The VP who asked, 'Can we buy this from you?'
A materials manufacturer ran three blind takeoffs against Kanopi, and we caught our own errors before he did.
In early July 2026 the VP of Operations at a building materials manufacturer put Kanopi through three blind takeoffs, all on the same day, to test it against his own team's internal estimating process. I chose not to polish the results before sending them. First my team ran a blind second pass on each takeoff.
That pass caught real errors before anything went out: a shell height mistake, an undercounted window schedule and a slab thickness conflict. A trial like this means something only if it survives another person checking your work. Finding your own mistakes before the manufacturer's estimator can is what separates a demo from a credible product. Every corrected takeoff took under an hour.
The VP's first reaction was that it was close and that he was sold. His team's own check came out within a couple of thousand board feet and some twenty to thirty bags of mine. He floated buying the capability outright, and I told him straight: the IP is expensive.
The trial that sells is the one where you find your own mistakes ahead of the other side. A live trial pushes you to rush an answer out the door. I built in the discipline to find my own errors first.
Story details
| Project | Kanopi |
|---|---|
| Type | Strong opinion |
| Year | 2026-07-06 to 07-09 |
| Firm telling | on the Common Ground wiki |