Welcome to The DIRT Teardown.
A patch of internet dirt, where I dig through the positioning and messaging of AEC tech, construction and building material brands.
Every edition gets sorted into three piles:
THE GOOD. THE BAD. THE UNBURIED.
I’m not here to sling mud. But I am here to pull apart websites, LinkedIn pages, demos and trade booths to see what’s working and what's not.
The point is to give you ideas that you can steal...er... I mean borrow, mistakes worth avoiding and a sharper lens to see your own brand.
First onto the slab: PinMy
PinMy is a mobile field app for construction: drop a pin on a plan, leave a voice note or a photo, and the site's decisions stop vanishing into WhatsApp.
Pretty neat stuff.
THE GOOD
They named the real enemy
This is one of the clearest examples I've seen of a brand naming the REAL thing its buyer would use instead: WatsApp.
"Stop losing decisions in WhatsApp".
They position themselves against their competitive alternative in their headline.
A move like this takes guts.
Hint: Your REAL competitor is usually a habit, a spreadsheet, or in this case, a WatsApp thread. Put your name opposite that and you've done more positioning work in six words than most brands manage in a whole deck.
Two CTA (Call to Action) Buttons
PinMy puts two calls to action side by side:
Try it free & Book a 30-minute demo
So smart.
One buyer is ready to speak to sales and do a demo. Another would rather poke around the product without being hounded by sales emails. Both are legit buyers.
PinMy lets each choose their own level of commitment instead of herding everyone towards the same demo form.
No empty words
"Pin them on the plan"
You know exactly what PinMy does in five words. FIVE! No over-explaining with technical terms.
I love a brand that just says the thing.
"Voice-first, glove-friendly, tested on dusty sites, in cold weather, with one bar of signal."
I can see the site. I can feel the cold hands. (When I say "see" I mean metaphorically, of course, in my own mind.)
But more importantly, it tackles the objection that kills plenty of field software before rollout: the crew won’t use it.
THE BAD
Speak to everyone, land on no one
Count the audiences PinMy refer to on their homepage. Actually, you're busy - I'll count for you. I counted seven: Site Supervisors, Architects, BIM Coordinators, Foremen, Snagging Managers, Project Managers, Telecom Teams.
The "get decisions out of WhatsApp" promise loses its edge the moment it has to stretch across nine different jobs. A message built for everyone fits no one in particular and "in particular" is exactly how buying decisions get made.
What they should do: pick the one person who feels the WhatsApp mess most (i.e. the site supervisor drowning in fourteen group chats) and write the homepage to them. The architect, the telecom crew, the snagging manager can each have their own page.
You want your messaging to resonate with ONE particular buyer... one message sprayed across all will land on no one.
The voice keeps changing
On one page, PinMy sounds like a foreman leaning across the bar:
Stop typing “see attached.” Pin it.
Then the copy moves into the boardroom:
The authoring layer. CDE integration. A structured record.
By the Digital Twins page, the original voice has been replaced by:
The capture layer. Ground-truth. A standardised, repeatable onboarding process.
The technical language isn’t wrong. A Digital Twins audience may understand every word.
But the problem is that it sounds like a different company wrote it.
PinMy’s strongest, most compelling voice is plain, direct and no BS. Keep that voice everywhere. The technical pages can become more detailed without the brand putting on a blazer.
THE UNBURIED
Voice is the X factor (and it's hiding in a list)
The subhead reads:
Voice notes, photos, videos and text.
Four capture types.
But photos, videos and text aren’t the interesting bit. Every phone already does those.
Voice is where the dirt is.
A supervisor is standing on site with gloves on, hands full and a problem directly in front of them. They can tap once, say what happened and keep moving.
To be clear, WhatsApp can record voice notes. What it can’t do is PIN that voice note to the exact spot on a plan, creating a record the whole team can find later.
THAT, my friend, is PinMy’s X factor.
Right now, it’s buried as item one in a list of four. When it should be leading the whole pitch.
Be honest, bro
I love how refreshingly honest PinMy are in their FAQ section. They openly tell you what it can't do: "Does PinMy replace PlanRadar or BIM 360? No." "Does it work offline? Not yet." "A pin isn't tied to a BIM element."
In a category where every tool swears it does everything, a brand that admits what it isn't is refreshing and builds trust. Plus, you believe the yeses more because you've seen the nos.
A good story
On the Digital Twins page they say, "Our team is Ukrainian, so we understand the reconstruction context directly."
That changes how I see the company.
This is a team building field-documentation software while its own country faces an enormous reconstruction effort. It gives the work weight, context and a human reason to care.
That story deserves a more prominent place in the company narrative.
Move it closer to the surface, but handle it with restraint. Ukraine’s reconstruction is CONTEXT, not a hook.
"BORROW" THIS BEFORE THEY NOTICE
- Name the thing your buyer actually uses instead not the competitor YOU think they use. resent.
- Build two front doors. A no-card "try it" for the self-server and a "book a demo" for the hand-holder. Let the reader pick their own commitment instead of shoving everyone through one door.
- Your best sentence is often already written; it's just filed in the wrong place. Move it up.
DIG RATING : (7/10)
A brand that clearly names the perfect enemy in the category. Kept off an 8 by talking to seven audiences in three different voices. Lead with the X factor, narrow the who, make the brand voice consistent and you've got a 10!
To getting DIRT-y
Nikita
P.S. If you liked this email, my newsletter (DIRT Dispatch) has more of the same. Except it's 23% funnier.
