How Buildern Reached $2M ARR and 300 Customers in 2026 with Zero Paid Ads (Interview with CEO and Founder Mayek Tigranian)

Cold Open: Revenue and Profit Teaser

Nathan Latka

00:00You've scaled over $2,000,000 of revenue today. Do you do podcasts a lot, or is this exclusive?

Mayek Tigranian

00:04>> No. No. It's exclusive.

Nathan Latka

00:06On a $160,000 a month of revenue, will you profit 20,000 or 10,000?

Mayek Tigranian

00:10>> Around 40.

Nathan Latka

00:11How much money have you raised from investors, and what percent of the company do you sell?

Mayek Tigranian

00:14>> So we raised around 500,000.

Nathan Latka

00:17How much equity did the angel investors get for the 500,000 investment?

Mayek Tigranian

00:20>> Total around 10%.

What Buildern Does: Construction Management Software

Nathan Latka

00:22So just tell us what you sell. What's the tool do?

Mayek Tigranian

00:24>> So how we help the builders? It's like building is construction management software. So we had residential and commercial builders to better manage their finances and better manage their forklifts. A lot of those are legacy tools. And whenever you're trying to find some good tool, it's it's was very hard. So that was the reason why we created Builder.

Guest Introduction: Mayek Tigranian, CEO of Buildern

Nathan Latka

00:42Where did most of your new customers come from? Hey, folks. My guest today is Mayek Tigranian. He is the CEO and founder of Buildern, a platform modernizing the 10,000,000,000,000 construction industry. With over fifteen years in SaaS development, he's helped thousands of builders replace outdated paperwork with digital workflows that save these firms up to 30% of their management time.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?

Mayek Tigranian

01:04>> Yeah. Hey, Nathan. Thanks, Jorge.

Nathan Latka

01:06And this is very nice of you. I I said before, I said, why did you say yes to this interview, and what did you say?

Mayek Tigranian

01:11>> 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.

Nathan Latka

01:19Well, love that. I love that you're here. And do you do podcasts a lot or is this exclusive?

Mayek Tigranian

01:23>> No. No. It's exclusive.

Nathan Latka

01:24We love that. Okay. So you've you've scaled over to to over $2,000,000 of revenue today. Tell me before we get into more economics, I was sort of joking with the revenue question. Just tell us what you sell. What's the tool do?

Mayek Tigranian

01:34>> Yeah. So how we help to build there is it's like building is construction management software. So we help residential and commercial builders to better manage their finances and better manage their forklifts. So, basically, what's happening 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

02:05>> to better manage everything internally and externally.

Founding Story: From Travel Tech to Construction SaaS

Nathan Latka

02:08This is great. And when did you write the first line of code for the company? What year?

Mayek Tigranian

02:12>> Soon will be fifth year. So we started 2021.

Nathan Latka

02:172021. Okay. Great. And how many customers are you now serving today?

Mayek Tigranian

02:21>> So right now, we are serving around 300 customers. Usually, as users, there are more, like three, four thousand.

Nathan Latka

02:28And where did you you know, walk me through when you launched this business in 2021. Where'd you get the idea from?

Mayek Tigranian

02:33>> So idea came from like, I was trying to find something else to work on because I was moving from my previous startup, which

02:39was

02:39>> Traveltech. 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

03:04>> it was like continuous discussion about like, don't having enough resources, enough project management tools to manage construction. 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.

Background: TripPlano, Travello, and Codelno Dev Shop

Nathan Latka

03:22And when you look at I'm just looking at your history here on screen. You were at Upwork, TripPlanner, Trello Solutions, Codelno. Did any of these create a major financial win for you?

Mayek Tigranian

03:31>> Some of them.

Nathan Latka

03:32Tell me more.

Mayek Tigranian

03:33>> So I previously, I had, like, b two b travel, and before that one, b two c 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 I was more engineer. That's it. I was software engineer.

Nathan Latka

03:54So team lead at Upwork up to 2016, and then you founded TripPlano from 2015 to 2018. Did you sell that company?

Mayek Tigranian

04:02>> No. It was my first company as a startup. I don't have skills at that time to sell a company. I was So in

Nathan Latka

04:09started slowly shut it down?

Mayek Tigranian

04:10>> Yeah, yeah. I was in Armenia. I moved to US three years ago. So before that home, when I was in Armenia, the market's a little bit different in Armenia. So whenever you try to sell, there is not many buyers.

Nathan Latka

04:22Okay. So you shut that slowly shuts down, and then you launched Travello Solutions in 2018. This looks like it was a travel agency. Did you make good money doing this?

Mayek Tigranian

04:30>> That one was b to b software company for outgoing or incoming travel agencies. So it was us.

Nathan Latka

04:38Okay. Did you sell this or or shut this one down?

Mayek Tigranian

04:40>> No. COVID shut this down. Like, if you see, it was 2020. So the COVID hit, and everything was shut down.

Nathan Latka

04:46Alright. Take me into Codell, though. What does this do?

