Sam Carigliano‘s journey with SkyCiv reveals a counterintuitive approach to market adoption: in industries where trust compounds slowly, engineering credibility through product excellence outperforms traditional marketing every time. From a simple student calculator to a comprehensive structural analysis platform, SkyCiv’s evolution offers crucial insights for anyone building tools in risk-averse professional markets.
About Sam
Sam is CEO and co-founder of SkyCiv, a cloud-based structural analysis platform serving engineers worldwide. Sam graduated from the University of New South Wales with a double degree in Civil Engineering and Business. Since launching in 2012, Sam has guided the company’s evolution from a simple bending moment calculator to a comprehensive structural engineering platform, hosting thousands of engineers around the world.
Today, Sam is in charge of the day-to-day operations of the company, managing a team of engineers, marketers, salespeople and developers in their mission to build the future of structural engineering software.
Introduction
“The biggest misconception was that what we had built was just another flimsy web app that couldn’t compete with 30-year-old desktop products. Proving that wrong wasn’t about marketing—it was about levelling up the product and making it meet and exceed expectations.” Sam Carigliano
When Sam launched SkyCiv in 2012, the structural engineering world wasn’t ready for cloud-based analysis software. The industry had spent decades perfecting desktop applications, building confidence through familiar interfaces and proven reliability. Cloud computing was still viewed with suspicion, particularly for mission-critical calculations where a single error could compromise building safety.
The challenge wasn’t just technological: it was cultural. Engineers needed to believe that a web-based application could match the precision and reliability of established desktop solutions. Earning that confidence required a fundamentally different approach; instead of marketing their way to credibility, Sam and his team chose to engineer it.
From student frustration to market insight
The story of SkyCiv begins with a generational shift in expectations for software. For Sam and his co-founder Paul, both university students at the time, the problem was straightforward: they needed to calculate a bending moment diagram. Their instinct wasn’t to install desktop software or dig through manuals; it was to search Google, expecting an instant, browser-based solution. This wasn’t laziness or impatience: it was a reflection of how their generation inherently approached technology: fast, accessible, and cloud-first.
“We were students, and we searched Google wanting a tool on the web,” Sam recalls.
“We wanted that nice, easy experience where you search for a problem, click a website, and get your solution in seconds. That’s what we were used to, and what we expected. But for structural engineering, it didn’t exist.”
This Google-first mindset wasn’t just a personal preference: it was a market signal. When Sam checked Google’s keyword planner, he found thousands of monthly searches for “bending moment diagram calculator.” The demand was clear, but the supply was stuck in a desktop-first world, requiring software installation for even the simplest calculations. This gap wasn’t just about technology; it was about a mismatch between how users wanted to work and how tools were being delivered.
Rather than overcomplicating their approach, Sam and Paul focused on this unmet need. They launched bendingmomentdiagram.com, a domain explicitly chosen to match what people were searching for. The site did one thing exceptionally well: calculate bending moment diagrams through a web interface. No downloads, no installations, no friction. This laser-focused solution created something revolutionary: instant access to structural calculations, built for a generation that expected simplicity and speed.
The simple tool became a proof of concept for something larger. Users didn’t just calculate their diagrams and leave; they started requesting additional features. Would they pay for enhanced functionality? Yes. The market was telling them that accessibility and ease of use created genuine value worth paying for. This early validation would become foundational to their approach: start simple, solve real problems, and let user needs guide expansion.
The credibility gap: more than just technical concerns
But moving beyond student users to professional engineers meant confronting a very different set of challenges. “When we built that, that’s when we started to get those sorts of challenges,” Sam notes. “If you want to sell to a serious consulting structural engineer, they have a whole other set of needs and they have a whole other set of desires.”
The scepticism they faced went beyond typical new product hesitation. “When engineers first encountered our platform, they weren’t just evaluating features,” Sam explains. “They were questioning whether any cloud-based tool could handle the complexity and precision their work demanded.”
This scepticism showed up in three ways. First, credibility: how could a startup’s software, which began as a simple calculator, compete with industry giants that had been refining their products for decades? Second, performance: engineers worried that web-based applications would be slow, unreliable, or limited compared to desktop alternatives. Third, and perhaps most damaging, was perception—cloud software was seen as inherently “lightweight,” suitable for simple tasks but inadequate for serious engineering work.
These concerns weren’t unfounded. Many early cloud applications prioritised accessibility over functionality, leading engineers to perceive web-based tools as necessarily simplified versions of their desktop counterparts. The fact that SkyCiv started as a basic bending moment calculator only reinforced these assumptions.
