# Marcus Trevino, Managing Principal at Trevino & Associates CPA — read of New Business Formation Lead Feed, June 10 2026

> 14 years in public accounting, currently running a 9-person CPA shop in San Antonio that does about 60% small-business work. Coach my daughter's U10 soccer team on Saturdays. Use HubSpot, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and I tried Apollo for about 4 months before canceling.

## How I got here

Googled "new business filing leads CPA" on a Tuesday night after losing a new client to a bigger firm that apparently called him the week he filed his LLC. I'd been thinking about this exact problem for two years. Someone in a CPA Reddit thread mentioned "same day SOS filing leads" and this came up in the results. I clicked it expecting to see a data vendor. That's not what this is.

## What I clicked first

"Cold-to-Hot in 24 Hours. Most prospecting tools chase 30-day-old data. This runs the race on day one when no one else is calling."

That line landed. That is the actual problem. The reason I lose new businesses to other firms isn't price or service, it's timing. When someone calls us two weeks after they file, they've already talked to three CPAs. If I could call them the day they file, I'd close 40% of those conversations. I've thought about building a scraper for this myself and never got around to it. So I kept reading.

## Where I paused

The scoring table. Specifically this: "financial upside: 2/10." And then the Fermi number: "$-8,944 Year-1 take-home."

I stopped and read that section three times. The site is telling me, in its own words, that whoever builds this product has a high probability of losing money in year one. That's either the most honest thing I've seen on a product page in years, or it's a hedge to avoid any liability for selling me a bad idea. I'm not sure which. But it made me read more carefully, not less.

## What I distrusted

Two things, and they're related.

First: I came here thinking I was buying a lead feed. A data product. Leads in my inbox by 9 AM. But what's actually being sold is a strategy dossier for $5 and a "code starter + outreach pack" for $99 to $199. The product being sold is not the lead feed. It's instructions for building one. The headline and the pricing page are describing two completely different things, and I didn't figure that out until I hit the "Adopt this idea" section. "We shipped the strategy package; you ship the customer conversations." That sentence buried halfway down the page is doing a lot of work that the hero section should have done in sentence one.

Second: "LinkedIn Profiles + Revenue Signals. Each owner: LinkedIn URL, job title, estimated revenue band, industry." Estimated how? Sourced from where? LinkedIn profiles for brand-new LLCs often don't exist yet or are personal profiles with no business info. I've pulled Secretary of State data myself. The quality is wildly inconsistent by state. This page doesn't touch any of that.

## What would convince me

A sample. Not a screenshot, an actual CSV row. Show me a real filing from last week, the LinkedIn URL it matched to, the revenue band, and how the match was made. That's it. If the enrichment is real and the match rate is above 60%, I would have already asked for a trial.

Also: which states? California and Texas filings are public and updated frequently. Montana and New Hampshire are a mess. If this only works reliably in 12 states, say that. That would actually make me trust you more.

## What I'd ask in an email reply

1. When the page says "LinkedIn URL" for new filers, what's the actual match rate? New LLCs often have no LinkedIn presence at all. Are you matching on the owner's name to a personal LinkedIn, or is there an actual business profile?

2. The Fermi model shows negative year-one take-home for the person building this. Is that the operator (me building a lead gen business to sell to others), or is that you as the vendor? I can't tell if I'm being sold a B2B SaaS idea or a data subscription.

3. What does "start free trial" mean on a product that has no live customers? Is there an actual feed I can test, or is "free" just the browse tier that's already on this page?

## Verdict: on-the-fence

The core insight is real and I've felt the pain personally. But I came here for a product and found a strategy kit, and those are very different purchases. If there's an actual working data feed behind this, someone needs to say so in the first 100 words.

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*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-06-10. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*