Pod Insights SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders How Buildern Reached $2M Revenue With 300 Customers | Hmayak Tigranyan About this episode How do you build a construction SaaS to $2M in revenue with just $500K raised and get 95% of growth from SEO? Hmayak Tigranyan is the founder and CEO of Buildern, a construction management software platform serving around 300 customers and generating roughly $2M in revenue today. The company helps residential and commercial builders manage finances and workflows, and it is doing about $160K in monthly revenue with roughly $40K in monthly profit. What makes this business interesting is that it scaled in a legacy industry without paid acquisition or outbound. Buildern built an inbound engine around high-intent SEO, stayed profitable, and is only now adding a sales team as ACV moves closer to the range that can support quota-carrying reps. You'll learn: How Buildern found an underserved construction software niche. Why Hmayak shut down a $3M dev shop to go all in on SaaS. How the company raised just $500K and sold only 10%. What $160K in monthly revenue looks like at a $40K profit level. Why 95% of revenue came from SEO-driven inbound. How Buildern chooses long-tail keywords in construction. Why transparent competitor comparison pages rank well. How internal SEO execution beat the need for an agency. What changed once the company started hiring sales reps. How pricing moved from roughly $6K ACV toward $7.5K to $8K. What AE quotas and compensation look like at this stage. How a profitable vertical SaaS company scales with a global team. Hmayak came into Buildern after years in SaaS development, travel software, and running a dev shop that peaked at about $3M in annual revenue. He launched Buildern in 2021, spent the first two years without paying customers, then used industry-informed angels and product iteration to find the right shape of the product. This episode is for founders building in old industries, operators trying to scale efficiently, and investors who care about profitable SaaS growth. It is a useful masterclass in vertical SaaS positioning, SEO-led demand generation, and disciplined capital use. Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/An0n18v4j8E Connect with Hmayak: https://buildern.com/ Connect with Nathan: https://founderpath.com/
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 You've scaled over $2 million of revenue today. Do you do podcasts a lot or is this exclusive?
0:04 Speaker 01 No, it's exclusive.
0:05 Speaker 00 On $160,000 a month of revenue, will you profit 20,000 or 10,000?
0:10 Speaker 01 Around 40.
0:11 Speaker 00 How much money have you raised from investors and what percent of the company do you sell?
0:14 Speaker 01 So we raised around half million.
0:17 Speaker 00 How much equity did the angel investors get for the 500,000 investment?
0:20 Speaker 01 Total around 10%.
0:22 Speaker 00 Just tell us what you sell. What's the tool do?
0:24 Speaker 01 So how we helped to builders, it's like Buildern is construction management software. So we had residential and commercial builders to better manage their finances and better manage their workflows. A lot of those are legacy tools and whenever you're trying to find some good tool, it was very hard. That was the reason why we created Builder.
0:42 Speaker 00 Where did most of your new customers come from? Hey folks, my guest today is Mike Tigranyan. He is the CEO and founder of Builder, a platform modernizing the 10 trillion construction industry. With over 15 years in SaaS development, he's helped thousands of builders replace outdated paperwork with digital workflows that save these firms up to 30% of their management time. Mike, you ready to take us to the top?
1:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, and I don't think it's harsh.
1:06 Speaker 00 And this is very nice of you. I said before, I said, why did you say yes to this interview and what did you say?
1:11 Speaker 01 So I said, if I, I'm listening to your podcast, so if I can help to someone else, as usually people help me, then I will be more than happy to participate.
1:19 Speaker 00 Well, I love that. I love that you're here. And do you do podcasts a lot or is this exclusive?
1:23 Speaker 01 No, it's exclusive.
1:24 Speaker 00 We love that. Okay, so you've scaled over to over $2 million of revenue today. Tell me, before we get into more economics, I was sort of joking with revenue question. Just tell us what you sell. What's the tool do?