Overcoming this perception required proving that cloud-first architecture could actually enable capabilities impossible in traditional desktop software. But more importantly, it required demonstrating that simplicity and accessibility didn’t compromise engineering rigour. This became the central tension in their evolution: maintaining the ease of use that attracted initial users while building the depth of functionality that professional engineers required.
Product quality as the path to credibility: building simply, engineering rigorously
Faced with this scepticism, most startups would have turned to aggressive marketing campaigns to change perceptions. Sam and his team made a different choice; one that would define the company’s growth trajectory: prioritising product excellence over promotion. This meant focusing relentlessly on customer problems rather than vanity metrics or investor expectations.
“We realised early on that in this industry, your product is your marketing,” Sam notes.
“No amount of advertising could overcome a subpar user experience or questionable calculation accuracy.” This philosophy meant obsessing over making the product better to increase customer value, while ignoring external factors that didn’t actually matter to end users; a discipline that many startups struggle to maintain under pressure to scale quickly.
But this realisation didn’t come immediately. In the early days, the team moved fast, shipping features rapidly to gain users and validate growth potential. “We were working really quickly but accumulating a lot of tech debt,” Sam reflects. “Just getting features and products out there, getting them used, getting feedback and growing.” The turning point came when they recognised that speed without quality was undermining the very credibility they were trying to build. “We had to go back and QA everything,” Sam explains. “From that experience, we learned we needed an airtight QA procedure before moving forward. It was actually a cultural change; speed isn’t the number one thing anymore. It’s quality.”
The team invested heavily in ensuring their structural analysis algorithms matched or exceeded the precision of established desktop solutions. They built robust error-checking systems that could catch potential issues before they affected results. Most importantly, they developed transparent reporting capabilities that allowed engineers to verify every aspect of their calculations.
But they never abandoned the principle that had made bendingmomentdiagram.com successful: software should be immediately useful without requiring extensive training. The interface remained intuitive. The learning curve stayed manageable. New users could accomplish basic tasks within minutes, while power users could access sophisticated functionality as they needed it.
This user-centric approach went deeper than simply collecting feedback. The team understood a principle that Google’s product leaders Robby Stein would later articulate: don’t think of users as “using” your product; think of them as “hiring” it to do something for them. For SkyCiv, this meant understanding that engineers weren’t hiring the software to “do structural analysis”—they were hiring it to get trusted calculations faster, with less friction, and with the confidence to stake their professional reputation on the results. Understanding what job engineers were truly trying to accomplish, not just what features they requested, became central to product development.
This philosophy extended to how they developed features. Instead of building capabilities in isolation and hoping users would find them valuable, the team maintained constant dialogue with practising engineers. Every feature addition was validated against real workflows and actual needs. They built what users asked for, not what they thought users should want. More importantly, they studied the “big hire” moment: understanding not just what engineers did with the software, but why they first decided to use it. This deep understanding of user motivation informed everything from interface design to feature prioritisation.
Crucially, they also implemented rigorous internal review processes that ensured quality never suffered in the pursuit of simplicity. They built what Sam calls an “Internal Soundboard of Ideal Customers,” a team of consulting engineers who had been practising as structural engineers before joining the company. “They’re our soundboard. Hey, what do you think about this feature?” Sam explains. These engineers, with experience across different markets and design standards (US, Europe, Canada), could validate both the accuracy of results and the appropriateness of implementation. This internal expertise became a quality gate: new features didn’t ship until they passed peer review processes and met standards set by engineers who understood the professional stakes involved.
The transparency element proved particularly crucial. While desktop software often treated calculation processes as black boxes, the platform made everything visible. Engineers could drill down into every assumption, review intermediate steps, and validate results using familiar manual methods. This openness addressed one of the industry’s core concerns: the need to understand and verify critical calculations, while reinforcing that simplicity wasn’t hiding complexity, but rather making complexity accessible.
Word-of-mouth in a relationship-driven industry
The decision to prioritise product quality over marketing aligned perfectly with how the AEC industry actually adopts new tools. Unlike consumer software markets, where viral growth and paid acquisition dominate, construction and engineering rely heavily on professional recommendations and peer validation.
“Our best marketing was always a satisfied user telling a colleague about their experience,” Sam reflects.
“In an industry where professional reputations are built on reliable work, engineers are naturally cautious about recommending tools they haven’t thoroughly tested themselves.”
