Disrupting Feasibility on a Next-Generation Platform: TestFit and Autodesk Forma

KYRZYSZTOF ZEDRZEJEWSKI: All right. Welcome to our two-hour class that will be conducted by TestFit and Autodesk Forma. We're going to be talking about disrupting feasibility on the next generation platform.

Before we start, I wanted to just show this Safe Harbor Statement. Basically, this whole text comes down to one single thing, which is don't make purchasing decisions based on this doc. What this allows us to do, within this doc, is be extremely open and transparent with you guys about where we are going, what is happening behind the scenes, and I'm personally very, very excited about that.

I'm Chris, or at least that's my pronounceable version of my Polish name. I'm a Senior Product Manager for Autodesk Forma. I'm responsible for third-party ecosystem, and the vision of the open platform of Autodesk Forma in that sense. My background is in architecture and computational design, so I'm coming very much from the industry. Clifton?

CLIFTON HARNESS: Hey. Hi. Clifton Harness. I'm Co-Founder, CEO of TestFit I'm very happy to be here with you, Chris. And my background is architecture, real estate development, and I've been building TestFit for about six years now.

KYRZYSZTOF ZEDRZEJEWSKI: That's awesome. All right. These are the learning objectives, which we've set up months ago when we were just putting together the session, and they are very much true to what we will be showing you today. What we will be speaking about is many things, but we wanted to start with talking a little bit about the industry, and talking about, how do you actually build software products? How do you achieve product market fit? And how do you make products that people love?

We're going to be talking a little bit about vision of this Forma and how it plays into this whole ecosystem vision. And we're going to be discovering TestFit's parking functionality within Autodesk Forma. But maybe even more importantly-- it's the one aspect that I'm excited about, is just highlighting the TestFit, and Autodesk Forma collaboration and relationship between our companies. And I think this is one thing that I really, really wanted to show to the world.

Yeah, let's start with the first part, with the software scene of AEC industry. One thing that, still to this day, surprises me is the size-- the sheer size of the AEC industry, which is basically estimated to be around 13% of global GDP, and it just keeps increasing. It's an incredible potential. like the building size and the building market within different countries is still expanding. It's a tremendous amount of money.

But this statistic is extremely shocking, especially when compared-- when juxtaposed with statistics about how digitalized, or rather not digitized, it's actually is. So it's actually one of the slowest developing technology industries. And this is visible in different statistics. For example, it's the second last, I believe, industry when it comes down to digitization.

And also, it's visible on the BIM adoption rates. So when compared to other industries and other similar technologies, when it comes down to information, it usually takes around 30 years to reach around 90% of adoption within the market. BIM managed to achieve around 60% within 35 years, which is very little for the size of the industry that it actually represents.

Clifton, you've been in the industry for a long time now. Could you walk us through why is that? Why is the AEC industry so slow?

CLIFTON HARNESS: Yeah. So I'm going to-- I'm actually going to do this slide in reverse order. So let's talk about complexity for a second. Buildings are the most expensive things that humans endeavor to build. Every single building is basically a prototype, meaning that it's entirely unique, which leads to slow iteration.

You have all the different kinds of buildings that you can build. And so you have office, retail, multifamily, hotels. So you have all of the different kind of, call it, specialists that need to show up, to do different kinds of buildings. And furthermore, you have different disciplines that have to iterate in AEC.

So it's not just architecture and it's not just the guys building it. You've got the engineers that have to weigh in on topo, and grading, and everything. And so that leads to significant amounts of fragmentation. You'll see, here in our next slide, how the software ecosystem has had to grow, to contend with just the vast complexity that you have in buildings, in general.

And so we have Autodesk. They're really great at buildings in the US and worldwide. But you have Bentley in the US. And they fight for civil engineers, and they've got all these tools for highways. And so this chart shows just the vast madness of the software ecosystem that we have out here. And I Chris can comment on later, why Forma is going to be so important in the future.

KYRZYSZTOF ZEDRZEJEWSKI: And what's worth highlighting here, it's just the AC software scene is so much greater than that. But what we are seeing, at least something that we've been discussing with Clifton for quite a while is kind of the evolution and the trend of where this is all heading, which is that we've started from some softwares at the beginning of the digitalization of AEC industry that were doing basically, they focused on being a generalized solution for accelerating the design process.

But the problem was that they were basically not compatible with each other. The data was not transferable, and they were closed ecosystem. This started shifting somewhere around '90s when the software started slowly aligning and accepting the data exchanges between many of them. And what we are seeing nowadays closer to 2010s and 2020s is that we have many, many more solutions, right? People are starting to code.