1:34 Speaker 01 Yeah, so how we helped to builders, it's like Buildern is construction management software. So we had residential and commercial builders to better manage their finances and better manage their workflows. So basically what happened in construction industry, a lot of those are legacy tools. And whenever you're trying to find some good tool, it was very hard. So that was the reason why we created Builder. So Builder helps mostly residential construction companies to streamline their workflows, to better manage everything internally and externally.
2:08 Speaker 00 This is great. And when did you write the first line of code for the company? What year?
2:12 Speaker 01 So it will be fifth year. So we started in 2021.
2:17 Speaker 00 2021. Okay, great. And how many customers are you now serving today?
2:21 Speaker 01 So right now, we are serving around 300 customers. Usually, as users, they are more like 3, 4,000.
2:27 Speaker 00 And where did you, you know, walk me through when you launched this business in 2021? Where'd you get the idea from?
2:33 Speaker 01 So I did came from like, I was trying to find something else to work on because I was moving from my previous startup, which was travel tech. And historically, I know like construction is very big market. It's very interesting market because it's less digitalized. And when I was young, I worked at construction. So I tried to find some interesting idea to work on. And whenever I speak with different people, usually at the end of the day, they are when we barbecue with friends, they usually complain that they are starting to go for next project, whatever they have or renovating their home. So it was like continuous discussion about like, don't having enough resources, enough project management tools to manage construction.
3:12 Speaker 01 And then I spoke with another construction companies and the idea came over like it was clean that it's underserved market and people need that one.
3:22 Speaker 00 And when you look, I'm just looking at your history here on screen. You were at Upwork, Trip Planner, Travelo Solutions, Codelmo. Did any of these create a major financial win for you?
3:31 Speaker 01 Some of them.
3:32 Speaker 00 Tell me more.
3:33 Speaker 01 So I previously I like B2B travel and before that one, B2C travel. And I also had my dev shop previously. So during my lifetime in different situations, I get some financial benefits, but it was not major exit. So in past, I was more engineer, let's say. I was software engineer.
3:54 Speaker 00 So team lead at Upwork up to 2016, and then you founded Trip Planner from 2015 to 2018. Did you sell that company?
4:03 Speaker 01 No, it was my first company as a startup. I don't have skills at that time to sell company.
4:08 Speaker 00 So you just slowly shut it down?
4:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. I was in Armenia. I moved to US three years ago. So before that one, when I was in Armenia, the market is a little bit different in Armenia. So whenever you're trying to sell, there is not many buyers.
4:22 Speaker 00 Okay, so you shut that slowly shuts down and then you launched Travelo Solutions in 2016. Eighteen. This looks like it was a travel agency. Did you make good money doing this?
4:30 Speaker 01 That one was B two B software company for outgoing or incoming travel agencies. So it was us.
4:38 Speaker 00 Okay. Did you sell this or shut this one down?
4:40 Speaker 01 No, COVID shut this down. Like if you see, it was twenty twenty. So the COVID hit and everything was shut down.
4:46 Speaker 00 All right. Take me into Codelno. What does this do?
4:48 Speaker 01 So Codino was software company. It was just a software dev shop.
4:53 Speaker 00 Did this generate good revenue for you during COVID?
4:55 Speaker 01 So yeah, during COVID and before that one, it was generating proper revenue. But with dev shops, it's the sales is very challenging because you work, it has good and bad things. So when you're working with many companies offering software solutions, you're gaining the skills to understand what really people want. So you're acting as semi-product manager in some of the situations for other B two B companies. So that was a lot of experience to learning what people want and how it need to be created. But financially, yeah, again, we just made a lot of money there. Yeah. And that was the reason like when I started Builder,
5:35 Speaker 01 I already had a team with me. So it was not like starting from scratch. I had team and also I have money to bootstrap.
5:42 Speaker 00 So you built this dev shop called Codelno between twenty eighteen and twenty twenty two. What was your best revenue year?
5:48 Speaker 01 I think it was three million, somewhere that amount.
5:51 Speaker 00 Three million. Okay, that's great. Congratulations. And so why did you shut this down to go all in on Builder and if Codelno was doing three million a year?
