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Highlights
From Library Outcast to Software Pioneer: A Technical Founder’s Journey to Fix the Software Crisis
$208 billion will be spent on software development this year. Yet 78% of software projects are late, over budget, or never ship at all. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Andrew Wolfe, Co-CEO of Bloomfilter, shared how this staggering inefficiency shaped his mission to transform how companies build software.
The seeds of Bloomfilter were planted years ago in an unlikely place – a public library in central Ohio. As a teenager facing a troubled youth, Andrew spent countless hours there, discovering programming through necessity and curiosity. “When you’re spending four to five hours a day at the library, you find a lot of books,” he recalls. “The Internet was kind of brand new, and so there were really cool games online. I wanted to build games.”
This early exposure to coding evolved into freelance work on Usenet forums, where Andrew would “bill myself out building Perl and PHP websites when the Internet was still very young.” But it wasn’t until years later, as a consultant, that he encountered the problem that would define his entrepreneurial journey.
The catalyst came during a project for a major healthcare system – a children’s diabetes monitor that could eliminate the need for finger pricking. Despite the seeming simplicity of building a mobile app companion, the project went sideways and was ultimately canceled. “The device seemed like the hard part,” Andrew explains. “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.”
This failure haunted him. He launched a consulting firm called Skip List to tackle the problem, scaling it to eight figures. But the industry-wide issues persisted. In fact, they got worse – from 68% of software projects failing to 78%. “Someone has to build something that’s scalable and can actually solve this problem,” Andrew recalls thinking. “If not me, then who?”
Enter Bloomfilter – a process mining platform for software development that sits atop existing tools like Jira and GitHub to identify process issues. But the go-to-market strategy wasn’t immediately obvious. Initially, they planned a product-led growth approach targeting project managers. However, they quickly discovered a crucial insight: “People don’t really sign up for more scrutiny.”
This realization drove a pivot to top-down enterprise sales. Through extensive customer conversations – over 150 of them – they refined their ideal customer profile: organizations with 30-300 engineers, pre-matrix structure, using cloud-based tools. “That sounds hyper specific,” Andrew notes, “but it took a lot of iterations and a lot of running our heads on the wall.”
The journey taught him valuable lessons about trusting instincts earlier. “We kind of knew deep down that we were going to be this transparency tool and this accountability tool… And yet we ignored our gut there.” He estimates this hesitation cost them two to three months of progress.
Looking ahead, Andrew’s vision extends beyond just fixing software projects. He’s taking aim at what he calls “the agile industrial complex” – the notion that doubling down on current practices will solve the industry’s problems. Success, he argues, will come when “people can start to say and look at data and say, ‘Hey, what we’re doing isn’t working.'”
For technical founders, Andrew’s story highlights a crucial truth: sometimes the most valuable insights come not from building new tools, but from fundamentally rethinking how we build software itself. The challenge isn’t just technical – it’s about creating the transparency and accountability needed to transform an industry that’s growing 30% annually while still struggling with basic delivery.
Actionable
Takeaways
Identify the Root Problem, Not Just the Symptoms:
Andrew and his team dug deep to understand the fundamental issues behind software project failures, rather than simply building a tool to make the existing problems easier to deal with. By focusing on the root cause, they were able to develop a more impactful solution.
Iterate Your Positioning Based on Customer Feedback:
Bloomfilter's messaging evolved from a process coach to an operating system for software development to a process mining platform as the team gained a deeper understanding of how customers perceived and described their challenges. Don't be afraid to test and refine your positioning based on market input.
Fight for Your Category, But Recognize When to Adapt:
While it's important to advocate for your unique value proposition and resist being lumped into ill-fitting categories, founders must also be willing to adapt their vision based on customer needs and market realities. Strike a balance between staying true to your mission and being responsive to feedback.
Trust Your Gut and Ship Early:
Andrew regrets not trusting his instincts on certain strategic decisions and waiting too long to release the initial product. He advises founders to listen to their intuition and get their product in front of customers as soon as possible to accelerate learning and iteration.
Embrace Rejection as a Learning Opportunity:
Founders will face countless rejections from investors, customers, and other stakeholders. Rather than getting discouraged, view each "no" as a chance to gather valuable feedback and improve your offering. The more quickly you can learn from rejection, the faster you'll get to "yes."
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