From Structural Engineer to Co-Founder of CalcTree with Tim Rawling

Andrea Ciaffi

Hey team, welcome to the Digital Construction podcast. How are you today?

Tim Rawling

Good mate. How you going?

Andrea Ciaffi

Very good, very good. So in today's episode, we sit down with team rolling. He's the Co founder and chief product officer of calculator. We want to explore how they are transforming the way engineers perform calculations, manage project data. We'll discuss with team the challenges of developing a no code or local platform and our calculator improve efficiency and collaboration and how the engineers are adopting this technology.

Andrea Ciaffi

But before we start, I'm very interested to understand. An introduction of country and I want to note him what inspired you and your Co founders to create and launch Calc 3 and also if you can share a little bit of your story.

Tim Rawling

For sure. Yeah. Well, I can. I'll start with the platform itself and then we can get into all the other stuff. So you can think of country as effectively like a workbench for your calculations.

Tim Rawling

And in the sense that you might have an individual who is performing structural, civil, mechanical, engineering calculations, who needs to think through their work through like a back envelope calculation first, then eventually produce a report from that calculation. So caltri allows you to do both all in the one place.

Tim Rawling

As well as actually execute your calculations like you might in Excel or with Python as well. The other key part of Caltri is that every country page is also can be a Python script, so you can have your report or like manual calculations alongside a Python Python code.

Tim Rawling

So looking to help engineers who are kind of getting into starting to use code to do their, their their work, giving them the ability to spin up Python quickly in a web environment. Without having to install environments and all this kind of stuff, all in the one place.

Tim Rawling

And I mentioned that that's sort of in the context of an individual. It's also a collaborative environment. So when you have a workspace in Coventry, you have. An environment where you can add your team members to when you collaborate live on the platform and build out calculations together.

Tim Rawling

And then with the aim to turn them into templates that can be reused, I think we've all seen and I've experienced it myself back in the engineering world, you build up these kind of example projects. We might have like a spreadsheet which everyone's like, Oh yeah, that's the spreadsheet you use for whatever whatever that calculation is.

Tim Rawling

It's the same idea with caltree. You can turn any individual page or multiple groups of pages into templates on the platform, which can then be reused for different projects all in the platform itself. So yeah, that's hopefully that gives you a good sense for the product itself where.

Tim Rawling

All Saa's are online platform kind of vibe, so kind of trying to trying to bring some of the kind of modern software engineering tools like notion, Obsidian, those kinds of tools. That kind of functionality into traditional engineering space as well.

Andrea Ciaffi

You're also the the the classic founder that comes from actually engineering.

Tim Rawling

Yeah.

Andrea Ciaffi

I met you in the days back at Arab. Can you share us a little bit of your journey and how you end up here working at country now?

Tim Rawling

For sure. Yeah, so I started I when I came out of uni, I actually started working at Accenture of all places. I was doing like digital. What was I doing? Digital business consultant, I think was my role. So that was basically like management consulting but for digital.

Tim Rawling

So I was doing a lot of digital transformation projects for the likes of like Telstra, Optus and and these kind of guys PHP and that sort of thing. But then at the same time I was doing masters. The Masters degree Instructional engineering and at the end of that decided to go to go into go into structural engineering.

Tim Rawling

Wanted to build stuff. Basically I wanted to be involved in real projects where we build real things rather than just kind of building slide decks.

Tim Rawling

No offence to any management consultants listening, but yeah, I ended up then ended up at Arab as a grad, but I always had like a digital bias because I just spent, you know, a couple of years doing that, like assessing companies for their digital capabilities and figuring out ways to improve things digitally.

Tim Rawling

And I think anyone who's worked in. Structural civil engineering knows that like there's definitely a lot of aspiration to be better digitally. The the reality given the sort of I guess, high risk nature of the work that's being done and the high stakes that exist on a construction project, it's kind of hard to digitise.

Tim Rawling

It's hard to be companies to digitise. So you end up in this environment where you have different parts of that organisation trying to digitise things, but other parts being resistant to that. In. Yeah, in in our. So I was kind of stuck in the middle of that at my time at Arab.

Tim Rawling

I did find my ways into the digital world of Arab and spent many, many. Overtime hour trying to build, you know, Grasshopper scripts building out Python automations. Putting together reports for for digital projects and this kind of stuff, which is where we cross bars good times, but eventually I just kind of got sick of the corporate environment and.

Tim Rawling

I didn't like. I personally didn't sort of see the problem that Caltri was trying to solve and say I want to. I definitely saw the problem, but I didn't say that's the one I want to solve. I just wanted to build a business.

Tim Rawling

To be honest, I wanted to build a start up in the construction space that I understood, but I didn't know exactly what that it that was. So what I did was during COVID that was kind of like the catalyst for me. I was like, OK, like life short, I'm going to roll the dice and and and try and start something.

Tim Rawling

So I actually left and joined an incubator. So we did things that I did was with antler so antler's like a global venture capital fund and they run these incubators, they call it, where basically they'll bring in individuals or people who'd already started like a business.

Tim Rawling

But they bring them into this environment like a 12 week intensive course. They give you a bit of a stipend so you can live so you can do it full time. And then I was, but that you don't need to necessarily have, like, a, like a full on.

