This interview is with Coleman McCormick. Coleman is the VP of Product at Fulcrum, a software platform that helps field service workers collect and process data. They most recently raised $42.5m in 2020. Coleman also is a prolific writer on his blog and Substack, covering topics at the intersection of adaptive systems, design, history, and the creative process. Below is an edited version of a conversation we had in August 2024.
Key Highlights
- On the benefits of solving problems for end users – “The beauty of what’s now known as product-led growth is that at every stage, there’s social proof that the product works. The proof isn’t just in a case study about some other company; it’s inside their own organization. It’s real. As the product scales within a company, we’ve done a good job over the years of empowering those first users—the early adopters—making them experts in the product and champions within their organizations. They essentially sell the product internally for us.”
- On building extensibility for non-technical users – “One of the most compelling, non-technical value propositions is the product’s extensibility. Users can build something, try it out, and then easily make adjustments based on field feedback. For example, if someone in the field needs additional options in a dropdown menu, they can make the change, hit save, and it’s updated on the device immediately. It might sound simple, but many users have never had this level of flexibility in their workflows, and they love it. It allows them to get creative with the tool, often finding new use cases and dragging every possible aspect of their business into Fulcrum. We have customers who have built thousands of forms for just about everything.”
- On the power of integrating data sources in one view – “…imagine an asset management use case where a customer is responsible for utility pole inventory. They might be responsible for maintaining 100,000 poles in a jurisdiction. They need to determine the material (wood or steel), condition, and maintenance needs. There are regulations around how often certain upkeep tasks need to be completed on a certain time frame. Fulcrum can be the center of the workflow here and make it easy for them. We integrate with the enterprise asset management system, which houses all of the asset inventory data. Customers can then access the data right in the Fulcrum app while collecting field data, updating in real-time to the rest of their back office.”
- On an unexpected Fulcrum use case – “…one of our clients is the HALO Trust, a global nonprofit organization that conducts demining operations around the world. They clear unexploded ordnance from areas that have experienced conflicts, such as Cambodia, Ukraine, and Syria. While Fulcrum is just one part of their extensive operations, they use it to document the landmine clearing process across various properties.“
- How Coleman uses AI in his day-to-day – “…when doing market research, I might ask for common GIS use cases for water utilities. While the initial results might be generic, they often spark new questions and ideas, making the process more creative and efficient than just Googling around.”
How would you describe what you do to someone who doesn’t know you?
I work in product development at a software company called Fulcrum. I’ve been building products for 15 years, 13 of which have been in SaaS.
But I didn’t set out to have a career building software products. In fact, my college degree is in geography. It was a personal interest growing up and so I majored in it in college. I was a mapping guy and did GIS for a while without much thought as to how it would develop into a career.
Along the way, I was tinkering with technology. While at school, I worked on campus doing Linux server administration and other IT work. After graduation, I looked around and realized I had a combination of skills that turned out to be pretty beneficial. I had the mapping and GIS expertise but also had the more technical, software development skills too. This positioned me well to go into a job where I could combine both skills.
I worked for an engineering firm for a while, and eventually met the founder of Spatial Networks, a mapping data consultancy. For me it was a great fit. I had a passion for mapping, but at most companies GIS was a small portion of what they did, kind of an afterthought. But Spatial Networks was all about mapping. The founder wanted to do more with technology, so I was excited to get started.
How did you decide to join Spatial Networks, and how did Fulcrum get started?
Spatial Networks worked with customers to develop map data in emerging markets around the world. Companies would request GIS (or other kinds of) data and Spatial Networks would collect, clean, and send it to customers in a report. We had a few developers in the early days helping with the data, but it was all in service of the projects that we were doing. There wasn’t any automation or data tools for customers yet.
I joined the company to level up the technical side. What we now know as Fulcrum has its origins in Spatial Networks project work. We were building and dogfooding our own product in the early days and realized we could go to market with the software as its own SaaS platform. My IT and mapping background was perfect to lead the transition that the company was going through. We experimented and found product-market fit pretty quickly. We’ve been growing ever since.
What problems does Fulcrum solve for your customers today? How do they get value from your products?
We build a low-code/no-code platform for field inspection forms.
Customers today are in all types of end markets, such as utilities (electric, gas, water, sewer), environmental services, and engineering firms. Any organization with a heavy field component like audits and inspections that needs to document processes or report asset inventory can get value from our product.
Our software basically allows customers to create their own data collection workflow in Fulcrum. Users can build the database and the front-end data entry form (usually used on an iPhone or tablet) for field use.
When we started Fulcrum, we made it really easy to collect this kind of data. We have mapping and location data native to the app and it syncs directly to the database and other backend tools.
At the time (and even still today) a lot of products make this data burdensome to collect and manage. They might have started with multiple devices: a digital camera, a laptop, a GPS device, a clipboard. Then they manually enter the data in the office. Some customers even still use paper and clipboards for data collection.
