Alister Wood

I find valuable business problems and build practical solutions to them.

I’m a software founder and product builder. I spend my time talking to businesses, understanding where things break, and testing ideas that might fix them.

Read The Idea Factory View Portfolio

Currently exploring

What I’m exploring

I regularly pick an industry, speak directly to the people running businesses in it, and try to understand the problems they actually face rather than guessing from the outside.

Current investigation

Pool Builders

I’m speaking to pool builders about lead generation, quoting, sales, finance, customer behaviour and operational problems.

Lead generation
Quoting & sales
Finance
Customer behaviour
Operations

Follow the investigation

Notes & observations

The Idea Factory

Notes from conversations, experiments and problems that might be worth solving.

All notes

Some field notes are example drafts, clearly marked below.

Pool buildersExample draft

What I learned from talking to Sydney pool builders

Not published

Example draft: a proposed field note about the day-to-day problems behind running a pool-building business. Research and findings are still to be added.

Business operationsCustomer research

View proposed article

Pool buildersExample draft

Why customers disappear after receiving a quote

Not published

Example draft: questions to investigate about customer decisions, quoting and follow-up. This is a proposed topic, with no conclusions yet.

QuotingCustomer behaviour

View proposed article

Pool buildersExample draft

When more leads aren’t actually the answer

Not published

Example draft: a proposed investigation into how lead quality, sales capacity and operations fit together. Evidence is still to be gathered.

Lead generationBusiness operations

View proposed article

Selected work

Things I’ve Built

A few examples of turning a useful question into something people can use.

View full portfolio

Lead Generation Product

Sign In Template Generator

The problem: VisitUs needed a scalable way to generate more qualified inbound leads while reducing reliance on paid acquisition.
What I built: Designed and built a self-service sign in book template generator that gave website visitors a useful custom template in exchange for their email, then optimised the page for high-intent organic search terms.
The value: Ranked #1 on Google in the US for target search terms and generated more than 1,000 high-intent leads in six months.

Lead Generation Directory

Visitor Management Directory

The problem: VisitUs needed a defensible organic acquisition channel for high-intent buyers researching visitor sign-in systems before they were ready to speak with sales.
What I built: Designed and built Visitor Management Directory from the ground up using Cloudflare Workers, D1 for structured product data and R2 for product imagery. The directory gives buyers one place to compare visitor management systems like for like, including vendor capabilities, positioning and review summaries.
The value: Created a lead generation asset for VisitUs that is being built into the one-stop reference point for visitor sign-in systems, with review summaries that explain what each product does well and where customers report weaknesses. The long-term goal is to become the source of truth that Google, AI tools and buyers reference when evaluating the category.

AI Product

Report Wizard

The problem: Teachers were spending hours writing student reports that needed to remain personalised while complying with curriculum and reporting standards.
What I built: Designed and built Report Wizard to generate tailored report comments, with SEO-led acquisition, automated onboarding and Stripe billing built into the product from launch.
The value: Reduced report preparation from hours to minutes, attracted more than 500 teachers, ranked #1 in Australia for high-intent AI school report search terms and grew with zero paid acquisition.

Alister Wood / Sydney

About me

I’ve spent more than a decade building software products and businesses. I’m most interested in problems that are expensive, frustrating or unnecessarily complicated, and working out whether technology can make them simpler.

More about me

A conversation is a good place to start.

Got a problem worth solving?

If there’s something in your business that wastes time, costs money, frustrates customers or just feels unnecessarily difficult, I’d like to hear about it.

Tell me about it