# Joe Andres, Automation Practice Lead at Marwick Solutions — read of automation-workflow-simulator-ai, June 18 2026

> 11 years in IT consulting, last 4 years building out our automation practice on n8n, Make, and Power Automate for mid-market clients. We're 30 people total, maybe 8 of us touching automation on any given week.

## How I got here

Somebody dropped a link in the n8n community Slack. The post said something like "interesting concept, someone's trying to productize pre-deploy auditing." I was on my lunch break, clicked it expecting to see a SaaS tool I might actually trial. That framing matters for what comes next.

## What I clicked first

The hero grabbed me. "Audit Your Automation. Before You Deploy." That's a real sentence about a real problem. We just finished a Make.com project where an approval-chain edge case surfaced on day two of go-live and ate two weeks of revision time. So "catch inefficiencies with AI before your team implements them" landed. I kept reading.

## Where I paused

"Simulate 100 variations in seconds." I stopped there. I wanted to know what a variation is, mechanically. Is it parameterized? Is it fuzzing field values? Is it changing branch conditions? Because "100 variations" means nothing to me without knowing what's varying. That's the sentence where I realized the page was doing a lot of gesturing without showing me the thing. I started scrolling faster, looking for a demo video or a screenshot of the actual interface. There isn't one.

## What I distrusted

The page is having an identity crisis and doesn't seem to know it. The top half talks to me like there's a product I can log into right now. "Start Simulating Free." "Try Free Simulator." Then I hit this:

"Honest disclosure: we don't have live customers on this idea yet. We shipped the strategy package; you ship the customer conversations."

So there is no product. I'm not being pitched a tool. I'm being pitched a blueprint to go build and sell this tool myself. The $5 and $99 tiers are for a dossier and a "code starter." The hero is cosplaying as a product launch and it's actually a business-idea marketplace.

That's a legitimate thing to sell. But running both pitches on the same page, in the same voice, without a clear handoff, is disorienting. The "buyer clarity: 10/10" score is particularly funny given that I, a plausible buyer, had no idea what I was being sold until halfway down.

Also: "pain intensity: 4/10" is in the scoring panel, which they put right on the page. If the builder's own Fermi model says the pain is a four out of ten, and the year-one take-home is negative $37,700, I'm not sure who the pitch is aimed at.

## What would convince me

If the product actually existed, one thing would move me fast: a real screen recording of someone importing a Make.com or n8n workflow and watching the AI flag something that actually broke a real project. Not a polished demo, a rough one. A practitioner walking through it, saying "here's what we caught." The specificity would do more work than any of the copy on this page.

If this is a blueprint play, the thing I'd want to see is one person who bought the $99 tier and actually shipped something, with a number attached. Even a small one. "Charged first client $800 for a pre-deploy audit, six weeks in." That's credible. "$72K year-one ARR mid-case estimate" without a single customer is not.

## What I'd ask in an email reply

1. Is there a working product I can actually log into, or does "Start Simulating Free" take me to a waitlist? Because I genuinely cannot tell from this page.

2. The scenario testing section mentions "what happens when approval takes 3 days" -- how does the simulator actually model that? Is this a rules engine, a graph traversal, something else? What does the output look like?

3. Who's built this? The "Wishdeal Factory" framing suggests this is one of many ideas going through a pipeline. Is there a team actively developing the simulator, or is this a packaged concept waiting for a buyer to run with?

## Verdict: on-the-fence

The pain point is real and I felt it personally three weeks ago. But I can't tell if I'm reading about a product or a product idea, and that ambiguity is doing real damage to trust. If the tool exists, show me it. If it doesn't, say so in the first scroll.

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*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-06-18. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*