Mayek Tigranian

04:48>> So Codellen was a software company. It was just a software dev shop.

Nathan Latka

04:53Would this generate good revenue for you during COVID?

Mayek Tigranian

04:55>> 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 whenever 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

05:25>> people want and how it can be need to be created. But, financially, yep, again, we just made a lot of money there. Yeah. And that was the reason, like, when I started Buildern, I only had a team with me. So it was not like starting from scratch. I had team, and also I have money to bootstrap.

Nathan Latka

05:42So you built this dev shop called Codelno between 2018 and 2022. What was your best revenue year?

Mayek Tigranian

05:48>> I think it was 3,000,000, somewhere that amount.

Nathan Latka

05:51$3,000,000 Okay, that's great. Congratulations. So, why did you shut this down to go all in on BuilderN if Codelno was doing $3,000,000 a year?

Mayek Tigranian

05:58>> So, my passion is creating product. Like, with Collina, 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 Buildern, it's it's always interesting because you're actually working with end customers, trying to find a reason what you can improve. And I'm patient about creating products.

Nathan Latka

06:21Yep. I love that. Okay. So Buildern gets going in 2021, launched. What year did you break your first million of revenue?

First Million in Revenue and Angel Investment

Mayek Tigranian

06:26>> So we broke our first year revenue last year. Initially, first two years, we don't have any paying customers. We just were brilliant. Then came two angel investors, both from construction. They saw the value and with them so they invested some money and they helped us to get the product, 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

06:51>> 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 new modules so people can use that one. It's not just like one estimating or one scheduled team because they are not techy, so they can't do any integrations. So you need to have a lot of futures integrated so it's suitable for them to use.

Nathan Latka

07:15That makes sense. How much money have you raised from investors and what percent of the company do you sell?

Mayek Tigranian

07:20>> So we raised around 500,000 from them. So with that money, we became profitable. So we are profitable for a long time and hopefully we'll keep the same way for the future as well.

Team Size, Geography, and Human Arbitrage

Nathan Latka

07:34How much equity did the angel investors get for the 500,000

Mayek Tigranian

07:37>> Total dollars around 10%.

Nathan Latka

07:40Do you regret that deal?

Mayek Tigranian

07:42>> No, never.

Nathan Latka

07:43It was good.

Mayek Tigranian

07:44>> It was good because it's it was not just money. It was people coming from industry and helping you to build the product.

Nathan Latka

07:52You told me today, as of right now recording, you're doing about a $160,000 a month of revenue, which is 2,000,000 of ARR. You also said you're very profitable. Can you share how profitable?

Mayek Tigranian

08:02>> So we actually like, every month we are growing, we get new revenue. Based on that new revenue, we're hiring more people. So it's just continuous loop. We never just hold money for a long period. We just reinvest Like,

Nathan Latka

08:14on on on a 100 on a $160,000 a month of revenue, will you profit 20,000 or 10,000?

Mayek Tigranian

08:20>> Around 40.

Nathan Latka

08:2140,000?

Mayek Tigranian

08:22>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

08:23Oh my goodness. Round dude, 40,000 of profits on that monthly row. That's incredible. Nice work.

08:28>> Thank you.

08:28Guys, remember, I am not just a YouTuber. I'm investing into my third fund. We've deployed $250,000,000 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 onboarding email, I reply and I see all those. Just reply and say, Nathan, I found you through YouTube,

Growth Channel: Organic SEO and Long-Tail Blog Strategy

Nathan Latka

08:51and 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?

Mayek Tigranian

08:59>> So full time, we are around 35. They are not everyone is in US, but across different countries.

Nathan Latka

09:05So here's a question I have for you. If anyone took your 2,000,000 of ARR today divided by 35, your revenue per employee looks really low by US standards, but you're still profiting $40,000 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?

Mayek Tigranian

09:20>> So mostly they are based in Armenia. Our headquarter on our own site 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 army.

Nathan Latka

09:41Love that. Okay. How are you growing today? You're almost doubling year over year, basically bootstrapped. You've only raised 500 k against 2,000,000 of ARR. You have 300 customers. Like, talk to me about, like, last month, February 2026. Where did most of your new customers come from?

Mayek Tigranian

09:55>> 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 etcetera. So people know about us. Initially, we 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 were you creating? You're creating something which is interesting for

Live SEO Walkthrough: Traffic, Domain Rating, and Content Structure

Nathan Latka

10:24>> them.

Live SEO Walkthrough: Traffic, Domain Rating, and Content Structure

Nathan Latka

10:24Yep. 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 18,800 organic traffic, 49 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?

Mayek Tigranian

10:44>> 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 on that part. But we have the content team, they are working on to polish the article. Sometimes I review, sometimes very, very frequently I also publish myself.

