Six months of the blog: what readers keep coming back to
Six months in, three posts keep getting shared, two flopped, and one surprised me. Notes from the founder on what the field-journal experiment is teaching us about what proposal practitioners actually want to read.
Six months ago we started writing this blog as a field journal — not as a content engine, not as an SEO play. The plan was to publish what we were learning from building grounded-AI proposal software and let the readership find us. Six months in, here is what the data says.
The three that keep getting shared
The eight-stage RFP response pipeline is the post that gets cited the most in inbound conversations. Proposal managers send it to new hires. Capture leads paste sections of it into kickoff docs. We did not expect a Shipley-flavored canonical post to land harder than the technical content; it has.
The reading an RFP like the procurement lead who wrote it post has the longest dwell time of anything we’ve published. It is also the one I get the most “this changed how I read RFPs” emails about. The reframe — read the document as procurement, not sales — is the kind of thing that sounds pedantic until someone tries it.
The grounded-retrieval pillar is the technical post that crossed over to a non-technical audience. Engineering teams send it to their CTOs. Proposal teams send it to their procurement teams. It is the only post I have seen forwarded across a buyer-vendor boundary, which was not a use case we designed for.
The two that flopped
The APMP salary survey post — one of the longer pieces we wrote, with citations to five years of survey data — got almost no traction. My read: the audience for compensation data is HR teams, not proposal practitioners, and we do not write to HR teams. The work was good; the audience was wrong.
The Responsive teardown was a bet that competitive analysis would draw in evaluators. It did not. The teardown got read by people already shopping (the bottom of the funnel), and our readership is mostly people building craft (the middle). Competitive content has a place; the place is not in a field journal.
The one that surprised me
The Friday 4 PM review is wrong field note — a 600-word operational rant about review-meeting timing — got the most LinkedIn engagement of anything we’ve published. I wrote it in 40 minutes. It is the smallest post in our top 10 by word count. The lesson is not that short posts win — plenty of our short posts disappeared — but that operational specifics with named failures resonate harder than essays about the failures.
What we are doing more of
More operational specifics. More named failures. More posts about the workflow, fewer about the category. Less “here is how to think about X” and more “here is exactly what we do at 9 AM on the morning of submission day.” The discipline-heavy posts are the ones the audience returns to.
We are also keeping the technical-build content. Engineering posts do not draw the same volume but they do disproportionate work in inbound conversations — buyers cite them in security reviews, technical evaluators cite them in RFP responses, and they are the posts that calibrate trust before a sales call. Volume is not the only metric.
The next six months tilt toward more pillar pieces (longer canonical posts on a single discipline) and more operational field notes. Less middle-tier theorizing. The middle is where readers tell us they bounce.
A note to the practitioners reading
The thing I want to know, six months in: which of these have you sent to someone else? Replies via the contact link below the post all get read. The signal we have is shallow — analytics and inbound mentions — and the strongest signal is hearing the post quoted back to me by someone who was not there when it was written.
We are publishing tomorrow. And the day after. The journal continues.