# Jake Moreno, Senior Developer at Stillwater Digital (12-person agency) — read of QRever, June 20 2026

> "9 years building web apps for clients, been chasing a productized side project for the last two. Dad of a 7-year-old, Saturday soccer coach, My First Million listener since episode 40."

## How I got here

Someone dropped a link in the Indie Hackers Slack with the message "anyone tried these Wishdeal idea packs?" Three people reacted with fire emojis and nobody actually answered the question. That made me curious enough to click. I was expecting a SaaS product. That is not quite what I found.

## What I clicked first

The hero pulled me in for about four seconds. "Stop paying monthly for a menu QR code" is a clean, specific pain statement. I know restaurant owners. My brother-in-law owns a taco spot in Tucson. He gripes about exactly this. So my first instinct was "oh, someone built this." Then I scrolled two inches and realized I was on a page selling me the IDEA of building it, not the product itself. The hero copy is written for a restaurant owner. The pricing tiers are written for a founder. That is a real disconnect and it cost the page my initial goodwill.

## Where I paused

The scoring block stopped me cold. "Year-1 take-home (Fermi): $-4,920." You led with a negative number. And then right below it: "1 in 6 Meaningful-success odds." I sat with this for a minute. My honest reaction was: is this a selling page or a warning label? I have seen a lot of idea marketplaces that oversell the opportunity. This one might be doing the opposite. I am not sure which is worse for conversion but I respect that they printed it.

## What I distrusted

Two things. First: "buyer clarity: 10/10" and "credibility: 9/10" are scores you gave yourself, about yourself, on a page you built to sell something. That is circular in a way that should probably embarrass the people who wrote it. Second: "We don't have live customers on this idea yet." Okay. So the $5 dossier and the $99 build pack are strategies built on zero validation. The Fermi math is interesting but Fermi estimates on an untested market are just math dressed up as research. I can write my own optimistic spreadsheet for free.

## What would convince me

One person who bought the $99 pack and shipped the product. Not a quote, not a testimonial formatted like a case study. A link to their actual site, even if it only has six customers. A founder saying "I paid $99, launched in three weeks, here is my Stripe dashboard at month two" would do more than the entire scoring framework. The framework is a clever way to signal rigor without having proof. I see it for what it is.

## What I'd ask in an email reply

1. The "working code starter" in the $99 tier: what stack, what's actually functional out of the box, and has anyone deployed it? Not "can it be deployed" -- has it been?
2. The Fermi estimate shows negative year-one take-home. What assumptions drive that number -- is this after paying the $99 or is there a customer acquisition cost built in, and what would change it?
3. How many people have bought any tier of this specific idea, and what happened to them?

## Verdict: on-the-fence

The honesty about negative odds and no live customers is genuinely rare and I respect it more than I expected to. But the page is selling me confidence in a plan that has never been tested by anyone, including the people selling it, and that is a hard thing to pay even $5 for.

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*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-06-20. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*