She’s flipping the priorities on homebuilding; this founder wants buyer stress out of the blueprints

Building a home shouldn’t be a nightmare for homeowners, Sabah Baxamoosa shared.

“It’s one of the biggest emotional, financial investments you’re going to make in your life,” the founder of Olathe-based buildNest explained, tapping into her own experience in 2024. “Once we got into the building process, I can’t tell you how many people came up to us and said, ‘Are you sure you’re ready for this?’ They made us feel like we were either going into war or divorce by the end of it.”

Despite such warnings, Baxamoosa herself enjoyed a pain-free custom homebuilding process. Knowing others clearly had endured much worse, she set out to make her experience replicable for any prospective homeowner.

“Even though we didn’t know what to expect from the process, we had a great builder. Everything worked out,” Baxamoosa said. “But while we had a wonderful team of people that we were working with, I recognized there was still this level of decision fatigue and stress and questions about everything.”

During that building process, she soon hacked together the prototype for what would become buildNest to help her handle the stress while working full-time, raising a child, and taking care of aging parents. Nothing on the market fit the needs of her multi-generational family situation.

“I used [the platform] to align our lives, our decisions, our timeline, and our finances,” said Baxamoosa, who has experience in product partnerships and technology, as well as ecosystem building, from her time in Silicon Valley. “And we were able to build this home in less than eight months.”

buildNest officially launched in April 2025. It’s an all-in-one platform for homeowners that works with builders and lenders to manage tasks, track the budget, collaborate in real time, and manage contractors and vendors.

“buildNest is really meant to be a finance-first, collaborative workspace for builders, lenders, and homeowners — which is really focused on the homeowner experience — to help them guide through the build process,” Baxamoosa explained. “And do it in such a way that they have both decision confidence and financial clarity.”

“So they get proud,” she added, “and not feel a sense of relief that it’s over, but like, ‘Wow, I can finally step into this thing that I’ve been working on for the last year.’”

Putting homeowners in the driver’s seat

Baxamoosa was convinced there had to be a better way when she learned that 12 of her 17 neighbors had bad homebuilding experiences. 

“If you’re spending that much money and time — and you’re putting your blood, sweat, and tears into this — it should not be a terrible experience,” she continued. “Yet it is for most people. I started digging in and more than 80 percent of all builds go over budget. And they go over budget by 20 to 30 percent. Now that can become a sizable amount of money when you’re working already in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

A lot of construction tech companies are focused on the builder first, Baxamoosa noted, but she wanted to build a solution that focuses on the homeowners and allows them control some of the sources of risk and stress.

“I realized that a lot of that risk, that lack of ability to know how to build or what to expect comes from the fact that there’s no financial clarity,” she said.

“So we’re flipping the script a little bit and putting homeowners in control of the experience,” Baxamoosa added, “where, traditionally, it’s really been the builder who’s been driving the process. And it should be flipped, because for the homeowner, it is their biggest priority at the time. For the builder, it’s one of 10.”

Sabah Baxamoosa gives her pitch for buildNest during a graduation event from the Wichita-based NXTSTAGE Customer Traction Cohort at NXTUS; photo by Nikki Overfelt Chifalu, Startland News

Baxamoosa graduated from the Wichita-based NXTUS NXTSTAGE Customer Traction Cohort in early February, will pitch at InvestMidwest this April, and was accepted into the NXTUS and Accelerate Venture Partners Accessing Growth Capital Series.

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She’s passionate about helping people build their own house, she shared, because it becomes more than just a place to live. It’s a home that is exactly what the owner wants and helps them build equity and generational wealth, Baxamoosa said.

“The beauty of the way the property rights and the structure works in the U.S. is that you can convert that into collateral and use it anywhere,” she explained. “That’s a privilege that I think people don’t really understand. Having lived on the other side of the world in Pakistan, a house is just a dead asset. You just have it, you live in it, and then it just crumbles. Or somebody comes and buys it from you and that’s it.”

‘I thought I had it all figured out’

While Baxamoosa’s intuition was to focus on homeowners, she said — when the buildNest pilot was launched — real world dynamics kicked in and she went to builders first, which didn’t work out as well as she hoped.

“Now we’re in this process of really doing a re-examination,” she explained, “going back to the basics, validating the assumptions that we had, and talking to a lot more homeowners and people who are beginning to build or actively building.”

With this re-examination, the NXTSTAGE Customer Traction Cohort came at just the right time, she continued. When she started the program, she was focused on solving money and approval problems for builders.

“That also quickly got invalidated through the experience,” Baxamoosa noted. “And that’s when I realized the real problem lies with these people and the builders have different concerns.”

Sabah Baxamoosa, buildNest, chats with Fielding Brenner, Pitchster, a fellow Kansas City region member of the NXTSTAGE Customer Traction Cohort at NXTUS; photo by Nikki Overfelt Chifalu, Startland News

The NXTSTAGE cohort helped her learn the hard way — like many founders do — that she didn’t spend enough time with problem validation and customer discovery.

“I thought I had a leg up because I worked with ecosystem builders and I’ve heard hundreds of pitches,” Baxamoosa acknowledged. “I thought I had it figured out. There’s a demand, there’s willingness to pay, and there are people who are paying for it. And it’s a high price point. I was like, boom, boom, boom.”

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So with that knowledge, Baxamoosa is now bifurcating the product set, one for builders and one for homeowners, she shared. 

For builders, she’s launching buildEstimate, a prototype around estimating and selections that addresses some of the most common use cases she has encountered so far: quick estimates, precision estimates, real estate investment ROI, and the selections bridge.

“When I started talking to builders, I started seeing that they were providing feedback around it taking them — on average — 10 hours to do a single estimate and an estimate to the point where it’s incomplete information,” Baxamoosa explained. “The math just doesn’t work out, because that’s a whole person’s job just to do that, when they could be doing something else.”

With the changes, she’s now focused on connecting with her customer set, joining the Home Builders Association of Greater Kansas City and the National Association of Home Builders.

“I want to spend time with the people who are closest to my customers,” Baxamoosa added.