Month two: the questions we got from readers

Two months ago we shipped the post that opened this blog and committed to a daily field journal on proposal work. Sixty-one posts in. The honest report from inside the practice.

This post is not a numbers update. It’s a reflection on the six questions readers sent that I keep thinking about. The questions below are paraphrased, and they’re framed as illustrative composites of the kind of questions we got — I don’t name readers, I don’t quote messages verbatim, and I’m using them as prompts to write what I’ve actually been thinking, not as testimonials. If you sent one of these, you’ll recognize the question; you won’t recognize a name attached to it because there isn’t one.

”Why daily?”

Several variants of this. The clearest version: “Daily seems aggressive. Doesn’t quality drop?”

The honest answer is that quality is going to drop on some days. We knew that going in. The bet was that a body of work — sixty posts, a hundred posts, three hundred — has compounding value that no individual post has. A reader who finds three posts that helped them is a reader who’ll come back and read the fourth. A reader who finds one banger and an empty calendar will not.

That said: when a post is genuinely thin, we know. The category of “we shipped something weak today” is a signal we read and act on. It’s not happened often yet — the editorial calendar is denser than the cadence of weak posts — but it will, and the public commitment is that we’ll say so when it does.

”Who reads a daily blog about proposal software?”

The question I underestimated. The answer is more varied than I expected.

Procurement officers send links to colleagues. Proposal managers at incumbent-vendor customers read for the category-commentary posts. Engineering leads who are evaluating retrieval architectures read the engineering posts and ignore the rest. Founders of adjacent vendors read the category posts, check our pricing, and either get nervous or nod along. APMP-certified practitioners read Sarah’s craft posts and tell us when the war stories ring false.

There is no single archetype. The blog gets read by people whose only common attribute is that they care about whether the words on a proposal page are actually true. That’s a wider group than I expected. Almost certainly because the alternative — vendor-blog sludge — has built a long backlog of frustrated readers in this category specifically.

”How does the composite-byline thing actually work?”

The question I expected and was glad to get. “You publish under ‘Sarah Smith’ as a composite voice. Isn’t that a kind of fiction?”

Yes and no. Sarah is a consistent house pen, not a specific human. Every post under that byline has the disclaimer in the footer (“composite voice, not a single person”), so we are not pretending. Why have it at all? Because proposal craft is best written from a single coherent voice — the war stories, the editorial sensibilities, the opinions about Shipley vs. APMP — and when those posts come from a rotating cast of unnamed authors, they read incoherently. The composite gives us coherence with disclosure.

If we ever stop being honest about it — if a Sarah post drops the disclaimer, or if a marketing campaign treats Sarah as a real person — that’s a violation we’d want readers to call us on.

”Why do you cite competitor reviews in your own posts?”

A few readers asked variants of this. The cleanest version: “Doesn’t that seem unprofessional?”

I think about this question a lot. Citing G2 reviews of Loopio and Responsive in our own posts is unusual for the category; most vendors are quiet about competitors. We are not, for two reasons.

First, the category has a specific and well-documented user-experience problem that the public review record establishes. Pretending the record doesn’t exist would be dishonest. Citing it is the lower-friction alternative.

Second, our pitch isn’t “we are better than Loopio.” Our pitch is “the category as a whole has shipped a generation of products that ignore the user, and we’re trying to do something different.” That pitch lands differently when we cite the user reviews directly than when we hand-wave at “the legacy market.” The reviews are evidence. We use them.

Where I am careful: we don’t quote anything we can’t cite, we don’t paraphrase competitor claims as if they were facts, and the comparative pages on the marketing site (/compare/loopio etc.) include explicit “where the competitor wins” sections. The point is comparison, not attack.

”When does the product get to the level of the posts?”

The hardest question. Several readers asked variants. The clearest: “You write about extraction quality, verification, retrieval latency, with confidence. Is the product actually there?”

The honest answer is: in some places, yes; in others, getting there. The Pledge enforcement architecture works the way the Pledge-in-code post describes. The retrieval latency budget post describes real production telemetry. The multi-doc ingest shipped this month and works the way the changelog post describes.

In other places we’re shipping the foundation and writing the posts honestly about where the foundation doesn’t yet support the polish. Diagram extraction works but is not as good as the prose extraction. Multi-block entailment is in a research branch, not the production path. Customer-facing dashboards are functional but not what we want them to be in six months.

The blog is ahead of the product on some axes and behind on others. That’s true for any company shipping at the cadence we are. The commitment we made is that the blog won’t get ahead of itself — when a post describes how the product works, the post matches what /platform/* says today. New product features get a marketing-page update first, then a blog post. We’ve held that line. We will keep holding it.

”Will you still be doing this in a year?”

The question I think about most. The honest answer is: yes, if the company is still here, and probably even if some axes change.

A daily blog is a commitment that scales with the team. Right now the cadence works because we have a small team and the blog is operationally important to the business. If the team grows and the blog becomes a smaller fraction of the surface area, the cadence might shift — five days a week instead of seven, or a Monday-Wednesday-Friday rhythm. What won’t change is the editorial discipline. Voice doc, banned-words list, citation rules, no-fabrication policy. Those are not contingent on cadence. They are how we write, regardless of how often.

If the company is not still here in a year, that’s a different conversation. The bets we made — public pricing, daily blog, comparison pages on the marketing site, an engineering build log that shows our work — are all bets that might not pay off. We think they will. We acknowledge they might not. The honest version of writing about your own company is that the company is itself an experiment.

What I learned from the questions

Three things, going into month three.

The audience is broader than the category. The blog isn’t only for proposal practitioners. It’s for anyone trying to figure out whether grounded AI is real or rhetoric, whether the RFP category is changing or just churning, whether transparency in pricing is a posture or a tactic. The next few months will lean further into the why-this-matters-broader posts.

The engineering posts are the ones readers cite back to me. When someone references a specific post in conversation, it’s almost always one of the engineering build-log posts. Verification, retrieval, ingest pipeline. There’s an appetite for technical writing in this category that the existing vendor blogs do not feed. We’re going to keep feeding it.

The “honest about limits” framing is doing work. A few readers said versions of “the part I trust most is when you say what doesn’t work yet.” That observation is the one I’m taking forward most directly. The temptation, as the company grows and the wins start arriving, is to write fewer of the “here’s where we’re still figuring it out” posts. We’re going to keep writing them. They are the highest-trust thing we publish.

Sixty-one posts. Three hundred and four to go this year. We’re still here, the calendar is still real, and the commitment from the first post — that this is a field journal, not a content marketing farm — still holds.

Send the next round of questions. The hard ones especially.