# Tom Bashford, Founder at Fieldway -- read of Job-Change Signal Enrichment, June 8 2026

> 8 years in B2B sales before going indie. Now building lightweight tools for outbound teams. Three of us, all remote. Currently living in Pipedrive, Apollo, and Clay.

## How I got here

Someone in the Trends.vc Slack dropped this link with the note "interesting transparency experiment." I clicked it because of the word "Fermi" in their message. I've had job-change tracking on my own product shortlist for about three months, so the timing felt relevant. I read it on my bike commute home, parked outside a coffee shop to finish it.

## What I clicked first

The hero is serviceable. "Catch job moves. Close deals faster." is not going to win any awards but it communicates the thing. What actually held me was further down: "-$34,820 Year-1 take-home (Fermi)." I genuinely stopped scrolling. You almost never see a product page tell you the first year is expected to be net negative. I clicked the "1 in 11 Meaningful-success odds" line next. That is not a normal thing to put on a page you want people to buy from.

## Where I paused

"Honest disclosure: we don't have live customers on this idea yet. We shipped the strategy package; you ship the customer conversations."

That stopped me for a couple minutes. Not in a bad way, more a "wait, what am I actually looking at" way. The hero is written like I'm signing up for a SaaS. The disclosure reads like I'm buying rights to build one. I read the pricing tier section twice trying to figure out which it was. I still had some uncertainty after that.

## What I distrusted

"Higher open rates. Higher reply intent." Those two lines in the feature list have no number attached, no qualifier, no "based on X." They come two paragraphs after a disclosure saying there are zero live customers. The collision is hard to ignore. It reads like those lines were written before someone decided to be honest, and nobody went back to reconcile them.

Also "Sales Connector native" is dropped without explanation of what Sales Connector is. If I'm not already in that ecosystem, this is load-bearing context I need. The page assumes I know and moves on.

## What would convince me

Not a case study -- there aren't any. But I'd want to see one person who bought the $99 tier, what they actually built with it, and whether they have even five paying users six months in. A three-paragraph honest update from an operator who tried it would do more for me than the Fermi model and all the axis scores combined. A failed attempt with a real post-mortem would also work. I just want evidence that someone touched the thing.

The "working code starter" in the $99 tier also needs a single sentence of specificity. Is it a Node app, a Zapier workflow, a webhook integration? That detail is the difference between $5 and $99 for me.

## What I'd ask in an email reply

1. The working code starter -- what stack, what's wired up, and what does someone still have to build before it does anything real for a paying customer?
2. Has anyone adopted this from the factory and shipped it, even quietly, even to a handful of customers? I'm not expecting a case study. I just want to know if the $99 path has been walked.
3. The Fermi model assumes what, exactly, in terms of who's doing the building? Solo technical founder? Someone contracting out the dev? That changes whether negative year-1 is a red flag or expected overhead.

## Verdict: on-the-fence

The transparency about odds and negative returns is genuinely unusual and I respect it. But the page is trying to do two things at once -- pitch an end-user product and pitch an idea kit -- and the resulting confusion makes it harder to evaluate than it should be. I'd reply to an email from this founder. I wouldn't pay $99 today.

---
*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-06-08. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*