# Derek Howell, Independent B2B Consultant (ex-Accounting SaaS) - read of LLC Filing Feed, June 10 2026

> "8 years selling practice management software into CPA firms of 3-15 people. Now consulting independently. My kid just started 4th grade, I coach his baseball team Thursday evenings, and I spend a strange amount of mental energy thinking about how small accounting firms actually find new clients."

## How I got here

Googled something like "automated new business leads for CPA firms" and this came up on page two. Not an ad, organic. I clicked because this concept has been on my mental "things that should exist" list for years and I wanted to know if someone had actually built it. Turns out it's not quite that.

## What I clicked first

The hero subhead got me: "Fresh business leads delivered daily, enriched before your competitors call." That's a clean value prop. I've heard CPAs complain about the window forever. A new LLC files and by the time they hear about it, three competitors have already left voicemails. If this delivers 48-hour freshness consistently, that's real leverage.

"Built for CPA and law firm workflows" I noticed too. That's either a smart vertical focus or the generic "we support all use cases" claim dressed up as specificity. With this kind of product I'd lean toward the former, so I kept reading.

## Where I paused

"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 twice. I've never seen a product page say that outright. Usually it's "join 200+ growing teams" backed by nothing. This is the opposite. But then I checked the pricing and the whole page reframed itself: I'm not buying a product. I'm buying a playbook to build a product. That's fine, but the first half of the page reads like a live SaaS product. The second half reveals it's a business-in-a-box concept. That gap is going to confuse people and probably costs them conversions from the exact operators who'd be most qualified to run this.

## What I distrusted

The enrichment claims are doing a lot of work on thin air. "LinkedIn profile URL and headline for each owner so you know who you are calling before you dial" -- how? Scraping? Proxycurl? Clay? LinkedIn kills vendors who do this on a rotating basis. The methodology is completely absent, and it's the single most operationally fragile part of the whole product concept.

Also: "Estimated business size and industry classification based on filing location, business type, and available signals." The phrase "available signals" is a tell. A brand-new LLC has no revenue, no employees on record, no Glassdoor page. Filing location and entity type will give you almost nothing on business size. You're guessing, and the page doesn't say that.

I also found "$-4,376 Year-1 take-home (Fermi)" strange to lead with. I get the honesty angle. But negative year-one income with 1-in-5 success odds on the front page of your idea isn't a hook, it's a warning label wearing a transparency costume.

## What would convince me

Show me a real sample CSV from Texas or Florida, not mock data. One actual week of filings with the enrichment columns filled in. I want to see the LinkedIn match rate as a percentage, what "industry classification" actually resolves to for a 3-week-old food truck LLC, and how many rows just come back blank because no enrichment was possible. That single file would tell me more than the entire current page.

Beyond that: one conversation with one CPA who received a trial list and called even three of the contacts. A quote. A number. Anything that proves someone received this data and used it for something.

## What I'd ask in an email reply

1. What is your actual LinkedIn match rate? Like a real number, percentage of new LLC filers where you can return a confirmed profile URL. And which data provider are you routing through?

2. "Sorted by filing date with hottest leads first" -- hottest by what signal? Filing date alone, or are you pulling freshness indicators from somewhere I'm not seeing?

3. Has anyone who bought the $99 dossier actually launched a version of this? Even a weekend side project? I want to talk to one of them before I spend $5 on the unlock.

## Verdict: curious-enough-to-reply

The explicit "no live customers" disclosure is rare enough that I actually trust this page more than most, which is a low bar but it counts for something. The enrichment methodology is a black box and the page has an identity crisis between "live product" and "idea for sale," and those two things would stop me from paying anything today. But I'd send a reply with the three questions above to see if the answers feel like someone who built something or someone who wrote a very thorough doc about building something.

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