Tim Rawling

Project or a full on company idea to start. Or to get into antler. So I went in just saying I think I said I wanted to do like, robotic Rio, like reinforcement bar layouts. I wanted to, like, build a robot to, like, build all the rebar for a building core, which would have been really cool.

Tim Rawling

But I very quickly learnt that that's not necessarily a really good place to start your entrepreneurial career just due to the whole bunch of difficulties. But through that antler process, I met my Co founders. So honour and Mahan and I Co founders Mahan comes from a geotechnical engineering background.

Tim Rawling

And he actually came into Adler with what was the original version of Caltri. It actually built a version of of Caltrate where it was more like more about like a hard coded set of calculations.

Tim Rawling

Imagine like a website where kind of like if you've seen like Omni calc, Omni calculator and these kinds of things where it's like hard coded calculations in the page and his idea was to just build out these like hard coded calculations and then and then provide that to engineers.

Tim Rawling

But when we kind of when we kind of got together, I kind of saw how that actually. Actually could solve a lot of problems around how companies turn their like how engineering firms rather turn their IP that they work on on projects into templates that can be reused.

Tim Rawling

The missing part of what Mohan hadn't kind of put together at the start was. Like a way for engineers to actually build those tools, because for his idea to work, you have to build in JavaScript or build an HTML like those those tools right away which is not accessible for the average engineer.

Tim Rawling

So where we landed was wanting to build a platform that allows engineers to do their work, but also capture it and turn it into templates which can then be reused. And that's kind of where Couture was born. So at the end of the outlook process, we then we then basically pitch the investment committee with the concepts that you come up with throughout the process.

Tim Rawling

You know, with your team, you have your pitch deck, maybe you have a prototype in our case. And then for us, we were actually successful in getting some seed money from Outlook. And then yeah, we went, we went from there.

Andrea Ciaffi

It's very interesting and this, I'm, I'm sure that there are many, many engineers that dream about this change during their everyday tasks. They are designing, they're working as a structure engineers, they're working Mechanical Engineers, pick any discipline you like. And I know that many of them would like to do what you've done.

Andrea Ciaffi

You've been brave enough to actually do it. So congratulations to you. Well done.

Tim Rawling

Thank you. Yeah, I think it was definitely. I always wanted to start my own thing on the side. I actually did a little. Data analytics thing on the side. In part time, like trying to do both like work at Arab and and do that at the same time.

Tim Rawling

But it's very difficult and it was. I mean as much as we've got all complain about COVID and lockdowns, if it weren't for that for me, I probably never would have had the, you know, the the guts, the courage to actually just say, you know, what, stuff it.

Tim Rawling

I'm just going to roll the dice and see what happens. But yeah, that's that was my story. And that was actually a pretty big silver lining of that whole experience. But yeah, it's I think everyone kind of sees those problems day-to-day and think, Oh yeah, that should be a business that solves that.

Tim Rawling

It's definitely been a rewarding, albeit very difficult and stressful experience to actually try and do that. And with that with that concept.

Andrea Ciaffi

And thinking about the the inefficiencies that you see in the engineering industry, the construction industries and there's lots of inefficiency in workflows, we talk about it all the time in this industry. So what are from your point of view, the biggest inefficiency and which one are you trying to improve with calculi?

Tim Rawling

Yeah, I think, I mean, there's a few that we're trying to solve with caltrate. I think the biggest one, the biggest issue that I see is like sort of it's it's two like A2 sided thing or a two step thing.

Tim Rawling

And what I experienced in structural engineering and I think a lot of other engineers would would would have been living today is the kind of what you say like fragmentation of data across different tools. And so this was one of the things I remember back at back in engineering, we kind of struggle with all the time was like how do I take data from this programme?

Tim Rawling

Bring it over here. Perform another operation on it, and then bring it over here and perform another operation on it.

Tim Rawling

And how do I do that when, like all these programmes are, you know, from different errors, let's say have that different data formats and also how do I do that if I can't code that was that was kind of the biggest challenge and the only solution you have in that environment is doing it manually and manually looks like extracting data results or or analysis results from something like a nitabs or something like that into a spreadsheet.

Tim Rawling

Then writing a bunch of formulas in that spreadsheet. Or manually moving data around and then maybe copy and pasting that into another spreadsheet and then maybe exporting some of those results, putting it in bluebeam, or putting it into like another calculation software to make some decisions and that like multistep process where it's manual data handling every time.

Tim Rawling

I think that is one of the biggest problems in the industry because what that in the first instance, it's very time consuming and you know it's a lot of time as an engineer spent not actually doing design. You know, you're just kind of.

Tim Rawling

Manipulating wrangling data to make decisions. So that's, you know in, in, in terms of like the lived experience, I'm an engineer that just sucks and like it shouldn't be where we're spending. We're spending lots of our time.

Tim Rawling

But the other big problem from a sort of corporate governance perspective is how do you how do you make sure that no one's making mistakes like it's one thing to get your calculation right and make sure that you know your design has a right amount of rebar in it or you're using like the the right kind of structural system for a particular problem that's challenging enough as it is.

Tim Rawling

But add into that you know the risk of just screwing up an Excel document you know, like actually putting the wrong column next to the other. Another wrong column and all of a sudden you're working with incorrect data and then multiply that two or three times across every kind of design task that you're doing.

