Earlier this month, the construction industry community platform Trade Hounds closed on $3.2 million in seed funding from a number of venture capital firms and investment entities. The Boston-based Trade Hounds originally promoted itself as the "LinkedIn of the construction industry," but is now moving to establish itself as a new online force for companies and individuals within this sector.
Trade Hounds has its roots in Australia, where co-founder David Broomhead studied the offline manner in which family members working in the local construction industry were able to source their work.
Arriving in the U.S. in 2016, Broomhead consulted with Darien native Peter Maglathlin, who has a background in finance and technology, about creating an online environment exclusively for construction professionals.
"It's always bothered me that tradespeople — the skilled workers who build our hospitals, schools and infrastructure — don't have access to a technology platform that meets their professional needs," Broomhead said in the press statement announcing the seed funding. "We've set out to change this with Trade Hounds."
"It seemed like the industry was still very old school from a labor market tools perspective," Maglathlin said. "The construction industry in the U.S. is huge, and I decided to partner with David and launch what is now the most thriving commercial construction community in the world."
When Trade Hounds debuted in 2019, Maglathlin did not want the site to become another online work-related forum full of conversation but limited in professional development and business leads.
"There are so many of them out there — it's a crowded space," he said. "We thought that we could create a tool that the worker wants to use habitually and will provide value to them over the course of their career life cycle."
Maglathlin recalled that his decision to join LinkedIn nearly a dozen years ago was "because I felt I needed a professional storefront," adding that construction workers would benefit from having a similar site unique to their industry.
But while LinkedIn covers the entire occupational universe and is heavily text-driven, Trade Hounds is industry-specific and offers a multimedia advantage that can offer a representation of the finished quality of the construction professionals' output.
"What a commercial carpenter or electrician or plumber prefers is to show imagery and video as evidence of what they're able to do," he said. "They are showers, not tellers. Workers on Trade Hounds can showcase their skills through imagery and video on the platform, seek advice, and get feedback and validation from other workers on the platform."
Maglathlin began to spread the word on Trade Hounds at the local construction sites near his Boston office, where he queried workers on sourcing work and networking for potential opportunities. Digital advertising, primarily on Facebook, helped raise a wider awareness of this endeavor.
"The beauty of a vertical community is that we're able to use very targeted messaging and very targeted imagery to capture the right type of person," he said. "And we can acquire users at less than $1, which enables our venture funding to go quite a long way."
Since the initial construction site queries, Trade Hounds has grown to 200,000 registered users across the country, with a strong concentration of users in New England, Pennsylvania, Texas, Florida and the Midwest. Maglathlin also stressed that the typical Trade Hounds user is not the neighborhood handyman that someone would hire from a consumer-facing website for small domestic repairs, but is instead a "licensed tradesperson who wears a hard hat and builds the big structures of the world: our hospitals, our schools, our bridges, etc."
Trade Hounds is also readying a jobs section that, according to Maglathlin, will "enable employers to interact with the community about job opportunities, which is going to be the primary monetization channel in the near medium- and long-term." This section is being planned to launch later in the year.
Since securing its new venture funding, Maglathlin stated the company is "going on a hiring spree" and is seeking a variety of employees ranging from a quality assurance engineer to a customer success manager, along with several marketing officers and front- and back-end engineers. The company is also considering an expansion of its platform to the wider world, but Maglathlin noted that would not be happening in the near future.
"We think this is a billion-dollar plus business in a massive vertical and can be scaled globally," he said. "Right now, I think America is obviously a big enough market to focus on for the next couple of years."
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