Many more startups are emerging within the space. And they are solving very complex and very specialized problems within many different spaces, something that would not be possible to be solved within one massive system, so one massive application. So what we are seeing is basically the emergence of systems, which, yeah which basically.

CLIFTON HARNESS: In my small brain, I think about it this way. It's like we're going to see a rise of these task based software tools where it's like my goal is to create construction documents from this Revit model. And there's startups out there that are trying to build language models that will read a big BIM model. And then they'll just focus on creating the CDs. I mean, that's a huge, huge endeavor to do in general.

But it's always going to be as we go from these generalist tools that think about CAD. It was one of the first solutions that took manual drafting off of the table and into the computer. So AutoCAD's has got 40 years of iterations. That thing is super stable. It's a great CAD system. But what we ran into in the 2000s was the CAD, the plans and the sections don't update in real time as I'm adjusting the plan or whatever.

So BIM is on the rise, and data is becoming more important. Well, those things like we've learned that the interfaces from CAD are still important. We've learned that the value of BIM the sort of data but also getting the model, the sort of parametric model to propagate and stay true at all times, those are underlying technologies that we still need in the future. We're not saying turn our back on them. But we use them as backlog. We say, hey, this is what Revit did. This is how they handle this information.

And either we can sync up with that in the future with our point solution that does a whole lot of work all at once, yeah, I mean, we're not saying it's the end of the tools that we use. It's just a very different future for tools where you've got lots of powerful point solutions that you have to start to utilize to be competitive in the AEC world.

KYRZYSZTOF ZEDRZEJEWSKI: It's basically the best tool for the job, right?

CLIFTON HARNESS: Yeah, like it's trending towards finding the best tool for the job at hand think.

KYRZYSZTOF ZEDRZEJEWSKI: Oh, and I feel like this is exactly what TestFit is doing as well, right?

CLIFTON HARNESS: Yes. So let's talk about TestFit and Spacemaker for a minute, start with TestFit. So TestFit today is a co-authoring solution, meaning that it's AI driven design tool that has significant amount of manual editing tools in it. So what we learned in 2017 and 2018 when we shipped kind of the initial versions of TestFit was that people liked the building to be generated, but they really wanted to be able to reach in and kind of edit the thing that was generated.

And so that's how we started with our co-authoring environment. Right now we do lots of different, this is a more simplistic diagram than maybe would like to have in a pitch on my company. But we do a lot of different styles of building. I've got a slide there in a second. Let's go to the-- can we go advance one slide? Yeah, so here's where we've kind of landed after growing our market share with the co-authoring.

So our customers, they're asking for concept iteration. They're asking for Proforma optimization, which for the AEC world is an analysis of whether or not the building is profitable. And then on the construction and cost side, productized delivery, meaning that we have people that manufacture bath pods and whole units. And we're trying to consider their kit of parts when we use TestFit to iterate a design. Slide, Chris.

So when I was talking about typologies earlier on the right hand side, kind of the approach that we take with our AI is we are very specific. So we've got high rise apartments in the US. It's an AI that's kind of been written to take into account the concerns of IBC, get travel distance. You've got a couple other things that make it more focused for the US market, apartments, single family homes, industrial warehouses, these are commodity configurators.

So our focus at TestFit is really the commodity markets, and slide, Chris, real quick. And so what we have is a core group of customers that go through hundreds of site plans a year. They might be building workforce housing, where they need several thousand units to be started every quarter. OK, well this is site planning at a scale that a small architecture firm doesn't really need, right?

And so this will lead into the form of story later. But we have a whole lot of AI at test fit for parking and for a couple other sort of commodity needs that almost every other building type will need as well. And we don't really sell our software to those markets. So let's talk about Spacemaker.

KYRZYSZTOF ZEDRZEJEWSKI: Yeah, we've started from a very, very similar point, which is first of all Spacemaker was acquired by Autodesk three years ago. And ever since, the team was working on Forma platform while trying to implement some of the spacemaker functionality. But the initial Spacemaker was actually targeted towards very similar problems and very similar needs just at the Scandinavian market. Our slogan back then was to design better, more sustainable cities with AI.

And this is already showing that the intention was similar, but the problems were a little bit different. The challenges of the market were a little bit different. When we look at the stuff that we offer to our clients was basically similar to TestFit, saving time, reducing risk and improving the value. So how do you actually do more test fits faster? How do you de-risk your investments right before figuring out after a while that what you did just didn't make sense? And how do you produce better buildings? So this is pretty much aligned with what TestFit is doing, right?