5:58 Speaker 01 So my passion is creating product. Like with Codino, you're getting money, but you're working different projects on and you don't have too much impact on projects because you're acting as dev shop. But with Builder, it's always interesting because you're actually working with end customers, trying to find a reason what you can improve. And I patient about creating products.
6:21 Speaker 00 Yeah, I love that. Okay. So Builder gets going in twenty twenty one. You launched. What year did you break your first million of revenue?
6:26 Speaker 01 So we broke our first year revenue last year. Initially, like first two years, we don't have any paying customers. We just were building. Then came two angel investors. Bought from construction. They saw the value and with them, so they invested some money and they helped us to get the product, uh, the shape that it need to be. So people in the market need that one because with construction management software, it's a little different. You need to have many different modules to work on because in construction, there are specific things. So whenever you're looking over legacy softwares, you need to bring so many different uh new modules. So people can use that one. It's not just like one estimating or one schedule looking.
7:07 Speaker 01 Because they are not taking, so they can't do any integrations. So you need to have a lot of features integrated. So it's suitable for them to use.
7:15 Speaker 00 That makes sense. How much money have you raised from investors and what percent of the company did you sell?
7:20 Speaker 01 So we uh raised around half million from them. So with that money, we came profitable. So we are profitable for a long time and hopefully we'll keep the same way for the future as well.
7:34 Speaker 00 How much equity did the Angel investors get for the 500,000?
7:36 Speaker 01 Around like total around 10%.
7:40 Speaker 00 Do you regret that deal?
7:42 Speaker 01 No, never.
7:43 Speaker 00 It was good.
7:44 Speaker 01 It was good because it's, it was not just money. It was uh people coming from industry and helping you to build the product.
7:52 Speaker 00 You told me today, as of right now recording, you're doing about a hundred and sixty thousand dollars a month of revenue, which is two million of ARR. You also said you're very profitable. Can you share how profitable?
8:02 Speaker 01 So we actually like every month we are growing, we get new revenue based on that new revenue, we hiring more people. So it's just continuous loop. We never just hold money for a long period. We just reinvest.
8:14 Speaker 00 Will though, like on, on, on a hundred, on a hundred and sixty thousand dollars a month of revenue, will you profit 20,000 or 10,000?
8:20 Speaker 01 Uh, around 40.
8:21 Speaker 00 Forty thousand?
8:22 Speaker 01 Yeah.
8:23 Speaker 00 Oh my goodness, round, dude, forty thousand of profits on that monthly, that's incredible. Nice work.
8:28 Speaker 01 Thank you.
8:28 Speaker 00 Guys, remember I am not just a YouTuber. I'm investing in my third fund. We've deployed 250 million dollars into 550 software companies so far. Again, at founderpath.com. If you're interested in capital, I would love to cut you a check because I know you're investing in your education. You watch my show. So sign up at founderpath.com and when you get the onboard. Email I reply and I see all those just reply and say Nathan I found you through YouTube and I'll make sure to prioritize you. I would love to cut you a check. Check out founderpath.com. Okay, how many are on the team today, full time?
8:58 Speaker 01 So full time, we are around thirty five. They are not everyone is in US, but across different countries.
9:05 Speaker 00 So here's a question I have for you. If anyone took your two million of ARR today divided by thirty five, your revenue per employee looks really low by US standards, but you're still profiting forty thousand dollars a month. That means you have human arbitrage on a lot of your headcount. Where are these people based? What are they doing? And what are you paying them?
9:20 Speaker 01 So mostly they are based in Armenia. Our headquarters on our own decide is in Armenia. We have also people from Philippines, sales in US. So right now we are going to hire also people from Australia because we have many clients in Australia as well. So customer facing roles we usually hire in US, Australia or abroad. Engineering, QA, product, we hire in Armenia.
9:41 Speaker 00 Love that. Okay, how are you growing today? You're almost doubling year over year. Basically bootstrapped. You've only raised five hundred K against two million of ARR. You have three hundred customers. Like, talk to me about like last month, February twenty twenty six, where did most of your new customers come from?