Tim Rawling

The chance that someone makes a mistake is like extremely high. And so yeah, that I think that's the biggest problem and that's where we're where we're working on what we're we're focused on for now solving with with caltrate.

Andrea Ciaffi

That's great. Thanks. And I would really have to talk about the challenges in developing software for engineers pursuing the construction industry. I remember a while ago somebody said to me that tools are like toothbrush for engineers. Everybody needs one, but nobody wants to use it.

Andrea Ciaffi

Each other's toothbrush or something along the line. So it's it's very hard to develop.

Tim Rawling

Yeah. Yeah.

Andrea Ciaffi

Software for for engineers because typically they. They think that they know how to build software, or you need to balance. You need to the user friendliness, so it's tools that needs to be user

Tim Rawling

Yeah.

Andrea Ciaffi

friendly and enough both so technically accurate. So what are the biggest challenges that your team has faced when you start

Tim Rawling

Yeah.

Andrea Ciaffi

developing Calc 3?

Tim Rawling

Yeah, really good question. And I think engineers as a group, you know any type of engineering software, structural, mechanical, whatever it is like, there's definitely like AI know. I know the answer or I can do the I can figure out the answer better than you can like that's definitely an attitude that I've I've seen in industry and probably have projected myself.

Tim Rawling

So I think the biggest we we have a saying internally where we kind of have we kind of have like a call like a pub test or a litmus test when we're trying to make a product decision we say. Oh, are we? Do we?

Tim Rawling

Are we taking a position or are we? Do we have an opinion on how this part of the product should work? Or are we gonna let the user make the decision?

Tim Rawling

And why that's challenging is because it's much simpler from a technical software development perspective to just take a position on something and say this is how it should operate and that's how we're going to build it because it removes a lot, a lot of complexity and ambiguity in how you might.

Tim Rawling

Then build that aspect of the product, but then you run into this issue when you give it to a user and they're like, oh, actually I don't agree with the decision that's been made there or I don't have enough information about this aspect of the product to use it effectively.

Tim Rawling

I don't like it. I don't. I'm not gonna use it. And so we I think that's one of the biggest consistent challenges we've had is when to take a position on something and when to take the extra time to build the optionality into the product.

Tim Rawling

A good example of this was in. In Caltrain you set up a bunch of parameters, right? And those parameters are kind of like cells in an Excel notebook. You know you you feed data into them and they perform an operation, or they, you know, an input to a calculation or whatever it is, and you have to give them a unique name.

Tim Rawling

What? Sorry. Not a unique name, but like a name that's code friendly, which means it can be then used by API and referenced in Python. And all this kind of stuff. And so initially we took a position that well.

Tim Rawling

We are just gonna like if there's duplicates in these names, we're gonna sequentially add numbers to them and and sort of control how those those parameters get named so that the user doesn't have to worry about it. But then when we found, when we gave that to a user, they were like, well, how come?

Tim Rawling

I don't want that name to have an underscore 1 at the end of it. I want it to be blah. I want it to be blah. And we were like, well, how do we like, how do we give them the ability to do that?

Tim Rawling

But then like, not like like not have to. But not have to build like crazy systems, right? And then we realised that the answer was to just give the user more information. You know, and I give them, like, warnings if they have duplicate names and this kind of stuff.

Tim Rawling

And so that was where we took a position, but actually we should have just given the user more information or given them the option and doing that consistently across the product in a new kind of way of working like the the country is is like probably the biggest challenge.

Tim Rawling

I think we're faced and then doing it in a way like you say that's user friendly and not like so much information that it's just overwhelming and they're like, oh, what the hell, like, I can't deal with this. See you later. Getting that balance right.

Tim Rawling

Is is tough.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah, definitely. And we're also, we also know that engineers are often familiar with manual workflows. I don't know if we want to consider Excel and manual workflow potentially, but how do you address the skepticisms from engineers that they still want to use their traditional or manual workflows?

Tim Rawling

Yeah. Yeah, that's another question. I think there's there's 22 aspects to that, which one of them we have always like focused on since the beginning of culture, it was like one of our principles, another one that was, which I'll get to 2nd is we learnt it along the way.

Tim Rawling

And the first one is is transparency in the product, I think. We like there's a lot of products out there which are kind of what you like about the industry would say like black boxy where they do, they take some input, they do some stuff that you don't see behind the scenes.

Tim Rawling

And then they give you the answer. And I think engineers, when they see a black box, it's alarm bells. You know that immediately is a turn off. And so we from the very beginning wanted the products to be ultra transparent and we wanted people to be able to look at a page, look at the integrations of a page.

Tim Rawling

So the mechanics underlying page, which are currently Python, Python scripts and then be able to get understand and decipher it, you know, in a language that they understand. So we wanted to remove that that black box.

Tim Rawling

And I think that's. Gone a long way to 1 differentiating us to some competitors and existing tools, but also to making new users more comfortable because it's like you're in culture, it's a new environment, but you can always look at the integrations and then see an environment that you're familiar with.

Tim Rawling

And get that transparency. So that helps. The other. One which is a lesson we learned was we're better off integrating with and playing with existing tooling rather than replacing certain tools. So at the beginning I think we we definitely had part of our vision was.

Tim Rawling

Oh, we're gonna ingest excel spreadsheets and then you can use them as sources in our pages.

