Software categories are almost always drawn around industries: “construction software,” “consulting software,” “research tools.” It’s a convenient way to sell, but it’s a strange way to describe work — because work doesn’t actually sort itself by industry. It sorts itself by job.
A finance and AP specialist at a construction firm and a finance and AP specialist at a software company are doing something much closer to the same job than either of them is doing to their own CEO’s job. The industry label is the least useful thing about them, for this purpose.
So we built the catalog around roles too
Alongside the product pages, Backshack has persona pages — one per role, gathering the tools that actually help someone in that seat, regardless of which industry-native skin they’re wearing. A few examples of who we’ve mapped so far:
- Finance & AP Specialist — reconciling purchase orders against invoices without a spreadsheet standoff. That’s Pliers.
- Project Manager — turning meeting notes and status updates into a live risk-and-action register instead of a document nobody opens. That’s the Sifter. Oh and we have a standard project plan generator as well!
- Founder or Managing Director — running an honest SWOT and getting back ranked, scored strategic options instead of a gut call. That’s The Level — the tool this whole campaign came out of running on itself (true story).
- Principal Investigator or Research Lead — turning a brief into a phase-gated plan with milestones and work packages. That’s Compass.
None of those four roles needed to be told “here’s our construction product” or “here’s our software product” first. They needed to be told: here’s the thing that does your job.
Why we’re saying this out loud
Because our own early positioning didn’t lead with roles — it led with the industry we happened to launch in first. That made sense at the time and it undersold everything else in the catalog. A procurement manager reading a page written for a construction estimator has no reason to keep reading, even if the tool right below it was built exactly for them.
The persona pages exist so that doesn’t happen. If you know your job title, that’s the fastest way into the catalog — faster than guessing which industry bucket we might have filed you under.
Backshack is a suite of à-la-carte AI tools, organized by the work they do — not just the industry they were first built for.