# Derek Samuels, VP of Sales at Coreva Systems — read of Deal Velocity Optimizer, May 28 2026

> 11 years in B2B SaaS sales, 4 of them managing people. Currently running 22 reps at a Series B infrastructure company. Been using Clari since 2021 and have genuinely strong opinions about deal forecasting tools. Have a 9-year-old who just started asking where money comes from, which is part of why I keep a tab open on "things I could eventually go build."

## How I got here
Someone dropped this in the RevGenius Slack under #tools-and-apps with zero commentary, just the URL. I clicked it because the slug said "deal-velocity-optimizer" and I spend probably 6 hours a week manually doing what that name implies. This was Thursday evening on the train home, phone in one hand, iced coffee that had gone warm in the other.

## What I clicked first
"Close deals 40% faster by surfacing stuck deals before they die." That's the hero claim and I almost closed the tab. Not because it's wrong -- the promise is real -- but because every forecasting tool from Clari to a custom Salesforce dashboard has said some version of this since 2018. The "40%" has no footnote, no cohort, no customer name attached to it. I kept reading only because the sub-features were described in unusually plain language. "Know whether it's legal review, procurement, budget, or seller action" is the kind of sentence someone writes when they've actually been stuck in a deal review meeting, not someone who read a G2 category page.

## Where I paused
The Fermi math box. "$-28,000 Year-1 take-home (Fermi)" and "1 in 9 Meaningful-success odds." I stopped and re-read the whole page because I realized I had misunderstood what I was looking at. This is not a product being sold to me as a RevOps buyer. This is a product concept being sold to someone who would go build it. The page is pitching an idea, not software. Once I figured that out, the whole thing reframed. The Fermi math is for the builder, not the end-customer. That is a genuinely unusual thing to put on a page like this and I respect it. Most idea marketplaces or "done-for-you startup" sites project absurd revenue numbers. Negative year-one take-home in big type is either very honest or very clever positioning. I spent a few minutes deciding which.

## What I distrusted
Two things. First: "buyer clarity: 10/10" and "credibility: 10/10" are self-scores. The studio scored its own idea a perfect 10 on credibility. That's the kind of thing that would get laughed out of any real investment memo. The score might be calibrated against some internal rubric I'm not seeing, but on its face it reads like a kid grading his own homework. Second: "Honest disclosure: we don't have live customers on this idea yet. We shipped the strategy package; you ship the customer conversations." That sentence is doing a lot of work. It sounds like radical honesty but it is also functionally saying: we have not validated that anyone will pay for this. The "buyer clarity: 10/10" score and the "no live customers" disclosure sit in real tension with each other and the page does not resolve that tension.

## What would convince me
If the dossier included three or four real RevOps or sales-leader interviews -- paraphrased, not quoted if anonymized is necessary -- where someone described their current workflow for catching stuck deals and what they'd pay to fix it. Not a survey. A conversation. Something like "talked to a Head of Revenue Ops at a 150-person SaaS company. She checks Clari manually every Monday morning. It takes her 90 minutes. She estimated she loses 2-3 deals per quarter she didn't catch in time." That's the kind of evidence that would make the $99 feel like research budget, not a lottery ticket.

## What I'd ask in an email reply
1. The $-28K Fermi estimate -- how did you model the cost side? Is that assuming a solo founder building this, or a small team, and what's the biggest single cost driver pulling it negative in year one?
2. You scored "market openness: 5/10" as a concern. What specifically is the competitive blocker you're worried about -- Clari, Salesforce native features, or something else?
3. The page shifts between talking to me as a potential builder and talking to me as if I'm the RevOps buyer who would use the finished product. Is there a clean ICP profile in the dossier for who actually purchases this, and what does their current stack look like?

## Verdict: on-the-fence
The Fermi math and the "no live customers" disclosure are doing more to earn trust than the 40% claim and the self-issued 10/10s are spending. I'm not buying anything today but I bookmarked it, which I do for maybe 2 or 3 pages a month.

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*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-05-28. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*