The Story of Bloomfilter: Building the Future of Software Development

The Story of Bloomfilter: Building the Future of Software Development

Sometimes the most transformative companies are born not from opportunity, but from frustration. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Andrew Wolfe, Co-CEO of Bloomfilter, shared how a failed children’s diabetes monitor project sparked a mission to fix the software industry’s deepest problems.

The Spark The story begins in a Cleveland healthcare system, where Andrew was brought in to save a troubled project – a mobile app for a children’s diabetes monitor that could eliminate painful finger pricks. “The device seemed like the hard part,” Andrew recalls. “You got this cool medical device that seems really hard to build, and we can’t write a mobile app… something everyone does every day.”

The project’s failure, despite being led by one of the world’s largest consulting firms, revealed a systemic problem. Watching children’s disappointment during test days haunted him. This wasn’t just about a failed app – it was about the human cost of software development’s dysfunction.

The First Attempt Driven to solve this problem, Andrew launched Skip List, a consulting firm focused on “thoughtful software.” The company scaled to eight figures, but something wasn’t right. The industry-wide failure rate of software projects actually increased from 68% to 78% during this period.

“Someone has to build something that’s scalable and can actually solve this problem,” Andrew remembers thinking. “If not me, then who?” This realization led him to leave behind his successful consulting business to launch Bloomfilter in October 2021.

The Pivot Bloomfilter’s initial approach targeted project managers with a product-led growth strategy. But they discovered that transparency tools face unique adoption challenges. “People don’t really sign up for more scrutiny,” Andrew explains. This insight drove a pivot to top-down enterprise sales, leveraging his network of CTOs and CIOs.

Through 150 customer conversations, they refined their focus to organizations with 30-300 engineers, pre-matrix structure, using cloud-based tools. This hyper-specific targeting proved crucial for early success, with 12 of their first 20 sales calls converting to design partners who remain customers today.

The Vision Looking ahead, Andrew sees Bloomfilter leading a fundamental shift in how software is built. “We joke around internally that we’re fighting the agile industrial complex,” he shares. Success, in his view, will come when “people can start to say and look at data and say, ‘Hey, what we’re doing isn’t working.'”

The stakes are enormous. Next year, global software development spending will increase by 30%. If Bloomfilter can help reduce the 78% failure rate, the impact would be measured in hundreds of billions of dollars – and countless projects that actually deliver on their promises.

But beyond the numbers, Andrew’s vision is about transformation. “We want to bring that number down,” he explains, “providing an example of how the industry can think, can act differently.” In three to five years, he aims to see Bloomfilter not just succeeding as a company, but changing how the industry measures and discusses software development success.

For technical founders, Bloomfilter’s story demonstrates how deep industry pain points can fuel transformation – if you’re willing to question fundamental assumptions about how things “should” work. Sometimes the biggest opportunities lie not in building new tools, but in fixing broken processes that everyone else has accepted as normal.