricing tiers (from their perspective): - Acceptable: $1,200/month (base product, replace two Philippines estimators) - Expensive: $1,000/month (would need auto-generated submittals) - Prohibitively expensive: $30K/year (half of US full-time estimator) -- would need full project management features - Providing customer options (value engineering alternatives) would help win more jobs but is currently too hard in FastWrap. - Can see clear ROI on replacing remote takeoff specialists. ## Next Steps - 11/21/2024 catch-up: discussed design partnership for January. Progress tracking is their current build focus. - Going to connect Alexei with others in their network. - Key insight: SMB insulation contractor that personally funded AI attempts -- deeply bought in on the vision, understands the difficulty.