# Marcus Tillman, Director of Business Development at Karbon (mid-market, ~180 employees) — read of Accounting Firm Partner Departure Signal Feed, June 16 2026

> 11 years selling practice management and workflow software into CPA firms. Currently running a 6-person outbound team. We use ZoomInfo, Sales Nav, and Apollo. I know this buyer well.

## How I got here

Searched "CPA firm partner departure leads" on a Tuesday morning after my commute. We'd just lost a deal because a competing vendor got to a firm three weeks before us after a founding partner retired. My manager asked me to find any signal source that could give us earlier warning. This page was third result. I clicked it.

## What I clicked first

The sub-headline: "Vendors have 30-60 days to pitch before new leadership stabilizes internal priorities." That is exactly the window we've been trying to catch manually. That sentence alone made me scroll. It's not dressed up. It's just the thing.

## Where I paused

The data card: "300 Departures/month average." I stopped there and did math. That's 3,600 per year across 2,400 tracked firms. That's a 150% departure rate annually, which is obviously wrong, or they're defining "departure" very loosely, or these aren't all partner-level transitions. I didn't see a methodology note anywhere. That number is either impressive or made up and I can't tell which.

## What I distrusted

The whole bottom section broke the spell for me. There's a score: "65/100 Adoptability." There's a "Fermi math" year-1 estimate of negative $14,500. There's a line that says "1 in 8 meaningful-success odds." And then this: "Honest disclosure: we don't have live customers on this idea yet."

So I scrolled back up to reread the top. The top reads like a live product. "Get Access Today." "Claim Free Trial." "200+ events during trial window (most months)." It felt like something you subscribe to.

But the bottom is selling me... the idea? The strategy? "Adopt the build $99" and "Hire the team to build it." This is a product idea marketplace, not a product. The hero copy and the footer copy are describing two completely different things. I genuinely don't know if there is a feed I can plug into right now, or if I'm being asked to pay $99 for a business plan to go build one myself.

## What would convince me

A single screenshot of the actual CSV output with real data, even redacted firm names, would go a long way. Not a schema description, an actual sample row. Also: how are departures detected? LinkedIn announcements only? Press releases? Bar association filings? That methodology gap is where I'd expect competitors to eat this alive. If someone can explain the source mix in two sentences I'd believe the 48-hour detection claim a lot more.

And I need to understand what "tracking 2,400 CPA firms" actually means. Is it all firms above a revenue threshold? US only? How many firms exist total? That denominator matters a lot for my team's territory coverage.

## What I'd ask in an email reply

1. Is there a live feed I can trial right now, or is this still pre-build? The page says both things and I'm not sure which is true.
2. What's the source for departure detection, specifically? LinkedIn profile changes, firm press releases, state CPA society news, something else?
3. Do any of your 2,400 tracked firms include regional firms in the $5M to $30M revenue range, or is this skewed toward large nationals? That's our sweet spot and I want to know coverage before I bring this to my team.

## Verdict: on-the-fence

The signal concept is genuinely useful and the timing logic is sound. But I cannot tell if I'm reading a product or a pitch deck about a product, and that confusion would stop me from forwarding this internally. If the feed is real and running, fix the homepage to say so clearly and I'd probably trial it tomorrow.

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*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-06-16. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*