Tim Rawling

And then that's how we're gonna work with Excel and that we still wanna do that, but we kind of learnt that one that is technically extremely hard because excel, you know the the legacy systems and frameworks that Excel uses to build a a platform that can talk to all of them and can talk to cell 99, eight and Excel 2015 and use both and work with both of them the same.

Tim Rawling

It's like. Extremely challenging and very resource intensive for Microsoft engineering perspective. So that was, you know one one reason. But the other reason was that we found that engineers in a lot of cases just wanted to stay in their existing environment. They wanted to stay in Excel, they wanted the benefits of culture, but they still wanted like a lot of their workflow to happen in Excel.

Tim Rawling

And this is particularly apparent for like large organisations where you have groups of engineers, you have to consider their their like their needs. You can't just say to everybody you're all using Caltrain. Now some people are going to be like nut stuff for you and I. Excel in fact, a lot of people are like that.

Tim Rawling

So we we kind of have over the last maybe 12 to 18 months have started to focus more on how we integrate with Excel.

Tim Rawling

And so that looks like building plug, insurance, building tutorials that like bridge or building workflows rather in the app that bridge across tools we're focused on doing that more and more as well, which is helping to dealing with some of that scepticism as well because it gives.

Tim Rawling

People in an organisation who aren't interested in caltri or want to stay in Excel. Way to do that, but the organisation can still get a lot of value out of the platform because they can kind of have their central repository of tools which have been built up by power users and they trust and have embedded and gone through QA processes.

Tim Rawling

But you know, mystery engineer over here can keep using Excel, they just reference that page as a formula basically. So yeah, those are the two big things, transparency and integration.

Andrea Ciaffi

That's very good and you probably touch it a little bit on the evolution of calculi and you already mentioned that your Co founder started something and then you guys work together. But I'll be interesting to know. How as calc ball calculator evolved over time from the the original the initial release.

Tim Rawling

Yeah.

Andrea Ciaffi

What have you done? Well, so how did you evolve?

Tim Rawling

Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of, there's a lot of aspects to that. I mean, I guess you can talk about it both in terms of like the business and then in terms of the product itself.

Tim Rawling

I think in terms of the products where we started and I touched on it there earlier was, yeah, behind it built, hey, a yeah, just like a web page, which he basically effectively hard coded calculation logic into. A web page and then that was the calculator and that's, you know what you'd see on like you'll see like on the calc and and other tools like that.

Tim Rawling

And what? Where we like the where we've gotten to now is a product that engineers can build that in a no code environment and then share it as a as a template.

Tim Rawling

And we you know there's aspirations to have a marketplace as well where an engineer can build something, turn it into a template and then it exists on a marketplace either privately within a company or publicly for for the world to use. So yeah, that, that that obviously there's a lot of evolutions in the product I think.

Tim Rawling

One thing I think that we did at the start that was probably a case of biting off more than we could shoot was we tried to to encounter you having integration.

Tim Rawling

So yeah, I've talked about both of them already, but to explicitly say you have Python integration, which means on a page you have like a page like, imagine like a Google Doc and then you can, like, pull up a screen where you can start to type and write Python.

Tim Rawling

In the past, we actually also had that As for Excel, where you could actually open up Excel editor and then also Edit Excel. So the idea being that you can have your report next to your Excel and next your your report.

Tim Rawling

That was extremely complex and it added a lot of overheads into our like our the requirements of of what we're developing and we by all means still intend to do that. But yeah, like 96 months ago, we basically hit that at that Excel integration part of the product so that we could focus on making a really good page experience and really good Python experience.

Tim Rawling

And we also at the same time shifted and I talked about it on the last question. Shifted our strategy with Excel from trying to like Ingest Excel and more about like building a really high quality plug in for Excel which can then bridge the gap between the two.

Tim Rawling

So we kind of yeah, that, that that's probably the biggest change I would say in the product. And then in terms of the company, I think the biggest one is probably how we like I go to market strategy.

Tim Rawling

I think we we maybe naively at the beginning thought that we could do product lead and we want to use SEO to reach the market and then use its self-serve sign up to get people onto the product.

Tim Rawling

And I still think that in the longer term vision of country is still very viable and definitely spot we're pursuing, but particularly in the short term when we're trying to basically. Launch a new product into the market and convince people that you know this.

Tim Rawling

This new way of working is is value adding to you. There's that that kind of those, the challenges that come with that lend itself more to AB to B sales process where you are, you're jumping on calls for people from firms showing them the product live having like an ongoing discussion taking their feedback on board, maybe making some changes to the product, maybe building out some examples.

Tim Rawling

And then coming back to them and then, you know, rinse and repeat until until you get like formal trial users and then sign up some paying users. So yeah, that that's probably been the biggest change I think in the business as well as well as you know, obviously scaling up the team we started with just the three founders we now have.

Tim Rawling

Nine in total, SO5 full time engineers full time software engineers and then structural engineer as well. And then the three founds.

Andrea Ciaffi

That's great and all startups are continuously evolving. If I ask you this question in six months from now, we'll probably have.

Tim Rawling

They asked me in a week and that'll be different answer.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah, definitely. And you touched before on the black box nature of some of the products that exist in this type of market. And I agree with you engineers immediately. Don't trust them because of course it makes sense like they are responsible for the calculations that they deliver.

