I called the 10 most active users of my app. The best answer came from the one who quit.

SaaS and business

November 2, 2026

7 min read

I phoned the most active companies testing Budowo.pl. Most found real jobs through it. One quit because he didn't know he could filter out jobs he didn't care about. Here is what the numbers say about why.

The call with the one who quit

Most of the 10 testers I called told me the app found them real jobs. The most useful call was with the one who had quit.

These were the phone calls I promised at the end of my last post. Quick reminder for anyone who landed here first: budowo.pl is a map of new construction sites in Poland. Every day it pulls fresh building permits, public tenders and announcements from municipal bulletin boards, lets an AI estimate which machines each site will need, and helps you find the investor's phone number. The customer is a small company with an excavator, a crane or a concrete pump that wants to call the investor before the competition does.

Over four months of testing, around 50 companies created an account. They kept signing up the whole time I was changing the app, so some of them saw a very different product than others. I picked the 10 most active ones and over the last two weeks I called each of them. I mainly wanted to know one thing: did the app help you find a specific job?

What they said

Most of them said yes, they found jobs through it and the app is really useful to them.

One of them said, literally, that I "fell from the sky" for them (the Polish version of a godsend). He wants to pay and offered to write a reference that I can put on the website. I'll admit, that was a very nice call :)

But one conversation was more interesting than the rest.

The guy who stopped using it

He told me he had been using the app, that it was useful, but then he stopped. Why? Because he kept getting notifications about jobs that didn't interest him at all. Most of them had nothing to do with his type of machines.

I told him that he could simply filter by machine type and only get the jobs that matter to him.

He had no idea that this feature existed.

When I looked into it later, it turned out he had created his account before I added machine filtering. So at the start the app simply showed him everything, and when the filters came, he never noticed them. And then he stopped opening the app, even though I kept writing in Facebook groups that I keep working on the app and adding new things.

What he was getting, in numbers

From a developer's point of view, my first reaction was: come on, the filters are right there, what's the problem with clicking through them and selecting what you need? So, while writing this post, I counted how much of what he was getting had anything to do with a company like his.

Every permit in Budowo goes through an AI step that estimates the machinery the site will need. It ends up as a simple JSON array next to the record:

["EXCAVATOR", "DUMP_TRUCK", "CONCRETE_PUMP", "TRUCK_MIXER", "SOIL_COMPACTOR"]

The equipment filter checks whether this list contains any of the machines you selected. To count it in the database, one operator is enough:

SELECT count(*)
FROM opportunities.gunb_permits
WHERE status = 'AI_OPPORTUNITY'
  AND created_at >= current_date - 30
  AND ai_required_machinery ?| array['SCISSOR_LIFT', 'BOOM_LIFT', 'SPIDER_LIFT',
                                     'MAST_CLIMBING_PLATFORM', 'FACADE_HOIST'];

?| means "does the array contain any of these values". I ran it for each group of machines over the permits from all of Poland that appeared on the map in the last 30 days:

If you run an excavator, almost every new site is yours, and the filter doesn't matter much. If you rent aerial work platforms, there are 28 permits about someone else's work for every one about yours. For a crane company it's more than four to one.

The numbers in the app are higher than in the table: the map also shows public tenders and early signals from municipal bulletin boards, and the tiles group machines more broadly (road works, for example, also include soil compactors).

Why he never found the filters

For a programmer like me, a filter panel is obvious. We open a new tool and click through every tab just out of curiosity. The people I build for mostly don't have time to test an app. They want to open it, click a few things, and have everything working and giving results right away. Nobody is going to explore what else it can do.

I've heard a version of this before. One of my earlier apps for this industry was a simple fleet and job management tool for a friend with a small crane company. His requirement was that it had to be really intuitive, and he didn't want the existing solutions because they were too complicated.

People and companies can tell you it's great, that everything is really great, and in the end still not use it, because some tiny thing doesn't fit them, or they aren't even aware that they can change it themselves in the app. In a very non-technical industry like construction in Poland, I think it's mega important to call your customers. They often give you small hints you'd never notice as a developer.

What I changed

After that call I added a dialog that now shows up right after you create an account, so people can pick what they're interested in straight away.

Since late October, every new account starts with one question before anything else: what does your company do? There are eight tiles: concrete and aggregates, cranes, earthworks and transport, road works, piling and drilling, lifts and scaffolding, demolition, and one for site facilities, containers, waste and wholesale. You can select several. The choice immediately sets two things:

• the equipment filter on the map,
• the equipment filter in the notifications.

On the same screen the app shows how many construction sites in your area match your equipment (or in all of Poland, if you haven't set your area yet), so you see right away what you will get. You can still change it later in the Filters tab, but you no longer have to know that the tab exists.

What's next

Testers get the full PRO plan for free during their trial (the early accounts had it until October 30, new ones get 14 days). For most of them it has just ended or is ending now, so I'm checking how many people order the paid PRO plan. I'll keep monitoring user activity and keep posting in Facebook groups to find new ones. Maybe I'll also try Google Ads.

I post updates as they happen on LinkedIn and X.