9:55 Speaker 01 So we don't do any outbound. Everything whatever we have is just inbound. We don't spend any marketing money on any paid ads or etc. So people know about us. We we targeting initially targeted blog articles with long tail keywords, very specific articles about construction, how to manage different things. So that one is bringing each article might bring not many visitors, but those visitors are very, very relevant. So what are you creating? You're creating like something which is interesting for them.
10:24 Speaker 00 Yep, I I looked at this in my research before this. You're doing a great job with SEO. If we pull up your website in Ahrefs, a popular SEO monitoring tool, you'll see eighteen thousand eight hundred organic traffic, forty nine domain rating, which is pretty healthy. But generally speaking, really good trends over time here. Walk me through how you run your SEO strategy. Do you have an external agency? Do you do it personally?
10:44 Speaker 01 We do internally, so I'm not much involved there. I usually approve, for example, what keywords should be right and what will be interesting to customers. So I'm involved in that part, but we have like. Content team, they are working on like to polish the articles. Sometimes I review, sometimes very, very frequently I also publish myself.
11:06 Speaker 00 Okay, let's, let's go deep for a second here. Construction management software for small businesses brings you a lot of traffic. Seventeen hundred free clicks per month. That's amazing cost savings. Other people might pay ten dollars per lead for Google Ads. That's like, you know, seventeen thousand dollars of free value you're getting from one blog post every month. So if you annualize that, you know, that's like two hundred thousand dollars of free value every month from this one blog post. So a couple of questions. How did you know that you wanted to target this long tail keyword? And how did you specifically structure this page to optimize for Google's SEO schema?
11:36 Speaker 01 So there are different techniques, but for, for example, for this particular one, you're trying to find what people look for. Even some people, some companies are listed here are our competitors. But we understand like from industry what people need and what they are searching for. So based on that, when we're trying to like create those articles, so it will be relevant for customers. So it's not about like only promoting yourself, but you can just showcase like, for example, here are other companies that you should take a look. And this is the reasons of their pros and cons. So in some specific scenarios, some of the other competitors' softwares are better much for them.
12:18 Speaker 01 So you need to like be very transparent what you're publishing, not just like trying to be on the first one for some of the reasons, but always try to be like honest and so whenever people read, they actually see the value rather than just like you promoting yourself.
12:35 Speaker 00 So if you guys are just getting started on SEO and you want to copy this tactic, a couple of things to keep in mind. The table of contents at the top that links to the rest of the article is a very good SEO signal. It shows that you understand internal linking and that this is a critical anchor piece of, a piece of content here. As you scroll down, obviously really good visuals. There's H1 and H2 tags that are optimized as we continue scrolling down here. There's a clear pattern, so the visual design is obvious. It's one through six, listing all the competitors with specific strengths and limitations. Again, SEO optimized. They've also got really nice FAQ schema. I think it's probably optimized for Google's FAQ. Schema down here at the bottom, which is really good for the chatbots, right? If you're searching in chat GPT, you know, how long does it take to set up construction software? Right? They hopefully show up in this article. How much are you doing in terms of Mike?
13:19 Speaker 00 How much are you doing in terms of SEO optimization to show up in chat GPT or Gemini or Claude results?
13:24 Speaker 01 We kind of doing not much. We actually optimizing for Google and whatever we do, same impact is happening also in LLMs. So not much specific for chat GPT. You actually if doing exactly for SEO, it have a lot of impact on chat GPT.
13:42 Speaker 00 Okay, so what percent of the 2 million of revenue you're doing today? Would you credit to your SEO strategy?
13:47 Speaker 01 I would say 95 most likely.
13:50 Speaker 00 So 95% of your 2 million of revenue today today has come exclusively from your SEO optimization strategy?
13:56 Speaker 01 I believe so.
13:57 Speaker 00 Wow, very impressive. Okay, how are you going to grow in the future? How do you go from 2 million of revenue to 4 million of revenue over the next 12 months?