Andrea Ciaffi

So, but from your point of view, how do you, how can you, how can people use calc 3 at the same time? And make sure that the calculation they are producing are reliable and accurate as well.

Tim Rawling

Yeah. So I think what, what culture is really strong at in the current state and we'll get stronger at is it's really clean and it pushes you to lay out your calculation in a logical way.

Tim Rawling

I mean, if you really tried, you could make it confusing, but just the nature of the way that you add blocks to the platform and start to build out your calculation and also the way that we present math notation in the platform as well is it makes it very hard.

Tim Rawling

To not notice a mistake, as long as you know what you're doing. So we yeah that, that's. It's it's baked into the product that as you build you are kind of they were also building your documentation.

Tim Rawling

It's not like you're just like doing something in the back of an envelope, making some assumptions and then that's job done and it's not like you're just an excel where maybe you're referencing other sheets we should just with cell references and this kind of thing in caltri when you write maths, you have to reference the name of a parameter and when that like when your mass renders,

Tim Rawling

like when you click off it and it renders, it renders in math notation. So you can see. If your mass is wrong or not in plain math, it's not in code, and I think those two things. Help and encourage people to document as they're doing their calculations, which is how you avoid mistakes.

Tim Rawling

You do good documentation you can work with collaborative collaboratively with others or come back and see logically like what's happened. And yeah, culture helps engineers do that without having adding extra burden to them. I kind of think of it like kind of like, imagine you're writing code and you don't have to write your own comments.

Tim Rawling

You know, they're just kind of like the way that you set up your code actually just does the commenting for you. It's like, OK, just logically makes sense just. On it and you don't have to be a software engineer, you can just be a regular engineer who's only ever used XLS long as you understand maths to understand what's going on.

Tim Rawling

Additionally, and I've touched on before, our integrations are you can just always click them and view them in the page. If they don't ever get hidden. So anyone who's on a page can view a source, the source integration on page. And then understand the logic within that as well.

Tim Rawling

So yeah, that that's kind of our our our guiding principles. Drive to the engineer as they're doing their work to create that documentation and that I think is key to making a good template as well. So if you want to make a good Excel template, any good Excel template?

Tim Rawling

If someone says oh, this Excel template is really good, why is it good? Well one it's right and two it's got documentation. You know, it's got the clause reference that it's talking to. It's got, you know, this sat and whatever to explain the math that's going on in caltria as you create your just your standard work, you're doing your day-to-day.

Tim Rawling

You're getting all that stuff as well. And as a result, your work that you're just trying to get there can also be a template. Because it's at that level where it's documented well and can be picked up and used by someone else. So yeah, that that's kind of our our approach.

Tim Rawling

There is helping get good documentation and transparency in the product features.

Andrea Ciaffi

Definitely. And we touched a little bit before in a way about adoption. So sometimes we think it's hard to build software which is already hard enough, but sometimes it's harder to drive adoption of digital products. Do you have any? Can you share with us any unexpected challenges that you find in trying to convince firms to switch to a new platform?

Tim Rawling

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I think there's plenty. I just got to think about which ones to share. I think unexpected.

Tim Rawling

Well, like I kind of touched on it before like we thought that we'd be able to do like a product led growth kind of strategy where you know we build a product, we build SEO as well build some templates and then people would kind of just find their way and sign up.

Tim Rawling

One thing that I found interesting in this industry is that. I feel like some larger firms have, maybe.

Tim Rawling

Like compartmentalised curiosity or experimentation, so large companies might have like digital teams, and it's the digital team's responsibility to go out and find the new tools and then bring the tools into engineers and the kind of the reverse symptom, I guess, or the result of that is that you might talk to an engineer and then they're like, yeah, this is a cool tool.

Tim Rawling

Like, I can say being valuable, but it's not up to me whether or not I can actually use it. So I'm interested. Which I think is like I just didn't expect that because I mean my personal experience.

Tim Rawling

Maybe I was kind of more digitally inclined and I would be open to using new tools like I'd just add a new plugin to Grasshopper and then get going with it, but I found that yeah, with the majority of people, it's kind of like, Oh well, yeah, like, I'm not even going to waste my time talking to you unless you talk to like the digital team and you go through XYZ process.

Tim Rawling

And that's part of the, you know that finding I guess, was part of the reason we switched to B to B. But yeah, at the beginning. I mean, I think it now I've thought about it a lot and I think it makes sense, but at the beginning I thought that was, yeah, quite surprising.

Tim Rawling

I think the other thing is like in the product design itself, and again I touched on it before with the kind of like when to take a position and when to like provide information to a user.

Tim Rawling

I didn't appreciate how important getting that balance right was to someone adopting the product, because on the one hand, if you make it, if you provide the provide, provide the user with a million like you know switches and dials so that they can customise the experience to how they want it.

Tim Rawling

That's great, but most people are kind of like too much. Like, that's that's too much. I I don't care. Like just I like I don't immediately. I'm turned off by this. I'm out. So. Yeah.

Tim Rawling

But then on the reverse side, if you don't provide some degree of the ability to customise or like just provide the information so the user can make the right decision about certain situation, then they also get annoyed, you know, because it's like you're you're in black box territory, right.

Tim Rawling

So getting that balance right, I did not appreciate at all. And now when I look at other products and I kind of see where they've had to kind of balance that. I have like a you found respect for that sort of thing and yes, it's no different for us.