This word-of-mouth growth pattern created a self-reinforcing cycle. Each new user who achieved reliable results became a credible advocate for the platform. Their endorsements carried weight precisely because they came from peers who understood the technical requirements and professional stakes involved. Many early advocates were the same students who had discovered bendingmomentdiagram.com and carried that positive experience into their professional careers.
The viral coefficient in this model was necessarily slower than that of typical software businesses, but it was also more durable. Engineers who recommended the platform had skin in the game; they were vouching for a tool they used in their own professional practice. This created a foundation of authentic advocacy that paid marketing couldn’t replicate.
The patient path to market acceptance
Building trust in conservative industries requires patience that venture-capital timelines often don’t accommodate. The typical startup playbook (raise a Series A, scale aggressively to hit growth targets, then raise a Series B to fuel even faster expansion) doesn’t align well with industries where trust compounds slowly. Sam’s approach was different: sustained focus on product-market fit and obsessive customer focus rather than chasing rapid scaling.
“There were definitely moments early on when we questioned whether we were moving fast enough,” Sam admits. “But we knew that any shortcuts in product quality would undermine the trust we were trying to build. In AEC, you really only get one chance to prove yourself with each potential user.”
This slower, more patient approach aligned with research on startup success factors. As highlighted in Bill Gross’s analysis of hundreds of startups, timing, not speed of scaling, is often the biggest determiner of whether a company succeeds. The team was fortunate to have long-term investors who understood this, allowing them to build at the pace the market could absorb rather than the pace venture timelines demanded.
This patience extended to their customer development process. Rather than pushing for rapid user acquisition, the team focused on deeply understanding the needs of early adopters through what product leaders call “interrogation-style” discovery: Where were users when they first decided to try the platform? What were they doing? What specific problem brought them to search for a solution? Understanding these moments of causation, not just correlation, revealed why engineers chose their product and what jobs they were truly hiring it to perform. They used initial scepticism as valuable feedback, treating every concern as product development guidance rather than a mere sales objection.
The approach also influenced their feature development priorities. Instead of building flashy capabilities to attract attention, they concentrated on core functionality that would win over the most demanding users. Their philosophy of graduated complexity (easy to start, sophisticated when you need it) became a key differentiator: engineers could begin with simple calculations, build confidence in the platform’s accuracy, and progressively tackle more complex analyses as their comfort level grew.
This approach rested on three interconnected pillars that reinforced each other. First, the intuitive UI got users 90% of the way to competency quickly. Second, comprehensive documentation, tutorials, and videos provide self-service learning resources. Third, and critically, live chat support created a direct line to knowledgeable staff, often structural engineers themselves, who could address questions immediately.
“When engineers have questions about our calculations or need help interpreting results, that’s actually a chance to demonstrate our expertise and commitment to their success,” Sam notes. They implemented live chat support within two years of launching, and it served multiple purposes: it built user confidence through real-time assistance, it created a continuous feedback loop that revealed confusion points and potential UI improvements, and it functioned as an early warning system for product issues. Rather than treating support as a cost centre, the team positioned it as both a trust-building mechanism and a product development intelligence source.
Lessons for building trust in conservative markets
The journey offers several key insights for companies building solutions in risk-averse professional industries. Product quality must precede marketing: in industries where professional reputation depends on tool reliability, expect longer development cycles and higher quality thresholds than typical software markets demand.
Simplicity and sophistication are complementary, not opposite. Start with focused, immediately useful capabilities and expand based on validated user needs. Transparency provides unprecedented visibility into processes, addressing core professional concerns while differentiating from competitors who obscure their methodologies.
Internal expertise ensures that simplification doesn’t compromise accuracy. Build a team of practitioners who understand real-world workflows to serve as a soundboard for product development. Word-of-mouth growth, while slower than paid acquisition, creates more durable market penetration through authentic peer recommendations.
Finally, patience is essential. Trust compounds slowly in conservative industries; companies need sufficient runway to allow organic growth patterns to develop. The path from simple tool to comprehensive platform may take years, but each step must be validated before expanding.
Today, this patient approach to trust-building has created substantial competitive advantages. The user base serves as a credible advocate network, the transparent approach has become an industry differentiator, and the reputation for reliability opens doors that would remain closed to less-proven alternatives.
“Looking back, the decision to prioritise product quality over growth metrics was absolutely correct,” Sam reflects.
“Trust is like compound interest in this industry; it builds slowly at first, but eventually becomes your most valuable asset.”