CLIFTON HARNESS: In my view, yes. [LAUGH]

KYRZYSZTOF ZEDRZEJEWSKI: Hence one more similarity that I also see between what Spacemaker was doing what Forma early offering is also trying to do is basically this shift of the change or the cost of the change, since obviously, the further you go to the process, the cost here, the changes, they become. So the more you can drive this decision process earlier, so basically upstream, the more you can test at the beginning with having informed algorithms, the better you're going to be, right?

Because you can basically fulfill the free check checkboxes that we spoke about earlier. So so far, it's very similar to what TestFit was doing. But the devil is in the details in a way since basically, the main difference that we see was basically how market differed. So we had three major blocks of Spacemaker, which is one was bringing contextual data, so starting your project. Second was being able to test it and basically design different options for your site.

And the third was analysis. And this last bit kind of defines what Spacemaker was looking like. Because in Scandinavian markets, analysis are basically essential. It's driven by the fact that customers are very interested in having sustainable buildings. But also Norwegian and Scandinavian regulations are very, very strict when it comes down to the amount of light that comes to the apartment. And to have that to calculate the sum, you need to have very accurate surrounding data.

So this kind of builds the initial three parts of the Spacemaker. So how, I remember, Clifton, that when we first spoke, basically, one of the first sentences were we're not competitors. We were not, and we will not be competitors. Could you elaborate a little bit on that?

CLIFTON HARNESS: All right, so I watched a Spacemaker demo I want to say April of 2020 or something it was mid-COVID. And your colleague, Daniel, who I'll never forget his demo was absolutely incredible to see a competitor and how they walk through the value prop and everything. And he gets to this light analysis on a unit that shows the number of daylight hours that that unit is going to get compared to all the other units.

And I just remember thinking, holy crap, there isn't a developer in the US that has ever thought about this analysis. And I'm from the multifamily industry. I'm been around for a bit. And so quality wasn't a thing that our market in my view really cared about. And then I just started thinking, OK, well if they're going to that level of extremes to serve their customer needs, OK, what am I doing in the US?

What is the most extreme thing that I'm doing to try to solve a deal to make sure the units are good, make sure the deal works. And so at TestFit, we have this DNA of reducing the amount of parking demand on a site just by bin packing parking in the most efficient ways we can. So anyways, I'm sitting there. I'm just thinking, holy crap, this is a country that, or a culture, Scandinavia not really just one country but focused on sustainability in such a clear way that they wouldn't build a building that wasn't sustainable in the first place, right?

And that's just culturally different than the US. We build a lot of our buildings in a way that they actually need to be like rehabilitated 40 years from now. So yeah, I mean, the US is a market. It's driven by money. It's driven by private developers. And the product that you build, at the beginning, we talked about product market fit and how important it is to change the trajectory of AEC, if you can achieve that product market fit, then you can start to move the needle.

And we both achieved it with developers and architects in our markets because we solved a product market fit for what we needed. And it's not saying that we agree. I don't agree that parking should be the main problem in American development. I believe that what Spacemaker is going after, what they went after and sort of the sustainability and higher quality spaces, we should as a culture try to optimize our buildings, and we don't. So that's how we, I mean, I don't know, man.

Does that explain the difference and kind of like the respect that you have to have for a competitor, too, well, a future competitor, right? Y'all were growing like crazy, too. That was the thing that was me and Ryan and two other guys. And when y'all started, and gosh how it grew, it was 100 employees so fast and eight guys, and we're like, well, Autodesk acquired Spacemaker, great.

But when you actually meet, and you actually understand the cultural differences that lead to the software development and the why, you can't just, you have to respect it. It's incredible just to see two startups, different places, two different products, same value prop, right?

KYRZYSZTOF ZEDRZEJEWSKI: Yeah, and it's I think this localization is incredibly important to underline and all of that, right? This is where the moment that we transitioned into building a platform, not building an application, it was clear that we're going to need to collaborate with people that basically understand the market that they are building the right solution for the right market, people like TestFit.

So having that said, I just want to very briefly discuss the formal vision and how it came about. It's probably by you, this slide will be everywhere, so I don't want to dive so much deeply into it. But there's one thing that I just wanted to highlight, which is that first of all, it's a grand vision. It's a vision of connecting basically all phases of AEC industry and different, not only buildings, but also transportation, water, and different parts of the AEC and different phases, which is incredibly complex job which will take us here years to build that's all in cloud.