Tim Rawling

And and one of the biggest challenges we have the challenge with it is like with that sales cycle stuff like it's quite easy to get feedback like it was pretty. We figured it out pretty quickly that this probably isn't going to work. But with this product design stuff, it's really like it takes a long time to know if you got it right or not.

Tim Rawling

And there's some stuff in the product that I still don't know if it's right or not because it requires people to use it. You start a dialogue with them, you have to read between the lines of how they're using it, what they do, like, what they don't like to understand.

Tim Rawling

The decision about, you know, having a toggle over there or having a warning show here or whatever to know if that was correct or not.

Tim Rawling

So yeah, the IT costs money or it costs time and resource to like execute on the decision and then it takes like quite a lot of time to actually get feedback on the decision before you can get better at those sorts of things in future.

Tim Rawling

So yeah, that's. I mean, I think most product people like from tech in particular probably are like, yeah, obviously. But from where I was coming from, from the structure engineering world, it was kind of like what this is like. I didn't even think this was something that you needed to figure out.

Tim Rawling

So yeah, that's been that's challenging and and the reason I bring it up in the context of adoption is because if you get it wrong. I'll see you later. You know that people people are very will very quickly, particularly again in consulting engineers who are, you know, working on by the hour.

Tim Rawling

They're working to heavy deadlines. You know, they don't have spare time. And the moment you make them think more than they would like to about certain things, then yeah, they'll go back to excel or go back to whatever their existing workflow was.

Andrea Ciaffi

Definitely there is not that there is no time to to understand the new products any so challenging because sometimes people miss opportunities because they may have a fantastic tool in front of them that could really improve their the quality of their life because they could work more efficiently and they just dismiss it because there is so much going on, so many products available in the market.

Tim Rawling

Yeah.

Tim Rawling

And our our part of position on that, is it like, well, if that's the result, then we haven't done a good enough job as product designers, you know like the product should be part of good, a good product is something that they they someone can pick up and whether they're designing a spaceship or like picking what's on, what to watch on on you know on on Wednesday night on Netflix like it should be obvious what they should do to get going and get started.

Tim Rawling

Now obviously with more complex thing there's additional layers that need to happen. I bought. Yeah, I mean I I believe and at the standard that we measure ourselves by is that, you know, every time we have to add more documentation or add tool tips and this kind of thing, then we haven't done a good enough job in making the product intuitive or balancing that information versus opinion.

Tim Rawling

And yeah, so that's that's just part of the challenge, isn't it? And yeah, it's like you say, it's a shame because, you know, if you move the needle slightly in One Direction or slightly further away from the user, are you not as good as that as you would like to be?

Tim Rawling

Then you potentially use that and you lose that user. And you know, it's all on the user to to put in the effort to to try the products on you to make the products so easy to use that they want to use it like that's trying out like how we think about it.

Tim Rawling

But you know it makes it hard. It's obviously very hard. Set of goal posts.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah, definitely. And if you think about the users who are the primary users of Calc 3.

Tim Rawling

So yeah, I mean, we started, we're focused on structural engineers globally. I mean, I guess primarily focus on Australia, US and Europe markets because that's where our backgrounds are. So that's where we're focusing.

Tim Rawling

And we also feel like maybe this is a like maybe this was the wrong decision, but we also kind of feel like that in terms of like the complexity of design that is one of the like higher complex complexity ones and reporting in terms of like what they have to do.

Tim Rawling

Compared to, you know, like maybe geotech or or mechanical and certain industries. But of course this probably comes down to my knowledge and I was a structural engineer, right? So that's what we're focused on and that's primarily who our users are now the vision for the product is any traditional IE non software engineer performing technical calculations, it has to do reporting.

Tim Rawling

They would be a target user for us.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah, definitely. And later on you can expand on any other discipline, but the structure engineering teams are already big enough. So if you can convince them,

Tim Rawling

Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Yeah, that's what that's that's like what we're

Andrea Ciaffi

there'll be a good a good result.

Tim Rawling

basing it on.

Andrea Ciaffi

One of the things that I know Calc 3 does is allow it allows people to reuse calculations from different projects, so you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time. Can you share with us how people can use Calc 3 to improve, improve collaborations between engineering teams or different projects?

Andrea Ciaffi

Again they do that.

Tim Rawling

Well, so the way country that every. I'm not sure you're up with the. A set of pages basically and those pages are grouped by branches which are themselves pages. So a better explanation would be if you've used notion page branches, then that's the same for caltrie.

Tim Rawling

So you can basically set up a page which is a template and you might just have one page which has this in my calculation for designing an RC beam to whatever code. That page can then be duplicated and moved in moved around the platform so it can be moved into another branch which might be called say, templates.

Tim Rawling

Or it can be moved into another branch called exemplar calculations or this kind of thing, as well as just at the individual page level.

Tim Rawling

You can do the same for multi pages, so you might have a group of pages which can speak to each other and perform not just the design of an RC beam, but the design of an entire floor plate with the you know one way slab your RC beam and maybe you call them connections as well and that might be in one pack.

Tim Rawling

And the connections between the two between all the different aspects of that calculation. Built in to that package of calculations, you can then duplicate that proof of counts group of pages and then also move them into a template environment and so then what that allows you to do by doing it that way is that you can you can use your building blocks just as you're going.

