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Before Adnan Malik built the company, he lost the same argument from both sides of it.
On one side he was running demand generation for a health-tech SaaS business, holding a budget, trying to buy leads that were worth buying. “We have the money, we have the cash,” he says, “but, you know, whenever you’re spending, you get, you know, all sort of bogus leads.” The leads landed in the pipeline. And sales worked them. And sales closed some of them, because sale at the end is sale, and the wrong customers churned out the back a year later. That is the vendor’s version of the problem.
On the other side he was the buyer. Over the course of his career he implemented seven or eight different SaaS tools, and he is unsparing about how that went.
“I used to spend so much time, like months, and we still make the wrong decision.”
Months. Still wrong. But he offers the reason without any defensiveness, and it is the most honest sentence in the conversation, because it is a limit rather than a failure.
“Because humanly, I can only look at maybe three or five different tools. I cannot speak to fifty different companies.”
And that is a person describing the ceiling on his own attention. Not his diligence, not his budget, not his seniority. The number of vendor conversations a working adult can actually hold in a quarter while also doing the job they were hired for.
And what he wanted, in those months, did not exist.
“There was no company where, you know, I can just call like, like a free call and say, ‘Hey, you know, I’m looking for this software, you know, as per experience, as per my needs, recommend me.’”
And he co-founded SoftwareFinder in 2019 with two colleagues, all three of them out of marketing and sales. It is bootstrapped, no outside money, and by his account it has grown about 110 percent a year for five years. They got a customer in the first month. “And then we never looked back,” he says, which is the kind of line founders use to compress a great deal of anxiety into six words.
But the interesting part of the company is not the growth rate. It is the diagnosis underneath it, which Adnan states as plainly as if it were common knowledge, and which I do not think is common knowledge at all.
The people buying business software are almost never technology people.
“If someone in your company is looking for HR software, it’ll be your HR manager. If someone is looking for project management software, it’ll be your project manager. If someone is looking for, you know, marketing automation, it’ll be your digital marketing person or demand gen person, right?”
And then the flat verdict.
“They’re not trained on how to shortlist technologies because that’s not their background. Their background is something else. Now they have a need for a software.”
Read that last sentence again, because it is doing something careful. He does not say they are bad at it. But he says they have a need. The need arrived at their desk, unaccompanied by any of the skills required to meet it, and they are going to meet it anyway because nobody else is going to.
I described to him the stereotype I have watched play out inside mid-market companies, which is that marketing ends up on HubSpot, sales ends up on Salesforce, and finance ends up on NetSuite, and every one of those vendors wins the deal on its own terms. What the company gets is three systems that were each chosen well in isolation and that now have to be lashed together with API connections nobody budgeted for. Adnan agreed, and then pushed it further than I had, into the specific questions those buyers do not think to ask.
And his consultants ask how fast the company expects to grow. Not because growth is nice, but because the answer changes the recommendation. Buy for the company you are and you may spend two years earning the sentence he quotes back with visible distaste.
“Oh, I’ve outgrown this software, now I need to switch.”
“Which is the worst thing to do,” he says. And then data migration. And rerouting the APIs. The whole apparatus rebuilt because a decision made by a well-meaning marketer in month one did not account for month thirty. And the cost of getting it wrong is not a bad quarter. In his phrasing, implementing the wrong tool “can really dent your business,” because your attention shifts to repairing the choice instead of to growth.
So here is the compression the company actually sells.
“We cut down their research time from anywhere from two to three months to, 10-minute phone call.”
Two to three months, into ten minutes. And it sounds like marketing until you notice what is being compressed. Not the reading. Not the demos. The part being removed is the buyer’s obligation to become, temporarily and badly, a technology analyst.
And I want to be careful here, because the unglamorous thing in this business is the thing that works. Craft in this market is not the matching engine. It is that a human being picks up a phone, spends 10 or 15 minutes, and asks a marketer about their growth curve and their existing stack and the departments they have not thought about yet. But Adnan is not romantic about it. He describes it as a service business and says so repeatedly, and he built a proprietary system in-house to help the consultants match rather than replace them.
The detail that persuaded me most is a small one, and it is the kind of thing you only do on purpose.
“If we’re recommending five, we try to make sure that we recommend three large and two small.”
Two slots, held open, every time, for companies with no brand and no budget to buy their way onto anyone’s list. And he is candid that some of the best software he sees comes from firms nobody has heard of. Reserving two of five for them is a decision that costs him something and that no buyer would ever notice was made.
All of which loops back to why he never raised money, and to the only piece of founder advice in the conversation I would repeat without qualification.
Adnan’s rule is not that venture capital is bad. It is that bootstrapping is a bet on a market that already exists.
