Powerplay: How a Simple App is Reshaping the Future of India's $600 Billion Construction Industry

In India, construction is a $600 billion industry, yet it remains one of the least digitized sectors in the economy. For decades, projects worth hundreds of crores have been managed through a chaotic mix of paper registers and thousands of unorganized WhatsApp groups. Iesh Dixit, the Founder of Powerplay, is changing that narrative. By building an app so simple that even a site supervisor with basic literacy can use it, Powerplay is moving the entire construction ecosystem from siloed registers to a unified digital platform.

An alumnus of IIT Roorkee, Dixit's journey was anything but linear. After a "miserable" failure in his first B2B marketplace venture and a stint at Jumbotail, he returned to the drawing board with a contrarian conviction: that the people on construction sites—those often judged as "non-literate" by business owners—were already digital-first consumers of YouTube and Instagram. Today, Powerplay leverages this "bottom-up" motion to solve real-time progress tracking, material management, and labor attendance for builders and contractors across the country.

The Hard Lessons of "Blind Hard Work"

Before Powerplay, Dixit launched a B2B marketplace for the apparel industry. Despite working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, the business failed. "I had this dangerous notion that if I just work hard, I will make it," Dixit reflects. He realized that unlike cracking the IIT-JEE, where the syllabus is clear, entrepreneurship requires right prioritization over brute force.

He had spent two years solving for "product discovery" in a market where the real pain point was "working capital." This taught him the most important rule for his second act: don't create an artificial problem. Dixit spent six months iterating through personal experiences—including a disastrous home renovation project given to him by his father—before fixating on construction management.

The "Bottom-Up" Pivot: Breaking the Mental Block

Initially, Dixit faced a massive mental block from business owners. They believed their site teams would never use software. But Dixit saw something different: during lunch breaks, those same site workers were scrolling through Reels and watching YouTube. He realized the issue wasn't "literacy"; it was "ease of use."

In August 2020, Powerplay made a pivotal decision: they launched a free app for site workers. "We made sure their problem gets solved first. Then, when we reached the owner, we could say, 'Boss, your team is already using it. Why wouldn't you buy the management version?'" This freemium, bottom-up SaaS model allowed the app to spread organically, with site reports being sent to bosses with a "Powered by Powerplay" watermark.

The Art of "Simple" Software

Dixit believes that "simple is not easy." In fact, building a simple product took the team two years of relentless iteration. He warns against the "Trap of Five Features," where founders add everything a customer asks for, only to create an overwhelming and unusable product. Instead, Powerplay uses a rigorous 5-Question Framework to filter out "crap" and focus on the hardest parts of the user's problem.

Scaling the Digital Construction Site

Today, Powerplay is more than just a tracking tool. It has expanded to include Material and Labor management, solving the "minimum portion" of a customer's life problems needed for retention. By tracking exactly how much cement is being used and which labor teams are on-site, the app provides owners with the data they need to keep projects within budget.

Founder's Wisdom: Crazy vs. Smart

When asked who wins in a startup fight—the crazy one or the smart one—Dixit's answer is nuanced. While he admits you must be "crazy" to believe in a vision when no one else can see it, he increasingly values intellectual strategic thinking. He recommends that entrepreneurs spend time asking "curiosity questions" and thinking 6-10 moves ahead, much like a game of chess.

"The world tells us the crazy ones win," he says. "But you must learn how to be smart when it's needed. Spend the time to figure out if you are going in the right direction." For Iesh Dixit, the future of construction isn't just about more cement and steel—it's about the data that flows through every brick, managed by an app that's as easy to use as a smartphone.

About the Guest

Iesh Dixit is the Founder of Powerplay. An alumnus of IIT Roorkee, Iesh is a serial entrepreneur who previously founded apparel marketplace Wholdus and worked as a Key Account Manager at Jumbotail. His deep understanding of B2B dynamics and his personal frustration with unorganized construction projects led him to launch Powerplay in 2020. He is a proponent of "bottom-up" SaaS and is passionate about using simple technology to solve complex, large-scale industrial inefficiencies in India.

Powerplay is India's leading construction management platform, designed to help project managers and contractors track site progress, material usage, and labor attendance in real-time. By providing a simple, mobile-first interface for site teams and a data-rich dashboard for business owners, Powerplay brings transparency and efficiency to the construction lifecycle. The company is backed by top-tier investors and serves thousands of projects across the country.