Tim Rawling

You can have your different building blocks of your project, different calculations, but then as you group them together to deliver your work. Then they become bigger building blocks, and so they are all templates that can be. Located moved around permissions, adjusted, and then reused as as calculation.

Tim Rawling

So we'll try to keep the platform quite flexible in that way because again, this comes back to that kind of opinion versus giving the flexibility. And we decided to try and keep the platform as flexible as possible because every engineering team's workflow is slightly different.

Tim Rawling

Every project is slightly different and therefore as well as having to do slightly different calculations. You also may have to have slightly different structures. So this allows you to have different structures of of calculations or groups of calculations. Which in themselves can become templates.

Andrea Ciaffi

That's great. I would like to talk about the future like it's very hard to predict the future and nobody really can right.

Tim Rawling

Yeah.

Andrea Ciaffi

But if you think about the engineers, the software for engineers in general, what, how do you see this evolving this space evolving the next let's say 5 to 10 years?

Tim Rawling

Yeah. I mean, I think that's there's many reasons why that's tough. I think the biggest reason is. Gonna be my answer, and that's AI. Because. The rate of change of that technology is just insane, and I think it's just the beginning.

Tim Rawling

I think there's our industry is maybe going to be a slower adopter of that tooling, but nonetheless, we'll we'll eventually adopt AI tooling and what exactly that looks like. You know, I have some ideas and we're very much looking at how it's going to how we're using it in caltree.

Tim Rawling

You know, we not much. Maybe that's what's coming in future. But yeah, I think every product, every existing product that's still going to be around in 10 years will have some kind of AI feature in it. Now that could that there's a that's a broad spectrum, right?

Tim Rawling

It could be as something as simple as like a gimmicky, really just a wrapping of ChatGPT in a chat bot in a in a product. But it could also then be something you know you mentioned. I think earlier about. Drones that can like.

Tim Rawling

To assess buildings, this kind of thing, and that's using AI to, you know, categorise and identify problems.

Tim Rawling

So that's kind of the other spectrum of of of AI, you know, will we have a situation where in a country you might have a whole bunch of building templates then when you get a new project, you actually just ask the AI based on our templates produce a a produce a, a new project structure for this new project that we're doing.

Tim Rawling

So yeah, it's hard to say. Like impossible to say, like exactly how AI will change how people like how our products exist and how people work with those products. But I think in in almost all facets it it will change it for better or for worse.

Tim Rawling

Maybe Skynet's on the way, maybe it's inevitable.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah.

Tim Rawling

We'll see. Yeah. And I I think. I think, yeah, I mean a subset of of AI is is agents. I think you know like to you know, closer to home in the context of like a country or like the problem that I was talking about at the beginning about data fragmentation, moving data around, I think we're going to see AI agents which eliminate that problem.

Tim Rawling

Basically, I don't necessarily think that we're going to have we're going to replace a full suite of software tool like structural engineering, software tools with one tool. I think rather what you'll have is you'll have.

Tim Rawling

Something which glues it all together and using AI agents and you know, we're hoping that that will be something like the caltrie where you we help you build those integrations and and flow data across the tools that you're still comfortable with. So that you maintain transparency and you don't have black box.

Tim Rawling

So I think that will I think that will. Will be a big part of it as well. Yeah, I mean, I throw throw in generative design there as well. I still think I still think in five to 10 years it'll be like just giving you like a baseline.

Tim Rawling

I still think engineers will be making the the final calls on things kind of think of it like you know, you might use touch, GPT to draught an e-mail. Or or draughts, I don't know a documentation page or draught a report, but you kind of it's rare that you would just send that as the final version.

Tim Rawling

You know, you're probably going to take that baseline and then make some edits and adjust it. I think we'll see that same kind of thing with some generative design as well.

Andrea Ciaffi

Hard to predict where this is going because we have seen the evolution of products like charge DP. It's been so quick like you are. So we were so shocked the first time we saw charge GDP and now it's just normal and it's incredible.

Andrea Ciaffi

So it's very hard for these what can possibly happen in the next 5-10, ten years without. Being able to see the the road map of these companies, which is probably very secret now.

Tim Rawling

Yeah. Yeah. Who knows? Yeah, they could go anywhere. I hope it.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah.

Tim Rawling

I hope it results in, like, some kind of robotics. Like, not Skynet, but maybe something like Skynet, you know, like, like building. Building is automatically this kind of thing. I would love to see that.

Andrea Ciaffi

To the region where you started, right? You wanted to be a robot to the beginning.

Tim Rawling

Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.

Andrea Ciaffi

Your dreams come true.

Tim Rawling

I was always a drink. Still, it's still on the road map. It's just really far away, yeah.

Andrea Ciaffi

Just for later.

Tim Rawling

Yeah, yeah.

Andrea Ciaffi

And and speaking about speaking about Rd maps, what next for country?

Tim Rawling

Yeah, good question. So right now what we're really focused on like the predominant feedback we're getting from engineers is that in the context of like the web environment, countries does a good job of helping you document your calculations, lay things out more logically.

Tim Rawling

And then our APIs and integrations are the tools, really make it easy to use what's in caltri. You know the tools, which is awesome, but where we're kind of have been falling down and what we're focused on right now is. Improving how country translates into reports and PDF reports.

