Software Buyers Council - Shape the future of software, one call at a time.

Without an outsider’s perspective, software companies over-index on the needs of the early few customers, develop blind spots, or fail to express the value of their product to a new audience because they lost the beginner’s mindset. For some of my consulting projects, I started conducting one-on-one calls with the people who could be using the product some day, then using that information to recommending a course of action for the startup. For example, for FoundationDB I spoke with over a dozen engineers and learned that the use case for FoundationDB wasn’t at all clear, so we overhauled the public-facing website to include more clear and concrete descriptions and visualizations. The study participants often told me they enjoy helping startups, and offered to help again in the future. Hundreds of engineers and data scientists told me this. That’s why I decided to create an independent group of people that I can invite to future studies to share their opinion and help software companies.