# Derek Solis, Founder at Solis Digital (12-person agency) — read of Product Roadmap AI, May 13 2026

> 9 years running a small digital agency, currently reselling productized software to mid-market B2B clients. Twin 7-year-olds who destroy my Saturdays. I check new tools on the Caltrain commute between client meetings.

## How I got here

A guy I follow on X (Josh something, runs a bootstrapped SaaS newsletter) retweeted something about a site that "scores your product ideas with Fermi estimates and doesn't lie to you." I bookmarked it on my phone and forgot about it for four days. Opened it this morning on the train because I had nothing else to look at.

## What I clicked first

The hero hit me immediately: "Your roadmap. Written. Shipped. In 10 minutes." I've seen that sentence structure on a hundred SaaS homepages, so I almost bounced. But then directly below it I saw a live score card showing "71/100 Adoptability" and "$-13,748 Year-1 take-home" and "1 in 8 Meaningful-success odds." That stopped me cold. You almost never see negative projections on a product's own homepage. Nobody puts "-$13K" in their hero section unless they're doing something deliberately different.

## Where I paused

The disclosure block: "Honest disclosure: we don't have live customers on this idea yet. We shipped the strategy package; you ship the customer conversations." I read this three times. It's either the most disarming thing I've seen on a product page this year, or it's a clever framing trick to make skeptics like me feel safe. Probably both. The fact that they scored their own product's landing page quality at 6/10 is the kind of self-aware detail that made me keep reading.

## What I distrusted

I genuinely could not tell, for about 90 seconds, whether Product Roadmap AI is:

A) A tool that helps me build product roadmaps for my clients, or
B) A business idea (a roadmap AI product) that I'm supposed to adopt and build myself

The hero implies (A). The scoring framework and the "Adopt the build for $99-$199" pricing implies (B). The page eventually clarifies it's (B), but it took me too long to get there. If I'm a busy operator reading this on a phone, I'm gone before I figure that out. "Your roadmap. Written. Shipped. In 10 minutes" reads like a SaaS product pitch, not an idea marketplace pitch.

Also: the Fermi math is presented as a feature, but I have no idea how those numbers are generated. Is it a model? An analyst? A template someone filled in? The phrase "Wishdeal Factory scores every idea against 10 Adoptability axes" sounds rigorous, but I don't know what the 10 axes are, who built the scoring, or whether this Fermi estimate for me is different from the next person's. If I'm betting $18K on a build, I want to know if the person who ran the numbers has ever shipped a B2B SaaS.

## What would convince me

One real operator's account of what happened after they bought the $99 tier. Not a testimonial blurb. An actual short post-mortem: what they built, who they sold it to first, what flopped. Even if it shows the 1-in-8 odds playing out badly. The "honest" framing is doing a lot of work on this page and it needs one real data point to back it up, or it's just unusually candid marketing.

Also: I want to know what the $5 dossier actually showed someone. Show me a redacted version. Let me see the ICP writeup, the MVP scope, the email drip. That's the thing I'd actually be paying for and I can't evaluate it at all right now.

## What I'd ask in an email reply

1. The page says Year-1 take-home is -$13,748. Is that after accounting for the $18K build investment, or is that separate? Because those two numbers together suggest I'm down $32K in year one, which changes the 13% success odds framing pretty significantly.

2. Has anyone actually adopted this specific idea (Product Roadmap AI) from you and built it? If yes, can I talk to them for 15 minutes? If no, why is this the idea you're leading with on your own homepage?

3. What's in the operator partnership tier that isn't in the $99 adopt? The "install, customize, and run launch with you" description is so vague I can't figure out if it's a $5K retainer or a $50K engagement.

## Verdict: on-the-fence

The honesty signals are real and I respect them. But the page made me work too hard to understand what I'm actually buying, and the negative Year-1 numbers with zero social proof from an actual adopter means I'd need that 15-minute call before I'd do anything with my credit card.

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*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-05-13. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*