Abel's claim is that the software analyst business was built for the wrong customer. The old reports covered only the biggest vendors and reached mainly Fortune 500 CIOs with subscriptions; his first company, BigMachines, took nine years to get into a report and twelve to be called a leader, and he says vendors still pay $50,000 to $100,000 simply for the right to market a quadrant. G2's counter-model borrows from Amazon and Yelp — Zomato, in the host's translation — but repairs the thing that broke consumer reviews: reviewers are verified through LinkedIn, so a buyer can see whether the person praising a CRM actually does that job, in that function, in that city. The analysts do not disappear; they change job. G2's research team writes no opinions, only the taxonomy — 2,100 categories and their inclusion criteria, adding vector databases the moment the market demanded one — and the opinions come from users, in real time, which is why listing is free. That free listing is how Freshworks and Chargebee let customers vouch for them to American buyers who had no reason to trust an Indian SaaS vendor. Now the catalogue is itself the problem: Abel calls G2 a supermarket with 2,100 aisles, so Monty, an agent built on OpenAI's APIs and sitting on 2.8 million reviews, is being taught to match a described business problem to a product. Underneath all of it runs a founder's argument that fortitude beats smarts — $19 million of a $20 million round burned in three years, a company cut from 70 people to 20, and seven years before it worked.
Worth your time if you are
Small-business buyers who pick software by brand name
Indian SaaS founders selling into a US market that has never heard of them
Product leaders whose catalogue has outgrown its own search box
Founders three years in with one year of runway left
Engineers weighing a capability centre against a full-stack product office
