# Derek Hollis, Staff Engineer at Folio Labs — read of Indie Project Showcase, June 14 2026

> 11 years in software, currently building B2B SaaS at an 80-person startup, third failed side project under my belt, actively hunting for idea #4 to not screw up.

## How I got here

Someone in an Indie Hackers Slack dropped a link to Wishdeal Studio in a thread about validating ideas before building. I clicked because I recognized the pain: I've wasted about 400 hours building things nobody wanted. I wasn't looking for THIS specifically. I was looking for anything that would help me not do that again.

## What I clicked first

The hero tagline is "Showcase your project. Get real feedback. Find collaborators." I spent maybe 20 seconds thinking I was landing on a community platform, like a Product Hunt clone or a Makerlog competitor. I was ready to sign up and post my unfinished thing.

Then I scrolled and realized I was not looking at a live product. I was looking at a PLAN to build one. That whiplash took me a beat to process. "Honest disclosure: we don't have live customers on this idea yet" confirmed it. The hero copy is selling a product experience that doesn't exist yet, which is either honest foreshadowing or a mild bait-and-switch depending on your mood.

## Where I paused

The Fermi math. "$-15,208 Year-1 take-home" stopped me cold. That's not a feature, that's a warning sign rendered as a data point. I had to re-read it twice to confirm they were actually publishing a negative expected income. Part of me respected it enormously. Part of me thought, who is going to pay $99 to adopt an idea that projects them losing money in year one? If the answer is "people who know this is a long game," that's a very specific buyer and they need to say that directly.

## What I distrusted

"buyer clarity: 10/10" in the Strongest Axes section. I did not have buyer clarity for the first 90 seconds I was on this page. I did not know what was being sold, to whom, or why. If that axis scored a 10 internally, either the rubric is wrong or the page isn't living up to the score. The irony is hard to miss.

Also "1 in 9 meaningful-success odds" listed without defining what "meaningful success" means. Is that profitability? Reaching $1k MRR? Getting acquired? That number is doing a lot of work and I have no anchor for it.

## What would convince me

One person who bought the $99 package and shipped something, even a landing page with 50 signups. Not a polished case study. Just a "here's what we built in 6 weeks with the starter and here's where it is now." Even a failure story with specifics would work: "we adopted this, got to 200 users, couldn't crack retention, shut it down" tells me the dossier was real, not a template dressed up with a brand name.

The Fermi model also needs a single open-number explanation. What revenue assumption produces $-15,208? If I can see the inputs I can sanity-check whether they match my distribution reality or not.

## What I'd ask in an email reply

1. The idea competes with Indie Hackers, Product Hunt Ship, and Makerlog. The "uniqueness: 9/10" score surprised me. What specific angle does the dossier propose that makes this not just another one of those, and why does the scoring model think it's that differentiated?

2. How did you arrive at the Fermi numbers? I want to see the revenue assumption, the conversion assumption, and the cost structure. Not because I need to audit it but because I need to know if your mental model of the customer matches mine.

3. If I buy the $99 package and hate the direction after reading it, what happens? The pricing page doesn't say anything about refunds or what "working code starter" means in practice for this specific idea.

## Verdict: on-the-fence

The honesty is real and I don't see that often, negative year-one projections and admission of no live customers on a sales page takes actual nerve. But the page hasn't yet told me why this idea, why now, and why I'm the right person to build it. Those are the three questions that would get me to reply.

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*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-06-14. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*