And one thing that I wanted to highlight is I really like this graphic because it's in a way, it shows a grid, a hexagon grid with only some hexagons being plugged into this whole vision. This represents, in my mind what's basically Autodesk is doing, so building capabilities that tailor to some of those elements within those phases. And I believe that in Forma, we're humble enough to admit that yeah, the space as we've seen in previous slides is incredibly, incredibly complex.

There are so many solutions that are tailoring basically to customer's needs in different markets. And what AEC needs right now is not another massive closed thing. It's basically needs a interlocked system of solutions that address the user needs and play together within the understandable and coherent space. So this is the vision behind Forma.

And what you can see right now in the Forma product is basically the very, very much the beginning of that, which is what we did is we took Spacemaker capabilities, so our early stage web product, we took Forma capabilities, and we also invited others such as TestFit to play along in this environment and start creating capabilities that play together and create a more coherent system.

So when we come back to the slide that I was showing before and how it comes together, basically, it's the same in a way, which is again, we took Spacemaker capabilities and we put this as an early offering on platform. But the approach and the underlying technology is quite different. We are basically allowing others to build and expand each of the verticals. So for example, we are allowing people to bring their own data. We're allowing people to sell and monetize their GAS data to make sure that users have the most local, the most updated data possible.

We are allowing other applications and other products to basically create and author geometry and buildings and roads and other elements within the scene. And this all plays together nicely with our existing analysis, but also other analysis that users can do them and monetize on essentially while also being able to customize whatever we've done, which in general, in principle, creates the vision of this coherent developing ecosystem.

And one thing about all of that is that one year ago, basically Forma was not announced publicly. And creating a platform when for the third parties without communicating that we are creating a platform was incredibly, incredibly difficult. And the job became so much easier when we encountered TestFit for the first time during the AEC Tech Hackathon almost a year ago. Clifton, you walk us through a little bit about the memories and the story behind that?

CLIFTON HARNESS: Sure. So Spacemaker co-founder and current head of Forma Carl Christiansen, and I got met at AU in New Orleans last year, we kind of known of each other but finally had the chance to meet. And we just dreamed for a minute, right? What's the best possible thing that we could both do for AEC? It wasn't what's the best possible thing that we could do for ourselves, like what do we do for because the goal is to defeat apathy.

AEC was so much technology, but we're not implementing it, right? So how do you defeat apathy, right? And so for what it's worth, , Carl and I think, just culturally hit it off. And he invited us to the Hackathon, which I think it was at Thornton Tomasetti, which TestFit's really close. They're an investor in TestFit. And so I was like, holy crap, this would be a great opportunity to actually see if I could hack something with them.

And I was more interested in it from a see what we could do together perspective. There wasn't a focus on getting to a commercial agreement at that time. And anyway, so culturally, we show up, my team, Nat, and I can you, slide, I think, we were fighting all night to build this MVP. And yeah, there it is, got these bags under my eyes because I've slept three hours and two days. And I'm trying to get, I think it was TestFit's IBC complaint office floor plate generator.

We're trying to plug that into Forma. And we did it. It was great. We pitched it. We definitely didn't win, but there was some more compelling hacks out there. But the cool thing was that we had TestFit at this time running in the early prototype of Forma. And it had some API documentation, and our engineers are trying to figure out the best way to place it. And it took 24 hours to do it. It was the fastest integration we'd ever done, and we did it all during a Hackathon, which was amazing.

KYRZYSZTOF ZEDRZEJEWSKI: If I can just chime in, my favorite memory from all of that, basically, Hackathon was going on the entire night. And my favorite memory is when my colleague [INAUDIBLE] that is very much focused on scalability and security and having everything in order was just pushing updates into the product like crazy with comments on Slack channel of YOLO, let's do it just to make sure we arrive on time. And you can also see the bags under the eyes of our team as well. So it's just a great, great effort.

CLIFTON HARNESS: Yeah, Magnus was a champ. [LAUGH] We beat Box a little bit, I think. [LAUGH] OK, product demo of the hack, so this is Forma at that point in time, or was it spacemaker? I think it was Forma, yeah.

KYRZYSZTOF ZEDRZEJEWSKI: It was already Forma. The underlying tech was Forma.

CLIFTON HARNESS: So yeah, we drew polygon on the y'alls really elegant topo, and here's the test that configurator running on top of it. No loss in usability, we're able to do it all in real time running in the web, which for people in the audience TestFit's a desktop tool. We don't have a web capability. So this was great just to have this little snippet of code running in real time in the web. And I had an emotional reaction. I was excited beyond belief.

