# Darren Strickland, Head of Product at Verdana Financial Tools — read of CPA Referral Partner Enricher, June 15 2026 > 11 years building software for accounting firms, currently 15-person team, we sell three tools to CPA practices under 20 staff. I read everything on the train. ## How I got here Someone dropped a link in the accounting-tech channel of a Slack group I'm in, said something like "look at how this studio prices ideas, kind of wild." I clicked it mostly out of curiosity about the business model, not because I was in market for this specific thing. Took me two stops to figure out what I was actually looking at. ## What I clicked first The hero tagline "Turn partner discovery into referral revenue" is fine. Not great, not offensive. I've seen that framing a hundred times. What stopped me cold was the score block partway down the page. A product page that shows me **"$-19,580 Year-1 take-home (Fermi)"** and **"1 in 8 Meaningful-success odds"** is doing something I have literally never seen a product page do. I read that twice. ## Where I paused The honest disclosure section. "We don't have live customers on this idea yet. We shipped the strategy package; you ship the customer conversations." That stopped me for a solid minute. Because I had to recalibrate what I was even looking at. I came in thinking this was a SaaS tool. It's not. It's a business idea for sale, with a code starter and a dossier. That's a genuinely different product category and the page doesn't lead with that distinction clearly enough. I had to piece it together from the pricing tiers. ## What I distrusted Two things. First: "AI-Powered Scoring" to "Score potential partners on compatibility, capacity, and overlap." Okay, what data? Where does it come from? LinkedIn scraping? A third-party enrichment API? Manual input? That phrase means nothing without a source. Every tool built in the last 18 months has "AI-Powered Scoring." I need to know what the AI is actually scoring against. Second: "Sales Connector Integration." Never heard of it. No link, no explainer, no context. If this integration is load-bearing to the whole value prop, I need to know what Sales Connector is before that feature means anything to me. Right now it reads like an inside reference I'm not in on. ## What would convince me Show me one operator who bought the $99 tier, what they actually built, and what happened in the first 90 days. Not a testimonial quote. A short write-up: what they spent, what they shipped, how many CPAs responded. Even a failure story told honestly would do more than the Fermi math. The Fermi math is interesting but it's still the studio grading itself. On the tool side specifically: I want to see what the partner scoring actually looks like in practice. A real example output for a made-up CPA firm in a mid-size metro. Who are the three bookkeepers it surfaces and why. That would make the "AI-Powered Scoring" claim land. ## What I'd ask in an email reply 1. The "Sales Connector Integration" is listed as a core feature. Is that integration functional in the code starter at $99, or is it something I'd need to build? And what is Sales Connector exactly? 2. The pain intensity score is 4/10. Your own scoring says CPAs don't feel this problem acutely enough to pay for a solution. How do you reconcile that with selling this as a viable opportunity? 3. Who is the intended buyer here? A solo operator who wants to build and sell this as a SaaS to CPAs? An in-house team at a financial services firm? A CPA themselves? I genuinely wasn't sure by the end of the page. ## Verdict: on-the-fence The transparency about financials and odds is the most disarming thing I've seen on a product page in years, and it bought real attention. But I still don't know what the product actually does in concrete terms, the Sales Connector reference felt like jargon I wasn't handed the key to, and the "idea for sale" model requires a different kind of trust than a SaaS tool does. --- *Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-06-15. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*