Tim Rawling

We are always wanted to. The dream was that you know, if you just shared a cultural link with someone, they wouldn't, you wouldn't need to PDF for a report that was wrong. Like, we need people want PD FS. You know, just as much as I want Excel and that's fine.

Tim Rawling

So we've been doing a lot of work improving the platform from the perspective of how this is going to realise itself in a report. So that's right now and that's kind of stuff like honestly like not the sexiest stuff. But stuff that needs to happen, things like headers, adding logos to headers, margins, font size, this kind of stuff.

Tim Rawling

So that's what's happening now. After that, what we'll be focusing on is basically where one of the in caltrate is like a right hand side panel, which is where you kinda have all your different components for doing stuff with the page.

Tim Rawling

So currently that's where you would add like a source or a Python integration and that's where you would manage all the parameters on your page we're doing. We're starting to do work on changing that infrastructure so that it's easy for others to build on top of it.

Tim Rawling

And in the first instance, we'll be building our own kind of. We call it sign panels, like building our own side panels that do cool stuff. The first one that will be coming out is version history and review history, so any every page in caltri it actually already has this under the hood, it's just not visible in the UI, but every page has full version history.

Tim Rawling

So the moment you start a page starts a version of mine and every time you make a change, you know we group them. But effectively there's a new version that's made. And so that sidebar will allow users to go through and see older versions of their calculations and then eventually be able to like compare side by side.

Tim Rawling

Not just the content on the page, but also the actual calculation. So if you had like Python code or an Excel spreadsheet, you could compare what changed in that as well. And then on top of that, we'll have reviews. So you can send a version for a review.

Tim Rawling

So basically in the platform you can say OK, I've done, I finished my calculation for my RC beam. I want to send that to my manager. I then tag them or set them as the checker for this calculation that then automatically sets off that page into AQA, process.

Tim Rawling

That manager then gets a notification. Hey, you've been set as the checker on this calculation. They come in and then they basically have to go through, like going through and commenting or, you know, they can comment on a page. Comment on the calculation say hey, this is good.

Tim Rawling

This is needs to be updated whatever and then they would tick done like OK we've checked this and at that point the that page is now labelled as reviewed. And that review status is shown everywhere else in the platform, so this is how we start to add that kind of cool it like light project management into into the calculations as well.

Tim Rawling

Then after that, like honestly, we kind of we take it, it's hard to we have aspirations that we kind of. Like one of the aspirations, for example, is then integrating AI. So one of our biggest investors is standards Australia. Who? You know, obviously write all the codes that we use every day.

Tim Rawling

So what we're really interested in doing is using this updated side panel infrastructure to build AI that can actually talk to standards Australia codes and compare what's on your page with those codes. So say for example you had a calculation that reference as 3600 clause, 3 point 1. 5 whatever.

Tim Rawling

Our AI could see that and say hey. Your calc is wrong. Based on this clause in standard Australia documentation. So starting that panel kind of starts to enable us to start experimenting with that kind of thing. By no means are we going to release like some fully polished awesome AI.

Tim Rawling

What we want to do is kind of release like a proof of concepts and then bring them to our early users, get them using it and see and see how that goes. So. Yeah, that, that all that's that's a big one. But we'll be guided by our users, so the the companies who are paying the US culture now or trial and country now they provide feedback.

Tim Rawling

You know everyday every week. That that feedback phones out our priority. So what I've just told you there is kind of like the priority based on what they've told us to date, but could always change.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah, not that's crazy. I'm very excited to see this AI integration with the standards. I think there will be super cool.

Tim Rawling

The yeah, that will be that will be pretty wild. Well, I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of challenges with that.

Andrea Ciaffi

Makes sense?

Tim Rawling

But yeah, it would be pretty sweet. I I think that's another I didn't have mentioned it yet, but another big problem you have in industry is like.

Tim Rawling

I have this code with the rules and now I have to apply that manually to my Excel spreadsheet like like people make mistakes in that process, either they misinterpret the clause or you know they put a. Like a divide instead of multiply and then all of a sudden all that could work that went into the code, it's gone.

Tim Rawling

Like someone's made a mistake. But tooling like this where you can start to join those two datasets using AI and using platform like Caltrate is where you can start to eliminate those problems and that's you know one of the main reasons some of my A standards Australia would invest in us is because they see us as a way to better realise standards documentation.

Tim Rawling

In calculation workflows like in situ in real time. So yeah, I'm I'm quite excited for that one. Getting that one like even just a proof of concept on that will be pretty pretty amazing I think so yeah. It's on the on the cards, but my tech team will probably kill me when they hear this, but we do.

Tim Rawling

It's going to make it happen.

Andrea Ciaffi

Definitely, definitely. Thank you very much, Tim. We are at the end of the episode. If people want to reach out to you, where can they find you?

Tim Rawling

Yeah. So you can always head to our website, caltri.com. From there, you can view our template libraries sign up to the platform or book demos with us. Additionally, we're pretty active on LinkedIn. I think at Caltree would be our tag on LinkedIn. So you can hit us up there.

Tim Rawling

Always, always keen to hear from everybody and and show you the platform or or chat more about anything specific that you've heard on on this episode.

Andrea Ciaffi

Thank you. Thank you very much, Tim.

Tim Rawling

No worries.