# Marcus Keller, Operations Manager at Ridgemont Logistics -- read of FreightAppend, 2026-05-19

> 9 years in freight, 6 of them running carrier dev for a mid-size regional brokerage out of Columbus. About 800 loads a month. I have a 10-year-old who plays travel baseball, which means I spend most Saturdays in a folding chair in Dayton listening to FreightWaves podcasts.

## How I got here

Someone dropped a link in the Freight Broker Hub Facebook group Friday with the comment "anyone tried this?" Three people replied "no but looks interesting." I was just home from my kid's practice so I pulled it up on my laptop. I have looked at maybe a dozen contact enrichment tools in the last two years. Most of them promise clean data and hand you a list that's 18 months stale with a confidence score slapped on top.

## What I clicked first

The opening kept me reading. "You know the load. You know the carrier. But the number doesn't work." That is the most accurate description of a Monday morning I have ever seen in a product pitch. We run PhoneBurner and I would guess 30% of our cold carrier dials hit dead air or ring through to someone's personal cell who has no idea what a load board is. The "$2,000 to $5,000 per unshipped load" number feels in the right neighborhood, though I have never actually sat down and quantified it.

## Where I paused

The methodology explanation is more specific than usual: "We use ProxyBox residential infrastructure to scrape web-published contacts daily, cross-reference with carrier fleet data, and verify deliverability in real-time." That is a real answer. Most vendors say "our proprietary data network" and leave it there. Naming the infrastructure and explaining the scrape cycle is unusual and I appreciated it. I stopped to think about whether our compliance contact would have questions about residential proxy scraping. Probably not a dealbreaker but it is a real question, not a paranoid one.

## What I distrusted

The stats have no source. "Your reps close 3x faster and reduce objections by 40 percent." "Freight brokers using FreightAppend report 40% faster call-to-quote time, 25% higher lane acceptance." Which brokers? One named company, one first name and city, anything. This reads like someone did favorable Fermi math and formatted it to look like a testimonial without technically being one.

Then halfway through the page just becomes a different product for a completely different buyer. There is a section that says "Honest disclosure: we don't have live customers on this idea yet. We shipped the strategy package; you ship the customer conversations." That is not written for me. That is written for someone deciding whether to BUILD this thing. The page is selling to both audiences simultaneously and it does not work for either one. If I am evaluating a data product, "no live customers yet" is not a neutral disclosure. Contact enrichment is a show-me-the-data category. I need to see that the data actually works before I trust my reps' time to it.

The Fermi scores sitting in the middle of the page ("1 in 8 Meaningful-success odds," "financial upside: 2/10") are also jarring if you are reading this as a potential buyer rather than a potential builder. I do not know what to do with those as an ops manager shopping for a dialer data feed.

## What would convince me

Give me 50 carrier records from Ohio and Indiana, completely unfiltered, not a curated showcase set. Let my reps run them Monday morning and I will know within two hours if the connection rate is real. If 80% or more connect and route to an actual dispatch person, I am on their pricing page by noon.

One named customer would also help. Not a case study PDF, just one brokerage willing to say publicly that they use it. "Tom, Columbus, 14-person shop, 200 loads a month." That is enough.

## What I'd ask in an email reply

1. The page says "updated every 24 hours" in one place and "data updates continuously" in another. For dispatch contacts specifically, what is the actual median age of a record at the moment I pull it?
2. When a verified number turns out to be wrong, what is the process? Credit, dispute, eat the cost?
3. What is your coverage rate for small regional carriers, specifically fleets under 50 trucks? That is where our biggest dead-number problem actually lives, not the big carriers who have a real web presence.

## Verdict: on-the-fence

The problem description is the best I have read in this category and the methodology transparency is real. But "no live customers yet" on a contact data product is a hard stop. I am not running my reps' time against data that nobody has pressure-tested in production. If they let me do a real blind test on my actual market, I would look again.

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*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-05-19. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*