# Tom Rakowitz, Head of Product Ops at Fieldstone Software — read of customer-onboarding-automation-ai, June 10 2026

> 9 years in B2B SaaS ops, currently running onboarding workflows for a 90-person company in Atlanta, been dabbling in side projects for three years without shipping anything.

## How I got here

Someone in the Indie Founders Slack I'm in dropped a link with the comment "this site is weirdly honest, check the Fermi numbers." I'm a sucker for anything that doesn't pretend the TAM is $4B, so I clicked. I came in expecting a landing page selling me software. That was wrong.

## What I clicked first

"Watch the 30-second explainer" was the first thing I went for. No idea if that actually plays, but it's the right instinct for a product I can't figure out from the name alone. The name "Customer Onboarding Automation AI" is three generic nouns stacked on top of each other. It tells me nothing. It sounds like a keyword slug, not a product.

## Where I paused

The Fermi math stopped me. "$-21,620 Year-1 take-home" is a negative number. They're showing their math and the math says you will probably lose money in year one. I've never seen a product catalog do that. I read that line three times because I assumed I was misreading it. Then I saw "1 in 8 Meaningful-success odds" and sat back for a second. That's a 12.5% shot. They're saying that out loud, on the page, before you pay them anything. I don't know what to do with that but I couldn't scroll past it.

## What I distrusted

The page literally says "This product page is being finished." That sentence does a lot of damage. I'm being asked to pay $5 or $99 for a dossier on an idea whose own page isn't done yet. The audio and video previews being "ready" while the rest is unfinished feels like they shipped the marketing before the product, which is exactly the behavior the product is supposed to help other people avoid.

Also: "buyer clarity: 10/10" and "credibility: 10/10" are self-scores. They graded their own credibility a 10. That's the one axis where a self-score means the least.

The product name is also doing no work. If I search "customer onboarding automation AI" I will find 200 SaaS tools, agencies, and listicles. There's no differentiation baked into the name at all.

## What would convince me

I'd want to see one real operator who bought the $99 package and shipped something, with a before/after that's specific. Not "saved 4 hours a week" but something like "we were manually sending 6 emails over 14 days using a spreadsheet, now the first 30 days run without anyone touching it, and our 30-day activation rate went from 38% to 61%." That's the kind of number that makes me forward this to someone.

The honest Fermi math earns a point. But honesty about the downside still needs to be paired with one example of the upside actually happening.

## What I'd ask in an email reply

1. The page says "financial upside: 3/10" on your own scoring. What's the ceiling scenario where someone who buys this actually makes real money, and what does that person look like?

2. Who bought the $99 package so far, and is there anyone I could talk to for 10 minutes about what they got out of the dossier?

3. The product name is "Customer Onboarding Automation AI" but I genuinely don't know if this is a tool, a template, a playbook, or a SaaS product I'm supposed to go build and sell. Which is it?

## Verdict: on-the-fence

The honesty about negative year-one returns and 1-in-8 odds is the most interesting thing on the page, and it's the reason I didn't close the tab. But the page isn't finished, the name is a keyword string, and I have no idea what I'd actually receive for $99. The trust account has a small deposit in it; the product clarity account is overdrawn.

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*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-06-10. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*