Origin Story

the infrastructure that doesn’t exist

I remember standing in a conference lobby in Marina Bay Sands Singapore, pitching a cybersecurity product to a CISO that I’ve met for the first time. The product was right. The timing was right. But we were a name he’d never heard of. And in enterprise software, that’s the same as not existing.

He wasn’t dismissive. He was honest. He told me he evaluates three, maybe four sometimes – the same shortlists, the same analyst reports, the same review platforms. He didn’t have the time or the tools to look beyond that, and he knew he was probably missing better options. He just couldn’t afford to find out.

That conversation stayed with me. Not because I lost a deal, but because I realized he was stuck too.

I was the first regional hire for an emerging cybersecurity startup, building everything from scratch across Asia-Pacific. Within a month, I managed to close my first deal, and that was a win I can remember well.

But for every door that opened, dozens didn’t. Not because the product wasn’t right, but because the buyer had never heard of us – and the entire discovery ecosystem was designed to keep it that way.

Gartner charges vendors six figures to appear in analyst reports. G2 monetizes reviews built on misaligned incentives. The whole infrastructure is optimized for vendor spend, not buyer outcomes. If you’re an emerging vendor with a small team and a real product, your options are often brutal: burn cash on outbound that hits a wall, or pay the toll to play on someone else’s platform.

Most can’t afford either. And they disappear – not because their product failed, but because the market never knew they existed.

I’ve also started consulting for startups on go-to-market strategy. Focused on building automated prospecting engines, revenue operations systems, and outbound infrastructure, I slowly became good at it. And the pattern only got clearer.

It didn't matter how sophisticated the sales motion was. The structural disadvantage was upstream of everything I was building. I was optimizing the engine while the road was a toll highway owned by three companies.

And here's what nobody talks about — the other side is just as broken.

CTOs and CISOs drowning in vendor spam all year-round with the wrong timings. Stuck re-signing contracts with legacy vendors because switching costs are brutal and the alternatives are invisible. Not out of loyalty — out of inertia.

But central consensus is clear: they want to buy, not to be sold to.

Both sides are losing. The vendor can't get in the room. The buyer can't see what's out there. And the platforms sitting in between? Extracting rent from both.

This isn't a sales problem. It's an infrastructure problem. And the infrastructure to connect them simply does not exist.

atliant.io inverts this.

Not another review site. Not another marketplace where vendors bid for attention. An inversion — where you are the driver.

Search for emerging solutions that interest you. Evaluate them on your terms. Complete anonymity. Get compensated for your time and your insights. The mechanism is simple: vendors opt to pay for the opportunity to speak to you. No ads, no lead gen games — a pure exchange of value for your time.

It’s a more efficient market.

Vendors already spend five and six figures annually to reach enterprise buyers through analyst firms, review platforms, sponsorships, and SDR teams. We're not creating new spend — we're redirecting it to where it actually produces value: a real conversation between a buyer who's curious and a vendor who's built something worth evaluating.

And there’s a second loop that matters more than people think. Feedback.

Today, when an emerging vendor loses a deal – or worse, never gets the meeting – they don’t learn why. They lose the signal they need to make their product better. Without that signal, they can’t iterate. Without iteration, they can’t compete. It’s a vicious, self-defeating cycle that kills companies before they can compete on fair ground.

The discover-feedback loop is fundamentally missing today. We built it.

Discover → Evaluate → Feedback.

We're launching in Singapore first.

Singapore is dense, underserved, and sits at the center of APAC enterprise spend. The startup ecosystem here is real but fragile — brilliant teams building serious products, competing against global incumbents with asymmetric resources.

We're stripping away the traditional power that incumbent review sites have over Singaporean startups — and giving them the opportunity to win not because they outspent their competitors, but because their product was genuinely better. We strongly believe this is the way an efficient market should function, especially in a rapidly fragmenting world.

And the timing isn't optional. AI is collapsing the cost of building software fast. More vendors, faster iteration, shorter product cycles — and buyers with no infrastructure to make sense of it all. The discovery gap isn't a future problem. It's already here.

The infrastructure for emerging software discovery doesn't exist. So we're building it.

At Atliant, we call our buyers Explorers. Not users, not leads, Explorers.

Because that’s what this is. You’re not being sold to. You’re not being tracked. You’re navigating a landscape of emerging solutions that the incumbent platforms will never show you.

An Explorer searches. Evaluates. Gives feedback. Gets compensated. And in doing so, reshapes which companies survive and which don't — not based on who had the biggest marketing budget, but because their product was genuinely better.

I’m the founder of Atliant, and we’re live today at explorer.atliant.io .

Join us, Explorer.