Building Fast, Thinking Big: Inside Ediphi’s 2025 Make-a-thon

When your company is busy building the most comprehensive cloud based estimating and preconstruction platform on the market, it’s hard to find the time to do the “extras”.
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The small organization tweak that enhances user experience.

The sketch on the whiteboard that lays the groundwork for a new feature.
Even that coffee chat with a co-worker that’s been rescheduled more times than it should.

Our first annual “Make-a-thon” was designed to make space for these moments. 

And the projects that came out of it are already being explored for real implementation.

Here are the highlights from Make-a-thon 2025 — along with some sharp takes from the event’s expert panelists.

First, what is a “Make-a-thon”?

It’s common among tech companies to host “Hack-a-thons” — multi-day sprints where teams break from their usual work to explore bold new ideas, rapid prototypes, or creative solutions.

A “Make-a-thon” is Ediphi’s version.

And their work was to be judged by the best in the business: Nate Wooten of DPR Construction, Mack Rush from Suffolk Technologies, and our very own Mike Navarro (CTO) and Trey Darnell (Director of Sales).
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1. ‍Make leaps in innovation. Is something that would typically take 3 weeks possible to make in 3 days? We wanted to test the limits of our speed, focus, and creativity.
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2. ‍Build culture. As a remote team, we want to be intentional about creating opportunities for people to work together, learn from each other, and create connections.
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3. ‍Add customer value. Most importantly, every idea was grounded in the same question: How could this make our product better for our users?
   
   

These goals weren’t theoretical — they were built for the potential to ship.

“We’re encouraging people to be ambitious…and it has the potential to bring a lot of value to our customers and product,” says Zach Azar, VP of Product Development, “Because the best of these will actually make it into production.”

What got created — and why it matters

Ten projects and forty smiling faces joined us for the Make-a-thon demo day, discussing everything from backend infrastructure improvements and customer-facing UX polish to who had the best dance moves in our virtual office.
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At the end of it all, Nate Wooten, our industry expert from DPR, simply said.

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“These projects are quality of life improvements for us as customers.”

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Here’s what caught our panel’s attention — and had them asking when it would ship.
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• Cleaner, simpler UI. Two of the teams joined forces to reduce the clutter: merging redundant estimate views, adding filters directly to the estimate grid, and making key info easier to find.
• ‍Smoother onboarding. Getting started with Ediphi is easy — but what if we could make it better? One team imagined a “quick start” setup with cleaner permissions, guided set-up, and personalized onboarding options.
• ‍More power for self-performers. The Self Perform crew (aptly named!) shipped a working prototype for crew-based labor costing intended to support contractors who self-perform work.
• ‍Faster testing = faster shipping. In a solo effort, one engineer reworked our end-to-end testing system by replacing slow, UI-driven workflows with direct API calls.
  The result? Tests would run 27% faster and users would get better, updates sooner.
• ‍“Google Docs” but for estimates. We're always pushing the boundaries of what’s possible when multiple users collaborate on estimates. The team Omnipresence took it further by building real-time cursors, live changes, and a reimagined way to work with your team in the same place.

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“ As someone who spent a lot of time in the early days of Ediphi and is now watching it grow into this platform, you're really executing at a pretty high level and working on really important stuff,” said Mack Rush, post-demo.
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“Just keep listening to customers,” he says.

User-focused solutions built by a customer-obsessed team

Give a group of customer-focused people space to build (and throw in a few swag items as an incentive) and they’ll surprise you.
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In just four days, our team turned loose ideas into real solutions, building connections, testing limits, and shipping features that will make Ediphi faster, smarter, and better for everyone who uses it.

And we’re already deciding which projects to launch first…New tools, better workflows, and meaningful improvements are coming your way soon.