# Derek Poulin, Director of Competitive Intelligence at Contractly — read of ModelRank, June 23 2026

> 7 years in B2B SaaS CI and product marketing, currently running competitive intel for an 85-person e-signature startup where I'm the department of one.

## How I got here

A guy in the Competitive Intel Slack I'm in (the private one, not the public one) dropped a link with "has anyone seen this, thoughts?" No context. I clicked it because the channel doesn't have noise in it and I trust the people there. That's literally it. No ad, no Google, no podcast. Peer curiosity.

## What I clicked first

The hero question got me: "Where does your software rank in AI recommendations?" I spend probably six hours a week thinking about this exact thing. Last month a prospect told our AE they'd "already checked ChatGPT" before the demo. We had no idea what it said. So yes, the framing hit immediately.

I read this next part twice: "Every day, software buyers ask AI models for recommendations before they ever touch Google." I don't know if that's true at scale yet but it's directionally true enough that I didn't bounce.

## Where I paused

The CRM chart. HubSpot at 54%, Salesforce at 13%, Pipedrive at 8%. That's specific. That kind of specificity either means they have real data or they made up real-looking numbers, and both would make me stop. I stared at it trying to figure out which. Then I read: "This isn't guesswork. This is real." Which is exactly what you say when it might be guesswork.

## What I distrusted

I scrolled past the pricing and noticed something I had to scroll back up to find: "Honest disclosure: we don't have live customers on this idea yet."

So wait. This is a product idea. Not a product.

The "Join 50+ SaaS companies who are already tracking their AI rankings" line is just above that disclosure. Those two things cannot both be true. Either 50 companies are using it, or there are no live customers. The page doesn't resolve this, it just lets both sentences sit there.

Then I saw the Wishdeal Factory scoring: "67/100 Adoptability. $-17,776 Year-1 take-home." This is a studio that sells dossiers for $5 and code starters for $99-$199. This is not ModelRank. This is Wishdeal Studio packaging an idea called ModelRank and selling the playbook for someone else to go build it.

That's a completely different product than what the hero sold me. The hero said: "We ask the models. You get the results." There is no "we." There is no results delivery. There is a pitch deck in disguise.

## What would convince me

If this were a real product: one actual report. Not a chart with CRM categories. A PDF or screenshot of what a customer actually receives on a Monday morning. Show me the format, the questions asked, the output. I have no idea what methodology they use to prompt these models or whether the queries are standardized across weeks.

If this is a product idea for sale: I'm not the buyer. I want the tool, not the blueprint.

## What I'd ask in an email reply

1. The CRM data in the chart, is that from actual weekly queries you've run, or is that illustrative of what the tool would surface?
2. When you say "authentic buyer questions," do you mean you're prompting with something like "what's the best CRM for a 50-person sales team" or something more literal? Because the answer changes completely based on query framing and I've seen that vary wildly.
3. Is ModelRank a product I can subscribe to today or is this a dossier I'm buying to go build something like ModelRank myself?

## Verdict: on-the-fence

The pain is real and the positioning concept is smart. But the page is doing two jobs at once and doing neither cleanly. If ModelRank is a live product, bury the Wishdeal Factory scoring and prove it works. If it's an idea for sale, lead with that. Right now I can't tell what I'm looking at and that's the whole problem.

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*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-06-23. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*