14:03 Speaker 01 So we hired our first salespeople in 2026. So we're building right now the sales team. And from January and February, they came over. They're coming from same industry. So they already know like what to sell and how to sell. So the thing is that because we are operating the way how we operate, like trying to find good partners, narrow down the product because the product is the key. Selling the software is much, much easier. I've been selling for over three years. There was no sales person, there was no support, there was no customer success. We built customer facing teams last last six months.
14:41 Speaker 00 Mike, let me ask you a question. You're in the death trap in terms of pricing. What I mean by that is 2 million of ARR and 300 customers means you're doing about 6,000, 6.5 K in ACV, annual contract value per account. That is like a little low to incentivize a sales rep to touch every call and hit a quota target, but it's way too high for a no-touch credit card checkout on your website. How do you fix that?
15:03 Speaker 01 So we historically have some customers, we came like very early. So we're keeping their pricing is low. So our ACV is a little bit higher than 6,000 something. So it's becoming like more close to seven and half and eight. And also when you have like good retention rate, then it makes sense to have sales reps.
15:23 Speaker 00 Okay, so do your account executives you're hiring now have a sales quota?
15:26 Speaker 01 Yeah.
15:27 Speaker 00 What quota do you want?
15:27 Speaker 01 And almost around 1 million.
15:29 Speaker 00 Okay, so they have to close a million of new ARR each year. That's their quota.
15:33 Speaker 01 Yeah.
15:33 Speaker 00 And what can you share? Don't name a specific, obviously, employee, but what's the base salary you're paying your new AEs?
15:40 Speaker 01 It's different based on their skills, but usually like you targeting to have for them as base around like 80K, maybe 100. OTE will be like around 150, somewhere around.
15:53 Speaker 00 Yep. And guys, real quick resource I want you guys to have, and Mike just nailed it, but at Founder Path, we anonymize all of the payroll data that founders give us, and we publish real-time changes in salaries, you know, SaaS companies are paying, based off real-time data. So, Mike, you'll see this matches almost what you just said. So, 833 real salaries and payroll flowing through Founder Path. If we go into Account Executive, you'll see the highest, the best, the top performers are getting 122 base, the new guys are getting 50K base, and then OTE is about double each of those things. You can see the different brackets here. So, you're sort of right on the money in terms of quota targets relative to OTE.
16:30 Speaker 01 Yeah.
16:31 Speaker 00 Very good. All right. So, that's your growth strategy today. How many sales reps are on your team? You said there's 35 total. How many sales?
16:37 Speaker 01 So, right now, two. Just only two.
16:39 Speaker 00 Two. Okay, very good. Well, look, we really appreciate you coming on. I learned a bunch. If people want to follow your story over the next 12 months, where can they find you online?
16:47 Speaker 01 You, I'm usually active on LinkedIn, so they can find me there.
16:50 Speaker 00 All right. Guys, buildern.com. It is software for construction companies. Mike got going on this back in 2021 after COVID killed his travel business, but he had a dev shop before that that was doing 3 million a year in revenue. So, he really knew how to get talented engineers. The first two years of building from 2021 to 2023, they had no customers, but they landed some angel investors who put in 500K for 10%. Then, lightning struck in a bottle. A million bucks of revenue in 2025. They've already doubled 2026 to 2 million of revenue. They're serving 300 customers, and they're very profitable. $150,000, $160,000 a month in revenue. They're taking $40,000 to the bottom line, which they are reinvesting those profits into new hires. They're currently 35 folks, mainly
17:31 Speaker 00 based in Armenia, but scaling the sales team in the USA today. Most of this growth, Mike said 95% of his revenue has come from his SEO strategy, which is pulling in 18,000 organic clicks for free per month. We're rooting for him. Mike, you're a loyal listener to the show, right?
17:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, of course.
17:48 Speaker 00 All right. I'm rooting for you then. That's how it works. Guys, check him out at buildern, B-U-I-L-D-E-R-N dot com. Mike, thank you for taking us to the top. You won't believe this CEO's revenue. Click here to watch the next episode right now.
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