KYRZYSZTOF ZEDRZEJEWSKI: And to us, it was also incredible how easy and how easy the process was how capable your team was, but also how good of an end result we got. This is instantaneous response, right? This is just dragging polygon around and generating the whole office buildings with course corridors elevators.

CLIFTON HARNESS: Yeah, it's got bathrooms in there too, maybe. It's got a couple of things in there.

KYRZYSZTOF ZEDRZEJEWSKI: Which is incredible, I was, you spoke about having emotional reaction, I had one as well, so.

CLIFTON HARNESS: It's too bad Office isn't blown up like it used to. I'm very happy.

KYRZYSZTOF ZEDRZEJEWSKI: You're were in COVID, right?

CLIFTON HARNESS: Yeah.

KYRZYSZTOF ZEDRZEJEWSKI: Yeah, it was I think the whole team of both Forma [INAUDIBLE] and TestFit were extremely happy with the collaboration at the time. But again, it wasn't commercial. It was just like playing together and putting our tech together, seeing what we can do.

CLIFTON HARNESS: Yeah, this is how absurd our teams are. We love AEC so much, we spent our weekends to go work on.

KYRZYSZTOF ZEDRZEJEWSKI: Yeah, yeah.

CLIFTON HARNESS: My wife's like, are you serious? You're doing what? Oh, that's great.

KYRZYSZTOF ZEDRZEJEWSKI: Yeah, and this basically led us to to the launch, right and the first virtual offering, actual something that landed in the product, which could you take us through that?

CLIFTON HARNESS: So I had the opportunity to have Carl in the office in Dallas, which was great. We think we told our team that day that we were going to do this with Forma and then we turned the computer, and Carl's sitting there. And they're like, who's this Norwegian guy? [LAUGH] But we got that thing built, and I think it's live now. We got a demo. All right, and this is what it does, surface parking configurator in Forma.

And so Forma's has got this amazing terrain mapping. And so we're able to project surface parking on top of it. And then it's got all the same kind of parameters that you would get in TestFit. So here, I think the user is adding in maybe some handicap stalls, yeah.

KYRZYSZTOF ZEDRZEJEWSKI: Yeah, and why parking?

CLIFTON HARNESS: Well, [LAUGH] this country has a lot of it. But like I said earlier, parking is a thing that is in nearly every single building and every single deal. And TestFit only sells to people developing multifamily and industrial, and anyway, so we're leaving a lot of value just sitting there because the rest of AEC can benefit from this configurator in my opinion.

KYRZYSZTOF ZEDRZEJEWSKI: Yeah, so and when we first spoke, it was basically instantaneous when we decided to do something together to put some actual functionality into the main product like into Forma and tossing it to our users to see. There was no doubts in your mind, which is we're doing parking. We want to do parking. And it was incredible in a way because it just shown to us your understanding of the market, which is we were not dictating, OK, we want this part of functionality.

It was more your initiative and just again, pure understanding of the market, which is just showing in the numbers. This is the tool that people use a lot on the product team. I'm getting inquiries every single week for the new functionality and stuff that can be added to basically accelerate the parking capabilities of TestFit. And this is just a true testimony to the fact that people are using it, and they are using it daily. They are not only trying it, but they are actually implementing this in their real projects, which is awesome.

CLIFTON HARNESS: So we do have a couple of updates coming to parking in Forma. I don't have a date, but I'm going to say probably Q1 will be safe to say. Angled stalls is a big request for the surface parking, so we'll be able to do angled stalls. And then couple other things, parking garages, so right now it's just a surface lot generator. And we've been asked to do parking garages with ramps and stuff. So that'll be coming next year if we can get to it.

But feedback that we get from the Forma ecosystem is excellent. And I think we already shipped maybe one tiny update from that feedback. So keep it up, and let us know if we can be of any help on anything related to Forma or TestFit or starting startups. Forma, I think we want 30 startups to integrate, hopefully, right? That should be a big goal is to get the ecosystem running, and I'm excited about it.

KYRZYSZTOF ZEDRZEJEWSKI: I think this a minimum. They think we are going in the direction. So I'm personally very, very excited about where this is going and where it all started in a way, right? Just shows the turning. If people can want to read or want to reach us, I think for Forma team, the most efficient way is usually either just forums. We are quite active there, but also just shooting us a message on LinkedIn I think this works quite efficiently for us.

CLIFTON HARNESS: Yeah, you can reach us on LinkedIn or Twitter or email. Email me, clifton@testfit.io

KYRZYSZTOF ZEDRZEJEWSKI: It's a waterfall. You're going to have a waterfall of messages. Hopefully you're ready. Cool, all right, thank you so much for that.