# Derek Schauer, Director of Partner Success at Ironside Networks — read of ProxyBox Reseller Lead Scorer, June 17 2026

> 9 years managing a reseller channel at a 140-person Columbus ISP distributor. Currently running 43 active partners through HubSpot and a truly embarrassing number of Google Sheets.

## How I got here

Typed "reseller lead scoring software" into Google last Tuesday after a post-mortem where a partner of ours sat on a warm enterprise prospect for three weeks and the company signed with a competitor. My VP asked what tooling we have for prioritizing which leads go to which partners. The answer was: Marcus's spreadsheet and vibes. Found this page on page 2 of results, which already tells me something.

## What I clicked first

The hero line got me: "Score every prospect before your resellers waste time." That is exactly the wound. We don't have a lead problem, we have a triage problem. Resellers work on equal footing with wildly unequal prospects and nobody upstream is helping them prioritize. So I kept reading.

## Where I paused

The scoring panel. Not because it was impressive -- because it stopped me cold in the wrong direction. "Honest disclosure: we don't have live customers on this idea yet. We shipped the strategy package; you ship the customer conversations."

I read that three times. I had to recalibrate what page I was on. I came here looking for software to buy and use. This is a pitch to get me to build the software. Those are completely different products and the hero did not signal that at all.

## What I distrusted

The feature list reads like actual software: "Behavioral Intent Scoring," "Friction Finder," "Reseller CRM Sync," "Channel-Aware Routing." These are named features with specific behaviors attached. But none of this exists yet. The "Try it Live result" callout implies a demo, but the page text doesn't show me what that demo actually looks like or proves. And the copy around these features is exactly as specific as a well-written PRD, which is not the same thing as a working product.

The "1 in 7 Meaningful-success odds" is unusual to see on a product page. I respect it. I also don't know what "meaningful success" means in their Fermi model -- does that mean the person who builds this breaks even, gets to $10K ARR, exits? That number is doing a lot of work without a definition.

The "$-13,132 Year-1 take-home" also stops me. Showing a negative number is a bold honesty move. But it makes me wonder: is this the take-home for the person who buys the $99 kit and builds it, or for the ICP using the finished tool? That's a meaningful difference and I genuinely cannot tell from the page.

## What would convince me

If this is asking me to build the product, I want to see one person who has actually walked through the dossier and gotten to a paying customer, even a single one, even a free pilot. Not a testimonial -- a case note. "Person X in vertical Y used the dossier, built an MVP in Z weeks, got their first paying reseller channel client." That would be enough to take the $5 seriously.

If this is asking me to adopt a finished tool, I want a real demo, not a "Try it" button with a screenshot. Show me actual company data being scored. Show me what the one-line reasoning looks like in HubSpot. The features all sound plausible, which means the demo would actually be convincing -- so why isn't it there?

## What I'd ask in an email reply

1. The page jumps between "here is a tool you can use" and "here is an idea you can build." Which one is this right now, and if it's the latter, is there a working prototype I can actually touch before paying $5 for the dossier?

2. The "Channel-Aware Routing" feature claims to identify which reseller is best positioned for each lead based on geography and customer base overlap. Where does that data come from? Does Ironside (or any channel operator) have to pipe in their reseller data, or does this pull from somewhere external?

3. The adoptability score shows "buyer clarity: 10/10" and "distribution ease: 10/10" but "financial upside: 1/10." Those three numbers don't usually go together. What's the theory behind a product with a clear buyer and easy distribution that still has near-zero financial upside?

## Verdict: on-the-fence

The honesty here is genuinely unusual and I respect it more than I expected to. But I arrived looking to buy a tool and discovered I was being asked to become a founder, and that gap is not explained anywhere until halfway down the page. If I understood going in that this was an idea marketplace, I'd evaluate it differently -- and probably more charitably.

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*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-06-17. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*