# Derek Hollis, Head of Sales Operations at CarrierPeak (logistics tech, ~120 employees) — read of Business Address Verifier API, June 9 2026

> 9 years in sales ops, half of that at a freight brokerage before CarrierPeak. I own list hygiene, CRM cleanup, and our enrichment vendors. I have a 40-minute commute each way and I've probably evaluated 30 data tools in the last 18 months.

## How I got here

Googled "API verify business address lead list accuracy" because our ZoomInfo lists have been degrading and our SDRs keep complaining about bounce rates. I clicked the third result. This page loaded clean, no pop-up in 0.3 seconds, so I kept reading. Nobody forwarded this to me. Never heard of ProxyBox before.

## What I clicked first

The headline stopped me: "Verify Every Address on Your Lead List." That's exactly the search I just did. Specific problem, specific claim. Fine. Then I read "ProxyBox-powered API that confirms business addresses and websites are real using residential IPs to bypass bot detection. No false positives from datacenter IP blocks." That's a real differentiator if true. I've run into exactly this problem with one vendor that was routing checks through AWS and getting blocked half the time. So the residential IP angle isn't noise to me. It's actually the first technically coherent explanation I've seen for why one address verifier would outperform another.

## Where I paused

The freight enrichment section. "For freight brokers and logistics firms: weekly enrichment of shipper contact lists using our carrier address database." I run ops at a logistics tech company. That sentence made me sit up. But then I couldn't find anything specific. What carrier address database? Is this an FMCSA feed, a commercial dataset, something they scraped? That sentence does a lot of work with zero backing. I reread it twice looking for a footnote or a link. Nothing.

## What I distrusted

Two things.

First, the accuracy claim: "99.2% accuracy rate." Every single address API I've evaluated says something between 98 and 99.9 percent. It's become a meaningless number. Accurate against what baseline? What counts as a true positive? Verified against what source? There's no methodology sentence, no sample size, no "we tested on X dataset."

Second, and this is the part that fundamentally changes what I think I'm reading: I scrolled to the bottom and found this section.

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

And then this:

"Adopt the build $99-$199: Dossier plus the working code starter, brand assets, copy library, and outreach pack."

So this is not a product. This is a product idea that someone can buy and build. The entire top half of the page is written as if this is a live API I can sign up for today, free trial, real-time queries, 99.5% SLA. Then at the bottom it says no customers, Fermi estimates, odds of meaningful success are 1 in 6. That's a significant bait-and-switch in framing. I don't think it's dishonest exactly, the disclosure is right there, but the page architecture is designed to get you nodding along for 800 words before telling you the product doesn't exist yet. That's a choice.

## What would convince me

If this were a real, live API, I'd want one thing: a trial where I upload 500 addresses from my actual ZoomInfo export and see the results side by side with what I already know. Not a demo, not a sandbox with fake data. My data, my ground truth, your output. Show me the confidence scores on addresses I know are dead versus ones I know are live. That's it. That's what would move me from "interesting" to "let's talk pricing."

The residential IP claim is either the real thing or it isn't, and 500 real addresses would tell me.

## What I'd ask in an email reply

These are what I'd send IF this were a live product with actual customers:

1. The carrier address database you mention for freight enrichment -- is that FMCSA data, a licensed commercial feed, or something you built? What's the update cadence and how do you handle deactivated carrier records?

2. Your 99.2% accuracy rate -- can you share the methodology? What dataset did you test against, how did you define a true positive, and what was the sample size?

3. For the residential IP verification: when you say you're checking from "real residential IPs across 195 countries" -- are these proxied through an actual ProxyBox customer network, or a dedicated residential proxy pool? Because the compliance implications for my use case are different depending on the answer.

## Verdict: on-the-fence

The technical differentiation is real and specific. The residential IP angle for address verification is the first thing I've read in this category that gives me a reason to prefer one vendor over another. But I got to the bottom of the page and found out this is an unlaunched idea dressed up as a live product, and that reframes everything I read above it. If someone builds this and gets 20 paying customers, I'd genuinely want to talk to them.

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*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-06-09. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*