# Marcus Okafor, Director of Strategic Sourcing at Hendricks Industrial — read of Procurement AI, May 11 2026

> "14 years in sourcing. 420-person manufacturer in Columbus. Running SAP Ariba for 40% of our spend and Excel for the other 60%, which tells you everything about where we are."

## How I got here

Googled "vendor scoring software mid-market manufacturing" last Sunday afternoon. My wife took the kids to her mom's so I had maybe 45 minutes of quiet. I've been circling this problem for two quarters: our three category managers each have their own vendor scoring spreadsheet and none of them match. A LinkedIn ad might have followed me here too, I don't remember, I had four tabs open.

## What I clicked first

The hero pulled me in hard. "Stop vendor scoring in spreadsheets scattered across your team." That is a verbatim description of my Monday mornings. I clicked the "Watch the 30-second explainer" link immediately. I'm not sure it went anywhere useful but I tried.

## Where I paused

About two-thirds down the page, there's a section called "How honest is this idea, really?" and it contains this sentence: "Honest disclosure: we don't have live customers on this idea yet."

I had to re-read the page from the top. Because I came here looking for software to buy. And this is not software. This is a pitch deck for someone ELSE to build software and sell it to people like me. The "Unlock the dossier" button is $5. The "Adopt the build" is $99 to $199. They're selling the blueprint.

I sat with that for a few minutes. It's either very clever or very confusing. For me it was confusing, because I misread the whole top half of the page.

## What I distrusted

The stat block: "70% Less procurement time. 30% Average cost savings. 60 Days to ROI." These numbers appear before the honest disclosure that there are no live customers. So those aren't measured outcomes from real deployments. They're projections or industry benchmarks or just... numbers someone picked. The page doesn't say. "$200k-$800k per year" is a range so wide it means nothing. A 4x spread is not a number, it's a shrug.

Also "Contract Optimization" as a feature bullet: "Generate market-competitive contracts, spot unfavorable terms, suggest cost reductions. Negotiate from data, not experience." The phrase "negotiate from data, not experience" is the kind of line someone writes who has not sat across from a Tier 1 supplier's account team. Experience is not the problem in contract negotiation. Leverage is. Data helps but it does not replace leverage, and nothing in this copy addresses that.

The Fermi math is interesting: Year-1 take-home listed as negative $72,700. That's tucked in below the fold. So the page is simultaneously claiming "Save 30% on procurement costs" in the hero and "you'll probably lose money year one" in the fine print. Both statements are about different audiences, but if you don't catch that, it reads as contradictory.

## What would convince me

If this were a real product: one named company (not a logo wall, a named company with a contact) who cut sourcing cycle time by a specific number of days on a specific category. Not "a mid-market manufacturer saved 28%." A name, a category, a number, a timeline. That's it. That's all I need to book a demo.

If this is what it actually is, a build-it-yourself dossier: I'd want to know what "working code starter" actually means. Is it a Next.js shell with no integrations? Does it connect to any ERP out of the box or is that 12 weeks of custom work on top of the 12-18 weeks to MVP they're already quoting?

## What I'd ask in an email reply

1. The page says 12-18 weeks to MVP. What does MVP mean in that context specifically? Can it ingest vendor data from SAP Ariba or is that out of scope for the starter build?

2. The "1 in 11 meaningful success odds" is a Fermi estimate. What's the failure mode? Is it go-to-market (can't find customers), product (technical complexity), or competition (Coupa, Jaggaer, Ivalua already own this conversation at enterprise)?

3. Who is the person who bought this at the $99 tier and actually launched something? I'd take a 20-minute call with them before anything else.

## Verdict: on-the-fence

The honesty on this page is genuinely unusual. Negative year-one Fermi estimates, a "1 in 11" success probability, no live customers stated plainly. That earns some trust. But the page opens by talking directly to procurement directors shopping for software, and most of them (including me, initially) will not realize they're reading a founder's prospectus for an idea that doesn't exist yet. That mismatch is the core problem.

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*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-05-11. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*