“If you wanna do bootstrap, you have to do bootstrap where the market is ready. The demand is there. People are looking for, you know, a solution that you’re gonna be providing.”
And if you are building something nobody has asked for yet, something that requires teaching an entire market that it has a problem, he does not hedge.
“Then good luck.”
And he knew software buying was already happening at enormous volume. He knew buyers were already frustrated, because he had been one. There was nothing to teach the market. But there was a better way to serve a demand that was going to exist whether or not he showed up. That is what let him ask his own first question, the one he says every founder should answer before anything else, which is where the initial dollar is going to come from.
He is gentler about the founders who cannot do this than I expected him to be. When I raised the wealth math of entrepreneurship, the years of flatlined or negative net worth that mass-market financial advice never accounts for, he did not turn it into a courage story. And he talked about savings. Fifty thousand, a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand of your own money, and the plain fact that a young founder a couple of years into working has not accumulated it.
“When you’re young, you don’t have that kind of saving, and you rely on that seed funding.”
No shame in the sentence, and no advice attached to it either. It is a constraint, described accurately. He is unusually good at that.
The last thing we got to is the shift that has rearranged his channel, and it is where his content library turned out to be an accident of good fortune. Two years ago, he says, roughly 90 percent of software research started with a Google search. Now about 55 percent of software-buying searches begin inside a language model, counting Google itself, which he notes is “pretty much becoming LLM” now that the AI overview sits on top and people have stopped scrolling past it.
And SoftwareFinder spent six years as a content website and accumulated something like 200,000 pages. Those pages are now being read by the models, and his traffic has climbed about 350 percent in a year. He is clear-eyed that this is a structural windfall rather than genius. But marketplaces had the corpus. SaaS companies that spent a decade winning at SEO are watching the channel drain, losing traffic and therefore losing leads, and they are hunting for replacements.
But notice that the shift does not touch the thing underneath. A marketer who asks a language model which HR system to buy is still a marketer who was never trained to evaluate HR systems. The research got faster. And the confidence went up. But the competence did not move.
Which is the whole business, and Adnan has been on both ends of it. He was the vendor buying bogus leads because nobody in the middle was sorting the buyers. And he was the buyer spending months on three or five tools out of fifty because nobody in the middle was sorting the vendors. The data, the 200,000 pages, the matching system, the hundreds of software sitting in every category, all of it is scaffolding around ten minutes on a telephone with someone who knows which questions you forgot to ask.
Guest Bio: Adnan Malik
Adnan Malik is the Co-Founder and CEO at Software Finder, a B2B software marketplace that pairs buyers with vetted vendors through a live consultative phone call rather than a self-serve directory. Rising to prominence for building the company entirely without outside funding, he became known for a bootstrap-first playbook that prioritized revenue in the first three months over product polish. Founded in 2019, Software Finder has sustained roughly 110% year-over-year growth for five consecutive years and is reported to have reached approximately $20 million in annual recurring revenue.
Previously, in his last role before founding Software Finder, Malik led marketing and sales for a health-tech SaaS company, where he encountered firsthand the lead-quality problem that became his company’s founding thesis: buyers spending months evaluating software with no reliable, human-vetted source of truth. He co-founded Software Finder with two colleagues who shared that same marketing and sales background, betting that a phone-based consulting layer could compress a two-to-three-month buying research cycle into a single ten-minute call.
Earlier in his career, Malik worked across client success and implementation roles inside SaaS companies before moving into sales and marketing leadership. He holds a degree from London Metropolitan University and is based in New York.
Hey,
Thanks for reading this. I mean that. There’s a lot of content out there competing for your attention, and you spent some of it here. I hope it was worth it. Even better, I hope it prompted you to think about something differently enough that you’d share it with someone who’d get something out of it too.
I started this podcast because tactics never stuck with me. What stuck were stories — business biographies, autobiographies, the decisions people made and why they made them. The principle only clicks once you know the story behind it.
So I built the thing I wanted to listen to. Every week I have two conversations with people who build in technology and product. Then I write the essay in my premium newsletter (Taste Maker) to distill the principles and reflect on the narrative — one that puts you inside the conversation, through my eyes. What caught me off guard. What I kept thinking about after we hung up. Where the principle actually lives once you strip away the jargon.
I make this for myself first. If you read the way I do, you’ll want it too.
PS — If you want to pitch coming on the show, or you know someone I should talk to, shoot me an email at caden@hey.com with "January752" in the subject line so it gets past my filters. I'm not optimizing for famous guests. I'm optimizing for interesting conversations, even from people who aren't LinkedIn influencers.