Fulcrum helps customers build tools to replace those processes. Our aim is to be the home for everything happening in the field.
How does Fulcrum integrate with other data sources? Are they combined in some way?
One of the big differences today is the variety of systems that contain segments of data that are used in the field.
For example, imagine an asset management use case where a customer is responsible for utility pole inventory. They might be responsible for maintaining 100,000 poles in a jurisdiction. They need to determine the material (wood or steel), condition, and maintenance needs. There are regulations around how often certain upkeep tasks need to be completed on a certain time frame.
Fulcrum can be the center of the workflow here and make it easy for them. We integrate with the enterprise asset management system, which houses all of the asset data. Customers can access those assets right in the Fulcrum app while collecting field data, updating real-time to the rest of your back office.
This is just one example. We like to view ourselves as the “field system of record” because customers use us for that core workflow but will pull in other kinds of field data (GIS, high-grade GPS, drone imaging) or back office data into the app. We’re building the rails so that data can be used in the field and easily flow between previously siloed tools.
Nowadays, almost every customer is, in some way, interconnecting other data in Fulcrum. In fact, if customers are bringing in data during onboarding, it’s a leading sign they’ll continue using the app.
How do you ensure you’re actually solving problems for the field workers, not just selling an unused tool to an IT department?
Throughout the life of our product, we’ve maintained a product-led, bottom-up approach to customer discovery and adoption of Fulcrum. While this approach has evolved in recent years, especially as we’ve scaled our sales and marketing teams, it largely remains the same today.
Typically, the first user from an organization is a practitioner—someone directly facing a problem. This person might be a field supervisor, a GIS analyst, or hold any number of titles depending on their domain. This person is often fairly technical and a self-starter; they start by signing up for a trial account, explore our documentation, and use our developer tools to build out their own solutions.
As they engage more deeply with the product, they might expand usage to a small group—10, 20, or 50 people at the department or team level.
Only later, as their usage grows, do we typically engage with IT or some central entity to scale the solution across the entire company. We’re not targeting these central entities from the start. This is changing as our larger sales organization becomes more direct, but even now, most of our customers—some with 500 to 1,000 users on the platform—began with just 10, 20, or 30 users and scaled up from there.
The beauty of product-led growth is that at every stage, there’s social proof that the product works. The proof isn’t just in a case study featuring some other company; it’s inside their own organization. It’s real. As the product scales within a company, we’ve done a good job over the years of empowering those first users—the early adopters—making them experts in the product and champions within their organizations. They essentially sell the product internally for us, which has worked out fantastically well.
Now, we have a dual approach: we can go top-down and engage with higher-level decision-makers, but we can also expand from the bottom up, getting the company to use the product while longer buying cycles are in play. This means that even if the sales cycle is extended or slow, we’re already working with them—they’re already customers.
What does Fulcrum do better than its competitors?
Fulcrum stands out through our focus on flexibility and customization, especially for power users and those with a more technical background.
For instance, we offer a feature called Data Events. It’s essentially a JavaScript environment that allows users to completely tailor the mobile app’s behavior and user interface to meet their specific needs. What’s unique here is that many of our users aren’t traditional developers—they’re often just the most technically inclined person on their team. They dive into our developer documentation and examples, and before long, they’re building custom solutions that perfectly fit their requirements. It’s similar to my approach to development—I’m not a developer by trade, but I can piece things together, and our users do the same.
We also have an API that allows for custom integrations on top of Fulcrum, including a Query API that functions like a SQL interface. This lets users make SQL queries directly into Fulcrum to pull data. These kinds of tools are virtually non-existent in the competition, and people really appreciate the control it gives them. They can make Fulcrum do exactly what they want.
While these features are more developer-oriented, what often wins people over on the less technical side is the product’s flexibility. For example, I often advise new users who might come in with a complex, multi-page inspection form with 300 fields to instead start small. Build out the easy parts first, put it in the hands of someone in the field, and then gradually expand as they learn what the product can do. Moving from something static like an Excel spreadsheet to a more dynamic tool will likely change what you collect and how you collect it.
One of the most compelling advantages is the product’s adaptability. Users can build something, try it out, and then easily make adjustments based on field feedback. For example, if someone in the field needs additional options in a dropdown menu, they can make the change, hit save, and it’s updated on the device immediately. It might sound simple, but many users have never had this level of flexibility in their workflows, and they love it. It allows them to get creative with the tool, often finding new use cases and dragging every possible aspect of their business into Fulcrum. We have customers who have built thousands of forms for just about everything.
What’s something unique or surprising that people have used Fulcrum for?
