# Derek Nunez, Head of Growth at Clover Advisory Group — read of CPA Dormant Reactivation, June 7 2026

> 11 years bouncing between SaaS and professional services, currently a 6-person fractional ops consultancy that mostly works with mid-market accounting and law firms. My youngest starts kindergarten in August and I am absolutely not sleeping.

## How I got here

A guy in a Slack community I pay $29/month for dropped this link with "anyone tried Wishdeal?" and three thumbs-up reacts. I looked it up during my commute. I was expecting another aggregator of half-baked SaaS ideas. I gave it four minutes because CPA dormant reactivation is literally a thing I have manually done for clients using spreadsheets and awkward mail merges, so I have some baseline for what "good" looks like here.

## What I clicked first

The hero line "Recover revenue from sleeping accounts" is honest and plain and I didn't hate it. I kept reading. The feature list is more specific than most pages like this: "Dormant Account Finder," "Revenue-Based Scoring," "Sequence Builder." Those names are doing real work. I could picture what each one does. That's rarer than it should be.

## Where I paused

The scoring block. Specifically: "$-25,700 Year-1 take-home (Fermi)" and "1 in 7 Meaningful-success odds." Those are brutal numbers to put on your own product page. I stopped for probably 90 seconds here. They either have genuine intellectual honesty baked into their model, or they are using the transparency as a trust play to get me to the $5 unlock. I can't tell which. But I did not scroll past it immediately, which is more than I can say for most pitch pages I've looked at in the last two years.

## What I distrusted

"financial upside: 1/10" as a concern, combined with asking $99-$199 to "adopt the build." If the financial upside is literally 1 out of 10 on your own scoring rubric, why would I pay anything to build this? That's not honesty, that's a contradiction. I also have no idea what "working code starter" means in the context of a CPA reactivation sequence. Is this a Zapier zap? An Airtable base? A half-finished Node app? "Copy library" and "outreach pack" sound like a template dump I could assemble from GPT in an afternoon. The page does not explain why the $99 tier clears that bar.

And the line "we don't have live customers on this idea yet" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. That is the whole ballgame for a B2B services play targeting CPA partners. CPA firm partners are among the most referral-dependent, proof-hungry buyers I have ever sold to. They will ask "who else are you doing this for" within 30 seconds of any call. A product page that leads with "no live customers yet" and asks me to go figure it out is essentially asking me to be the guinea pig while also paying for the knife.

## What would convince me

One real case study from a CPA firm that actually got dormant clients to respond and pay. Not a hypothetical conversion rate. Not a "Fermi estimate." A specific firm, a specific campaign, something like: "Roanoke tax shop, 340 dormant accounts, ran the 5-touch sequence, reactivated 28 in 60 days, $41K recovered." Even anonymized with firm type and revenue range would move the needle. The absence of that is more damaging than they probably realize given what they're asking people to go build.

## What I'd ask in an email reply

1. The "financial upside: 1/10" score, combined with year-1 negative take-home, means this is essentially a loss-leader play for what exactly? Are you expecting this to grow into a retainer model after year 2, or is the 1/10 just the honest answer and you're still selling it anyway?

2. What does "working code starter" actually mean? What stack, what state is it in, what would I realistically need to invest in engineering time before it handles a real client?

3. Have you personally pitched this concept to an actual CPA firm partner, not to sell the dossier but to sell the reactivation service itself? What happened?

## Verdict: on-the-fence

The page communicates clearly and the honesty about bad numbers is unusual enough that I did not close the tab. But asking me to pay money to go build something with a self-declared 1/10 financial upside and zero live proof points is a hard sell, even at $5.

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*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-06-07. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*