It’s 2023 and software buying is broken.

‍

After we sold my previous business, I wrote down the key pain points we’d experienced in our 7+ year journey.
‍

Buying software was first on the list.
‍

Why? Because out of all the problems we had (and obviously there were tonnes), this one was both large and ridiculous. We were a software company struggling to buy software.
‍

We knew our requirements. We had lots of knowledge in-house, and a network of wizened advisors we could turn to.
‍

But each time we wanted to buy, say, a new CRM, we still had to spend a crazy amount of time - sometimes weeks- trying to figure out which software was (a) good and (b) right for us.

‍

1. The choice is overwhelming

There is now so much software that it takes days to even begin to understand the products in any given category. In the CRM space alone there are now over 850 different software products - where do you even start?

And it's getting worse as it becomes easier and easier to build software.

2. The current options for working out what software is right for you suck

You currently have 3 main options:

1. ‍Ask people you know - but even if you happen to have a relevant network, they don’t have the same requirements as you, their knowledge is usually out of date and they can only answer 10% of your questions.
2. ‍Read review platforms - but they overwhelm you with information, don’t have a number of the data points you actually want, and force you to scroll through thousands of reviews (of unclear authenticity or relevance) to extract insight. Fundamentally, they do not guide you to the right product.
3. ‍Read vendor websites and ‘speak to sales’ - I need not tell you how horrific this is.

So - like every company - we ended up doing a bit of all 3, and putting together our own comparison spreadsheets.
‍

As we were amateurs, our conclusions were, well, amateur.
‍

So we’d still end up buying the wrong software. Software that was too complex, too expensive or didn’t give us what we needed. We then had to spend more time switching software, or building workarounds within the wrong software - leading to a loss of productivity and, ultimately, hard cash.
‍

It’s 2023 and this process is still the state-of-the-art. It’s crazy.

‍

Enter Stackfix

‍

We’re building Stackfix to solve this problem.
‍

Stackfix helps businesses buy the right software fast, starting with personalised recommendations. Under the hood, we're building the world's leading software dataset, and using this to transform software buying and usage.
‍

Watch this space. We’re super excited to share more over the coming months.