Nathan Latka

11:06Okay. Let's go deep for a second Construction management software for small businesses brings you a lot of traffic. 1,700 free clicks per month. That's amazing cost savings. Other people might pay $10 per lead for Google Ads. That's like $17,000 of free value you're getting from one blog post every month. If So you annualize that, you know, that's like $200,000 of free value every month from this one blog post. So a couple questions. How did you know

11:29that you wanted to car target this long tail keyword, and how did you specifically structure this page to optimize for Google's SEO schema?

Mayek Tigranian

11:36>> 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 from industry what people need and what they research for. So based on that one, we try 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,

12:05>> 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 competitor softwares are better matched for them. So you need to, like, be very transparent what you 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

SEO Attribution: 95% of Revenue from Organic Search

Mayek Tigranian

12:33>> than just, like, you promoting yourself.

Path to $4M: Building the Sales Team

Nathan Latka

12:35So if you guys are just getting started on SEO and you wanna copy this tactic, a couple 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 piece of content here. As you scroll down, obviously, really good visuals. There's H1 and H2 tags that are optimized

12:53as 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 chat bots, right? If you're searching in ChatGPT, you know, how long does it take to set up construction software, right?

13:14They hopefully show up in this article. How much are you doing in terms of, Mike, how much are you doing in terms of optimization to show up in ChatGPT or Gemini or Cloud results?

Mayek Tigranian

13:24>> 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 Charge GPT. You're actually doing exactly for SEO. It have a lot of impact on Charge GPT.

Nathan Latka

13:42Okay. So what percent of the 2,000,000 of revenue you're doing today would you credit to your SEO strategy?

Mayek Tigranian

13:47>> I would say 95%, most likely.

Nathan Latka

13:50So 95% of your $2,000,000 of revenue today has come exclusively from your SEO optimization strategy?

Mayek Tigranian

13:56>> I believe so.

Nathan Latka

13:57Wow, very impressive. Okay, how are going grow in the future? How do you go from 2,000,000 of revenue to $4,000,000 of revenue over the next 12

Pricing and ACV: The Death Trap Between Self-Serve and Enterprise

Mayek Tigranian

14:03>> 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 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

14:33>> for over three years. There was no salesperson. There was no support. There was no customer success. We built customer facing teams last last six months.

Nathan Latka

14:41Mike, let me ask you a question. You're in the death trap in terms of pricing. What I mean by that is 2,000,000 of ARR and 300 customers means you're doing about 6,006.5 ks 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 but it's way too high for a no touch credit card checkout on your website. How do you fix that?

Mayek Tigranian

15:03>> So we historically have some customers. We came very early, so we're keeping their pricing is low. So our ACV is a little bit higher than 6,000 something. It's becoming more close to 7 and half and eight. And also when you have like good retention rate, then it makes sense to have sales reps.

Sales Rep Quotas and Compensation

Nathan Latka

15:23Okay. So do your account executives you're hiring now have a sales quota? Yeah. What quarter

Mayek Tigranian

15:27>> do you Annualized around 1,000,000.

Nathan Latka

15:29Okay. So they have to close a million of new ARR each year. That's their quota?

15:33>> Yeah.

15:33And what can you share? Don't name a specific, obviously, employee, but what's the base salary you're paying your new AEs?

Mayek Tigranian

15:40>> It's different based on their skills, but usually you're targeting to have for them as pays around 80 ks, maybe 100. OT will be around 150, somewhere around.

Nathan Latka

15:54Yep. 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. Eight thirty three real salaries and payroll flowing through Founder Path. If we go into account executive, you'll

16:15see the highest, the best, the top performers are getting 122 base. The new guys are getting 50 ks base and then OTE is about double each of those things. You can see the the different brackets here. So, you're sort of right on the money in terms of quota targets relative to OTE. Yep. Very good. Alright, so that's your growth strategy today. How many sales reps are on your team? You said there's 35 total. How many sales?

Wrap-Up and Where to Follow Mayek

Mayek Tigranian

16:37>> So right now two, just only two.

Nathan Latka

16:39Two, okay, very good. Well, look, we really appreciate you coming on. I learned a bunch. If people wanna follow your story over the next twelve months, where can they find you online?

Mayek Tigranian

16:47>> You I'm usually active on LinkedIn, so they can find me there.

Nathan Latka

16:50Alright. Guys, buildern.com. It is software for construction companies. Mayak got going on this back in 2021 after COVID killed his travel business, but he had a dev shop before that that's doing 3,000,000 a year in revenue. So he really knew how to get talented engineers. Their first two years of building from 2021 to 2023, they had no customers, but they landed some angel investors who put in 500 10%. Then lightning struck in a bottle. A million

17:14bucks of revenue in 2025. They've already doubled 2026 to 2,000,000 of revenue. They're serving 300 customers and they're very profitable. A 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 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

17:40in 18,000 organic clicks for free per month. We're rooting for him. Mike, you're a loyal listener to the show, right?

Mayek Tigranian

17:47>> Yeah, Of course.

Nathan Latka

17:48Alright. I'm rooting for you then. That's how it works. Guys, check him out at Bildern, buildern,.com. Mayank, 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.