# Tom Kessler, Sales Enablement Manager at Veridian Security (183 employees) — read of employee-advocacy-ai, May 25 2026

> 8 years in B2B sales enablement, currently running content and rep enablement for a mid-market cybersecurity company, been quietly daydreaming about going indie for two years.

## How I got here

Someone dropped a link in the #side-projects channel of a Slack community I'm in for wannabe founders. The message was something like "this Wishdeal thing is interesting, has anyone tried it?" I figured it was another directory of SaaS ideas. Clicked it on my lunch break. Didn't eat my sandwich.

## What I clicked first

The hero pulled me in for about 15 seconds. "Turn your best people into your best marketers" is a clean line, not embarrassing, I've seen worse. I immediately assumed I was looking at a finished product I could buy for my current company. The feature list under "Capability" reads like a real SaaS: Smart Content Curation, Deal Attach and Attribution, Gamification. I started mentally comparing it to GaggleAMP and EveryoneSocial. Then I hit the scoring block.

## Where I paused

"54/100 Adoptability. $-16,224 Year-1 take-home (Fermi). 1 in 8 Meaningful-success odds (Fermi)."

I had to read that three times. That's a negative dollar number. A tool designed to help me launch a business is telling me, above the fold, that the expected take-home is negative sixteen thousand dollars in year one, and I have a one-in-eight shot at meaningful success. I actually laughed out loud. I don't know if that's the most honest thing I've seen on a product page or a completely deranged way to sell something. Either way I did not close the tab.

## What I distrusted

Two things. First, the feature list. "AI selects and adapts assets daily. Employees get pre-written posts, talking points, and media." This is describing a product that doesn't exist yet. I read to the bottom and found: "Honest disclosure: we don't have live customers on this idea yet. We shipped the strategy package; you ship the customer conversations." So what I was reading as a product teardown was actually a pitch for me to build the product myself. The feature list is speculative. That framing needs to be clearer at the top, not buried after the Fermi math.

Second, the social proof block. "SOC 2 Type II Certified, SSO / SAML / SCIM Included, Dedicated CSM." Those look like trust signals for an enterprise buyer of a real product. But there are no customers yet. So who is that procurement table for? It reads like copy borrowed from a real SaaS and pasted into a spec sheet for a hypothetical one.

## What would convince me

I want to see one real person who bought the $99 Adopt package and then did something with it. Not a testimonial written in founder voice. A Loom video, a tweet thread from their account, a case study where they got to five customers and then quit, something real. Even a negative one. The whole "honest expectations" framing sets up the expectation of radical transparency, but then the social proof section is empty. That gap is the loudest thing on the page.

Also: show me what the dossier actually looks like. Not the list of what's in it ("ICP, MVP scope, first 7 build tasks, 30/60/90 launch plan"). Show me a page from it. Blur the confidential parts if you want. Let me see whether the writing is sharp or generic.

## What I'd ask in an email reply

1. The Fermi math gives me $-16k year one. What assumption would need to change to get that to break even, and is that assumption defensible or heroic?

2. You list "pain intensity: 4/10" as a concern. That's almost half score. Employee advocacy has been a known category for 10 years and it still has middling adoption. What's your actual theory for why now is different from when Bambu and Smarp tried this?

3. If I buy the $99 Adopt package and realize after three customer conversations that the ICP is wrong, is there any recourse, or is the stance strictly "we told you it was a dossier, not a guarantee"?

## Verdict: on-the-fence

The negative-year-one disclosure is the only thing that kept me here, and I mean that as a compliment. But the page can't decide if it's selling to a founder evaluating an idea or a marketing buyer evaluating a tool, and that confusion costs it credibility it was trying hard to earn.

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*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-05-25. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*