# Marcus Delacroix, Senior Backend Engineer at Convex (Series B, ~180 people) — read of iroh-p2p-sync-for-devs, June 17 2026 > 9 years writing distributed systems plumbing, mostly Go and a little Rust. Currently employed, building a side project on weekends. Train commute is 38 minutes each way. Three-year-old goes to sleep at 7:30 and that's my two hours. --- ## How I got here Someone in the Indie Hackers Telegram dropped a link with "this p2p sync angle is actually underserved." I've been watching the libp2p / iroh ecosystem since the n0.computer guys started making noise on HN. Clicked expecting either a library landing page or a SaaS pitch. Got neither, exactly. --- ## What I clicked first The spec table. "Peer-to-Peer Sync. Replicate data directly between peers without centralized servers or infrastructure." That framing is clean. I immediately looked for the GitHub link and there it is: "View on GitHub." Okay, so this is the actual iroh project? I clicked Docs. Then I read the rest of the page and got confused about what exactly I was looking at. --- ## Where I paused The scoring section. "61/100 Adoptability. $-41,090 Year-1 take-home (Fermi). 1 in 9 Meaningful-success odds." I stopped here for a while. That's a genuinely unusual thing to put on a page you're trying to sell something from. Most landing pages would bury that or spin it positive. They just... put it there. I don't know if that's honesty or a trick to make me trust the rest of the page more. Maybe both. Either way it made me keep reading. --- ## What I distrusted The page never told me what I'm actually buying. I had to read the pricing section three times. It seems like this isn't a real p2p sync product at all. It's a strategy kit for building one. The spec table at the top describes iroh's technical features as if they're this studio's product. They're not. Iroh is an open-source Rust library by n0.computer. So the hero is describing someone else's open-source work, and what Wishdeal is actually selling is... a $5 PDF with "ICP, MVP scope, first 7 build tasks, 30/60/90 launch plan." The page doesn't make that distinction clear until you're already three scrolls deep. That's either sloppy or intentional. "Honest disclosure: we don't have live customers on this idea yet" is good. But the honest disclosure should be higher and it should clarify: we are not iroh, we are a studio selling a kit for building a business around the iroh ecosystem. "We shipped the strategy package; you ship the customer conversations." That line is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It's almost disarming in how bluntly it offloads the hard part. --- ## What would convince me I want to see one concrete example of someone who bought the $99 adopt kit and shipped something. Not a testimonial quote. An actual link. "Person X, who had Y background, bought this in Month Z, built W, and here's their GitHub or launch post." Even if it's one person. Even if they failed interestingly. Also: the "first 7 build tasks" claim. Show me one of them publicly. If they're the quality of a senior engineer's actual build plan and not just "Step 1: set up repo, Step 2: deploy to cloud," that would move me a lot. The difference between a useful build scaffold and a generic checklist is everything. --- ## What I'd ask in an email reply 1. The spec table describes iroh's actual features. How much of the $99 kit is specific to building a business around iroh versus generic SaaS advice dressed up in p2p language? 2. The "1 in 9 meaningful-success odds" Fermi estimate: what's the methodology behind that number? What counts as meaningful success in the model? 3. Is the code starter in the $99-$199 tier a real working implementation or a skeleton? Specifically: does it handle NAT traversal and hole punching, or does it assume the happy path where both peers are on open networks? --- ## Verdict: on-the-fence The honesty is real and earns attention. But the page left me genuinely unsure what I was looking at for too long, and the pivot from "this is a product" to "this is a kit to build a product" is a problem that erodes trust even when the honesty signals are otherwise strong. I'd reply if the email list sends something that shows me one of those build tasks. --- *Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-06-17. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*