For example, one of our clients is the HALO Trust, a global nonprofit organization that conducts demining operations around the world. They clear unexploded ordnance from areas that have experienced conflicts, such as Cambodia, Ukraine, and Syria. While Fulcrum is just one part of their extensive operations, they use it to document the landmine clearing process across various properties.
This is a case where they discovered Fulcrum and gradually expanded its use from country to country, with different teams adopting the product. It’s not something we originally designed Fulcrum to do, nor was it a market we actively pursued, but the open-ended nature of our platform has allowed them to find tremendous value in it.
Another example involves a nonprofit in Australia that monitors invasive species. They’ve set up a network of over 500 participants across the Australian outback in what’s essentially a private, crowdsourced project. Landowners take pictures and document the locations of invasive animals and plants, allowing them to map these sightings over time and track the effectiveness of removal efforts.
Let’s talk a bit about AI. How do you see AI impacting Fulcrum and the broader GIS industry? Is there anything you think is “smoke and mirrors”?
Computer vision especially has a lot of potential, especially in the field where users take photos as part of the documentation process. One common task among nearly all Fulcrum users is taking pictures during inspections. Currently, this is a manual activity, unrelated to AI, but there’s a lot of untapped potential in those images. AI could be used for future predictions, streamlining data entry, or speeding up existing processes.
However, the most interesting use cases for computer vision require highly detailed data, which presents challenges. For example, generic models like those from Amazon can identify broad categories, but they lack the specificity needed for detailed tasks, such as distinguishing between different models of cars or region-specific variations in objects like gas meters. Transferring a model from one geography to another isn’t straightforward and depends heavily on the granularity of the data. This is where our approach comes in—enabling customers to train models on their own data and then integrate those models into Fulcrum for inferencing, addressing both the need for specificity and the challenges of data privacy.
As far as what might be “smoke and mirrors” in the AI space, I haven’t encountered anything blatantly ridiculous that stands out. The biggest challenge I see is the readiness of these technologies to actually drive value and justify their cost. Plenty of the technology has value, the question is, is the value high enough to justify the cost, complexity, and fundamental change required to integrate it all. In my experience, especially with more traditional, non-technical industries, there’s often a disconnect between the hype around AI and the practical problems these companies face daily. AI seems cutting edge, but many companies are still just trying to solve basic issues like getting their employees to fill out timesheets correctly. We’re still in the early stages of tech adoption, let alone AI.
Have you found any AI tools useful in your own day-to-day job?
One of my key use cases for AI tools, both professionally and personally, is in research. I’ve experimented with some open-source tools designed for deeper research than just asking ChatGPT questions. These tools are specifically built for developing extended research reports, which is pretty amazing.
For example, when doing market research, I might ask for common GIS use cases for water utilities. While the initial results might be generic, they often spark new questions and ideas, making the process more creative and efficient than just Googling around.
I’ve looked into tools like GPT Researcher, which, while I haven’t fully explored it yet, seems to offer more tailored and customizable research capabilities compared to something like ChatGPT. However, even with more general tools like Claude or ChatGPT, I find them incredibly useful for jogging my memory or overcoming the challenge of a blank page. They might not always provide groundbreaking insights, but they often remind me of things I might have forgotten, helping me build a more comprehensive view.
Rapid Fire
What’s your favorite book?
David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity has quickly become one of the most critical and impactful books I’ve ever encountered—easily in my top three.
Another one that might seem unconventional is The Federalist Papers. I believe it should be required reading for everyone in America, not just for its apparent content about the U.S. Constitution, but for the deep philosophical insights it offers.
As for fiction, Neuromancer is probably my favorite. Its influence on science fiction and its vision of the future is just incredible.
Who has influenced you more, Stewart Brand (How Buildings Learn) or Christopher Alexander (A Timeless Way of Building)?
Stewart Brand is definitely the one who resonates most with me right now. While I’m interested in much of what Christopher Alexander has done, I’m not as familiar with his work directly—most of my knowledge of him comes from references in other contexts. But Brand, especially his book How Buildings Learn, is incredibly deep, far beyond what the cover or title might suggest.
What do you think people misunderstand about Florida?
One thing that people often misunderstand about Florida is the “Florida Man” stereotype that you see everywhere. It’s really not as real or pervasive as people might think. I live in a more urban part of Florida, so my perspective might differ from others, but to me, Florida is just a normal place. We find the stereotype funny too, but it doesn’t reflect our everyday reality.
What’s the last thing you built with your hands?
Right now, I’m working on renovating my laundry room. I’ve built several cabinets and installed a countertop over the past month or so. For the materials, I used a butcher block for the countertop. It’s an L-shape, so I had to figure out how to combine multiple pieces, which was tricky.
This project has been ongoing for a while since I have two kids, and I usually only get to work on it in 20-minute increments spread out over several days. But I enjoy doing it and wish I had more time for these kinds of projects—it’s a great way to decompress.
Note: This was also published on Fantasy M&A.
