About
Built on two decades of measuring why people buy.
Why Not Buy exists because the two hardest parts of consumer research — talking to people who actually bought, and turning what they say into strategy — have always been slow, expensive, and easy to get wrong. Modern AI finally makes it possible to do both rigorously, at scale.
Walter Carl, Ph.D.
Founder · Why Not Buy · Boston
Walter is a founder and applied-AI builder based in Boston with 19 years spent shipping consumer-insight products for the world's largest brands. He began in academia as a tenure-track faculty member at Northeastern University — where his framework for measuring the ROI of word-of-mouth marketing spun out into a company he led — before building measurement systems for clients including Google, Walmart, Microsoft, and Gap Inc.
Why Not Buy exists at the intersection of two things Walter has spent his career on: knowing how consumer decisions are really measured, and knowing how to build with AI himself rather than bolt it onto old workflows. That combination — research rigor plus hands-on engineering — is what makes the whole approach possible.
The result is a platform that interviews receipt-verified buyers with the care of a trained qualitative moderator, then synthesizes the findings into strategy you can question directly — no leading questions, no guesswork, no waiting weeks for a deck.
- 19 years
- shipping consumer-insight products for the world's largest brands
- Google · Walmart · Microsoft · Gap Inc.
- measurement systems built for enterprise scale
- Research + engineering
- the rare founder who designs the method and builds the AI that runs it
See what your buyers would tell you.
Tell us the category and brand you want to understand. We'll come back with how a study would work, timing, and pricing.