.png)
.jpg)
Frameworks, core principles and top case studies for SaaS pricing, learnt and refined over 28+ years of SaaS-monetization experience.
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
Today, I'm excited to announce the launch of 28 Experts, a new primary research platform for B2B companies. 28 Experts helps marketing and product teams conduct expert interviews faster and more affordably by transforming their own LinkedIn connections into a powerful recruiting network.
We built 28 Experts to solve a major pain point in primary research – traditional expert network models are too slow, expensive, and broker-controlled – and now is the perfect time for this change: teams need answers faster than ever as markets shift and budgets tighten. In short, 28 Experts is here to modernize how businesses gather insights from the market, just when they need it most.
The Traditional Primary Research Model (and Why It's Broken)
For decades, the standard approach to primary research (gathering firsthand market or customer insights) has been built on renting access to other people's networks. If you needed to interview an industry expert or a target customer, you often went through an expert network firm. Companies like GLG or AlphaSights maintain vast databases of experts and broker introductions – but at a steep price. You pay high fees for each call (often $1,000 or more for a one-hour expert consultation), and those firms essentially own the relationship.
After the interview, you can't follow up with that expert directly without going through the broker again, meaning you haven't built any lasting network of your own. This middleman model not only drives up cost, but it also deprives you of a cumulative knowledge advantage since you're starting from scratch each time.
In response to the high costs and friction of expert networks, a new breed of panel marketplace tools emerged in recent years (e.g. Respondent, User Interviews). These platforms promised a faster, self-serve way to find interview participants by creating pools of willing respondents. They did improve the workflow for common scenarios, but ultimately they still play a version of the same game.
Panel-first recruiting works best when the people you need are already sitting in the platform's pool. For straightforward consumer surveys or general user feedback, that might be fine. But for strict B2B targets – say, "CFOs of Fortune 500 healthcare companies" or "senior engineers with 10+ years in autonomous vehicles" – the odds of those exact profiles already waiting in a marketplace panel are low. Teams often end up spending time waiting for the right candidates to appear or filtering through a lot of "close enough" matches. In other words, panel tools can struggle with niche or specialized recruiting needs.
The bottom line is that the traditional primary research model is broken for modern B2B needs. It's too slow (projects can take weeks just to schedule a handful of interviews), too expensive (broker fees add up quickly), and yields no lasting benefit (you don't retain any of the expert connections you paid to meet).
Lessons from Our Experience in Primary Research
I founded 28 Experts because I experienced these pain points firsthand in my own work. In my years leading product and marketing projects, I often needed quick insight from very specific audiences. I recall one project where we needed to interview about 20 senior finance executives from large companies to test a new product positioning. Going through an expert network would have been far too expensive and slow, and the panel platform we tried couldn't find the exact profiles we needed.
Finally, my team decided to roll up our sleeves and reach out directly. We each used our LinkedIn accounts to message finance leaders we identified, inviting them to share feedback. By pooling our efforts – essentially acting as our own mini expert network – we managed to schedule 15 interviews in about a week.
The best part: those new contacts became connections in our LinkedIn profiles, meaning we could potentially tap them again later or continue the conversation. That experience was a revelation. It taught us that the people we needed were out there and reachable, as long as we approached them directly with the right tools and persistence. We saw that owning the outreach process gave us speed and control that no third-party broker could match.
However, doing this manual outreach was tedious. Coordinating across multiple team members, keeping track of who messaged whom, avoiding duplicates, and juggling calendars was a challenge. I thought, there has to be a better system to do this.
We had proven the concept — that direct outreach could find high-quality, niche experts faster and cheaper — but it needed to be streamlined and scaled. This realization planted the seed for 28 Experts.
