Two small email tests exposed a mismatch between OurBuilding’s pitch and its best-fit customers—and showed why early outreach is still customer research.
A founder’s first customer can feel like proof that a product has a market. But when the founder is also the customer, that sale may say more about one building’s needs than about demand across an industry. For OurBuilding founder, two small email tests revealed how much more he needed to learn about property managers, their software and the people who choose it.
The product grew out of a problem the founder knew firsthand. As board president of a 40-unit co-op in Park Slope, he reviewed the building’s costs after maintenance rose 9% the previous year, driven by taxes and insurance. He found $3,000 a year going to BuildingLink, a resident portal that the staff and residents largely didn’t use. The superintendent wasn’t closing maintenance tickets in the system, and residents had moved to a WhatsApp group.
The building had a small management company and no large enterprise system beneath it. What it needed, the founder concluded, was narrower: maintenance requests the super could close by text, a way to contact residents in an emergency, and a single place for house rules.
He built OurBuilding, a service priced at $79 a month that requires no app installation. It also includes an AI powered insurance checker intended to help the building manager review policy details. After the co-op tested the product and the founder fixed bugs, its board voted to end the BuildingLink contract. The switch saved the building $2,000 a year.
A customer isn’t the same as a market
That result was real, but it didn’t settle the central business question. The founder’s friends who lived in buildings with BuildingLink often disliked it and supported his effort. Yet residents weren’t the people choosing building software. They couldn’t identify the competing systems or explain how a management firm made its decision.
That support looked like validation, but it came from people already inclined to like the founder. His first sale also came from a building whose needs he understood directly. Neither signal established how many other buildings had the same problem or who could buy a solution.
In August, he assembled a list of co-ops and condos in Park Slope with 30 to 99 units, then found managing agents through city registration records. The first email batch went to 27 work addresses. He had filtered by location and building size, but not by the recipients’ roles, the software their firms used or their ability to approve a purchase.
The first emails exposed weak assumptions
The subject line, “From the Board President at Plaza St West — How we saved $2000 annually,” was meant to lend credibility. One recipient replied, “Please be advised I do not manage this building.” She had read the message as an inquiry about a building she managed, not as a product pitch. Her first task in sorting incoming email was to identify which property it concerned. The sender’s title gave her a reason to dismiss the message before she understood the offer.
Other recipients asked for marketing materials. The founder had assumed an email and a website link would be enough. But a property manager considering a new service may need to present it to a board, where a PDF can be included in a meeting package or forwarded as an attachment. The request showed that the buyer’s internal process matters as much as the first conversation.
The same outreach also revealed a competitor: a property manager who had built similar software to solve a problem in their own buildings. A closer review of firms’ websites or domains might have surfaced that overlap before the emails went out.
The founder then built a marketing site and revised his note. For the next list, he ranked firms by the number of buildings attached to their registration paperwork, reasoning that a single sale to a large firm could reach many properties. One contact appeared tied to 182 buildings. She turned out to handle registration paperwork, not manage those buildings. In practice, no one person managed 182 properties; managers typically handled far fewer. The founder had mistaken a paperwork count for a measure of buying reach.
Fit depends on the systems already in place
With Claude’s help, he redirected the list toward firms managing five to 30 buildings, where the person named on the paperwork was more likely to make the decision. One hour after the next 25 emails went out, the CEO of a 12-building Brooklyn firm replied: “We use Buildium and Appfolio. Their pricing is on their websites.”
At first, the founder thought the CEO had missed the point. Then he realized the reply directly answered his question. The email had asked what systems the firm used and what it paid. He had wanted a call, but his invitation was an afterthought: “Would love to know what you're using and how much you're paying for it.” The recipient supplied the information requested.
His answer also clarified the competitive problem. Buildium and AppFolio combine accounting and resident functions in all-in-one platforms. A firm already standardized on one of them was unlikely to replace its full system with OurBuilding, which addressed a narrower set of needs. The product made more sense for buildings using BuildingLink or piecing together services such as Google Groups, ClickPay and Monday.
A review of the firms contacted found five using AppFolio, one mentioning BuildingLink, and many with no resident-facing system beyond a way to collect maintenance requests. The original pitch described OurBuilding as cheaper than existing software, even though some targets already had an integrated platform and others had little software to replace.
Use outreach to disqualify, too
The next email was designed to find out whether a firm had the specific problems OurBuilding could address. It asked whether the firm lacked one unified system and instead used separate tools for payments, maintenance, emergency messages and financial records; whether boards thought they were paying too much; whether residents bypassed the app to text the superintendent; and whether a person reviewed insurance certificates.
Those questions gave recipients a straightforward way to say the product wasn’t relevant. That’s useful information. Early customer discovery works best when it can produce a clear “no,” including the possibility that the product fits only the founder’s own building.
The broader lesson is about what early marketing can do. Before a founder knows who can buy, which systems they already use and what problem they’ll pay to solve, a larger budget may simply deliver an unclear pitch to more unsuitable prospects. These two rounds cost nothing and exposed mistakes in the list, materials, message and market assumptions.
For founders, the next step after a first sale isn’t necessarily to widen the audience. It’s to identify the customers who have the problem, the authority and the incentive to act. Then ask questions that make it easy for them to show when the fit isn’t there.
