Kicking the tires on software purchases
by Sharon Fisher
If you’re looking for a barbecue grill and trying to decide which one to get and where, you have lots of options. You can ask your neighbors. You can read Consumer Reports. You can get on Yelp or NextDoor.
But if you’re a small business trying to find out whether you really need a content and digital asset management application, and which one to get, it’s not so easy.
That’s the problem Philippe Boutros is hoping to solve with his Get Whys Inc. service.
Get Whys founder Phillippe Boutros. Image courtesy Phillippe Boutros.
“I want people to be using this as a go-to for insights long-term, not just for software but for all business decisions,” said Boutros, founder and CEO of the Boise-based company. “I’ve benefited so much from having really phenomenal mentors in my career. Whenever I’ve had an impasse, I can pick up the phone and call someone. That’s not available to everybody. Anyone with a keyboard and mouse should be able to see what similar people have been through and learn from that.”
What Get Whys does
While there’s plenty of tools for marketers and sales people, there’s not much in the ways of tools that help purchasers buy, other than some procurement products, Boutros said. That’s particularly true for small- to medium-sized companies.
“I found that people spend a lot of time on the phone with vendors to educate themselves,” Boutros said, relating the story of one executive who gets software demonstrations from vendors every couple of weeks – not to buy, but just to be familiar with what’s in the market. “It’s a huge waste of time.”
That’s how businesses end up falling back on “no one ever got fired for buying IBM,” Boutros said. Which is fine, but sometimes there isn’t an “IBM” to fall back on to make these important software purchasing decisions. “You cannot only buy things that are tried and true,” he said.
That’s what led to the idea for Get Whys, a proprietary database featuring interviews with people who bought certain software products, including what they regretted and what they wished they’d known at the time. “It leverages the hindsight of people who come before you,” Boutros said.
How Get Whys was founded
Boutros, who hails from Minnesota and is half-Lebanese, speaking Arabic and French as well as English, said he’s an unusual entrepreneur because he doesn’t come from the tech side but from the market research side. “Founders tend to be very strong on technology – math whizzes or physics PhDs,” he said. “They know how to build things that are cool, but they don’t come from the standpoint of customers and buyers. It’s not quite the same as knowing what a large group of people will want.”
Now 31, Boutros has worked in market research for more than seven years, and he brought that background with him. Market researchers find people for studies by having a customer base of people who buy software. When someone is looking to learn about, let’s say, Adobe Experience Manager, the market researcher looks through its database, finds someone who has bought that software, and interviews them about it for a half hour or so, he explained.
Boutros started working on the product earlier this year. “I, along with many people in tech, switched jobs at the beginning of the year, and not of my own volition,” he said. He and his wife moved to Boise a year ago for her new job at Boise State University, and he’d started a new position with Transform in October 2022. The company was acquired a few months later.
“I sat on my hands for a month,” Boutros said. “I’m not very good at sitting on my hands.”
But the interlude gave Boutros time to think about what he wanted to be doing, and while he had job offers, he had a lingering feeling that he wanted to pursue this idea and give being an entrepreneur a try. So he approached his former bosses at ClearPath Strategies, and proposed them funding him to build a prototype, as well as set the company up legally, and outsource development if necessary.
“The goal was to spend as little as possible to make sure it’s worth investing a lot into,” Boutros said.
Next steps
The Get Whys dashboard. Image courtesy Get Whys.
While Boutros was building the product, he was collecting potential customers. “I didn’t want to do what a lot of startups do – build a solution and hope people have problems,” Boutros said. “I talked to people and got two dozen organizations to join – midmarket companies that buy technology.” The companies were big enough to need to buy software on a regular basis, but small enough that they didn’t already have software procurement procedures set up and didn’t have a contract with a consulting company such as Gartner or Forrester to help.
On June 13, Boutros started writing the product – “I built it with duct tape and toothpicks,” he said -- and in mid-August, he started getting people off the waitlist. For the next six weeks or so, he’ll see how his initial group of people use it, and start revising the product to accommodate that. “It’s very exciting to see what they need to change,” he said. “It’s mostly phenomenal to get all this validation that this is a problem people need to solve.” In a few months, he’ll end the beta test and open it up for more access, he said.
Currently, most of Boutros’ testers are in Seattle and the Bay Area, with one from New York. “If there’s anyone in Idaho reading this, it would mean a lot to me to have someone down the street,” he said.
Funding
Boutros wouldn’t say how much the initial funding was, but after the beta test is over, he plans to have a funding round to build out his team, and said he’s already started meeting with venture capitalists in the Bay Area and in Seattle.
Now that Boutros has finished the initial product creation, he’s also planning to look locally. “I would love to have people in Idaho to talk to,” he said. “I’ve been very heads-down building this and I haven’t put in the time yet to meet people here. If you’re a good person, and helpful, and interesting, I don’t care where you are, but it would be helpful if you’re down the street.”
As far as revenue, Get Whys makes money by charging the customers for access, likely through a subscription model, Boutros said.
Boutros said he isn’t sure of his exit strategy yet. “I have no plans for world domination. I just want to build things that help solve that problem,” he said. “What shape or form that takes, I don’t have an opinion. It’s easy to get blinded by dollar signs. I am not in that mode. If I can make these people happy with the product, that’s success for me.”
Sharon Fisher is a digital nomad who writes about entrepreneurship.