Introducing 28 Experts: A Primary Research Platform to Own Your Network
28 Experts is our answer to the broken model. It's a primary research platform purpose-built to give marketing and product teams a faster, smarter way to recruit interviewees and glean insights. In plain terms, 28 Experts turns your team’s LinkedIn accounts into one unified outreach engine for expert interviews. Our platform automates and manages the process of finding and scheduling interviews with the exact people you need, so you're not limited by who happens to be in someone else's database.
Unlike traditional primary research firms or expert networks, we don’t sell you access to a closed pool of experts. Instead, 28 Experts empowers you to recruit directly through your own professional networks, cutting out the costly broker layer entirely. The connections you make through the platform stay with you – you own your research network going forward.
And unlike panel marketplaces, which are great for generic consumer research but falter with strict criteria, 28 Experts is built for target-first outreach. You define the precise profile of who you want to interview, and our system goes out and finds them (rather than hoping they're already signed up in a pool).
How 28 Experts Works: We designed the platform to slot into your workflow with minimal friction. Here's a quick overview of the process:
- Connect Your LinkedIn Accounts: You and your team members connect your LinkedIn accounts to 28 Experts (Sales Navigator is required for advanced search capabilities).
- Define Your Target Audience: Enter the criteria for your ideal interview respondents – role, industry, seniority, location, and any specific keywords or qualifications. These can be highly specific (e.g. "CFOs in healthcare companies with 1B+ revenue").
- Automated Outreach at Scale: Once you set the criteria, 28 Experts uses the pooled reach of all linked LinkedIn accounts to send personalized outreach messages inviting those experts or customers for an interview.
- Seamless Scheduling: When someone agrees to talk, they self-schedule a call on your calendar via your Calendly or Cal.com link – no back-and-forth emails needed.
- Conduct the Interviews: You run the interviews on your own video conferencing (Zoom, Teams, etc.) – we don't sit in the middle, so you maintain direct rapport with the interviewee.
- Optional AI-Powered Synthesis: After the calls, you have the option to generate an AI-written report summarizing the insights. Just share the list of questions or topics you covered, and our AI will produce a draft report with key themes, quotes, and even simple charts derived from the discussions.
By following this workflow, 28 Experts lets you initiate and complete a round of primary research interviews in a fraction of the time it used to take. More importantly, it flips the ownership equation: each interview isn’t just a one-off transaction, but an addition to your own expert network.
Why 28 Experts Is Different
Our approach delivers several big advantages over the status quo:
- You Keep the Relationships: When outreach runs through your LinkedIn, every person you interview becomes a connection you or your teammates keep. Traditional expert brokers hoard the relationships as their own asset, whereas with 28 Experts, your company steadily builds its own Rolodex of experts after each project.
- No More Middleman Markups: Because you're reaching people directly, you’re not paying exorbitant per-interview fees to a middleman. Traditional firms charge a hefty premium simply for being in the middle.
- Faster, Targeted Recruitments: For niche criteria, direct outreach is much faster than waiting on panels or recruiters. You fill interviews faster, especially for strict targets that generic pools would struggle with, achieving speed without sacrificing fit.
- From Calls to Insight, Quicker: Our optional AI synthesis means that after you conduct the interviews, you can get a digest of the findings in a very short time. Instead of spending days combing through transcripts and writing up a report, you get charts, key quotes, and summary points on-demand. This accelerates the time from doing interviews to actually using the insights in your strategy.
The Future of Primary Research
The launch of 28 Experts marks a shift in how companies can approach primary research. We believe the future is one where you own your research network and treat it as a lasting asset, rather than renting access interview by interview. Instead of being bottlenecked by third parties, teams can now reach out directly to virtually anyone, at scale, and build knowledge faster than their competitors. In an era when business moves fast and decisions can't wait, this model of rapid, in-house primary research will be a game-changer.
If you're tired of the old way of doing expert interviews and ready to try a smarter approach, we invite you to give 28 Experts a shot. Let your own network – and your own team's resourcefulness – be the engine of discovery. Welcome to a new era of primary research, where you own the network and the insights.