About ProposalKit
A one-person product company.
Why I'm building ProposalKit, who it's for, and how I think about the work.
I've spent a decade on B2B products: engineering management at Estonia's largest e-commerce platform, growth engineering at a few SaaS companies, and a stretch at Microsoft. Enough of it up close to know how often B2B software either costs a fortune or almost works.
Before writing a line of ProposalKit I spent weeks in reviews and forum threads on every proposal tool I could find: G2, Capterra, Reddit, indie hacker posts. The same complaint came up again and again: a good-looking proposal shouldn't cost enterprise money or require a designer on retainer.
So that's what I'm building.
How I work
A few things I care about.
Start with the problem
If nobody's complaining about it, I don't build it. Features start with a conversation with someone trying to get a job done, not a brainstorm in a doc.
Design does the selling
A polished proposal gets signed. A clunky one gets forwarded to legal and forgotten. Design isn't decoration; it's the thing that makes buyers trust what they're reading.
Ship, then learn
I'd rather ship something rough to ten users than something perfect to zero. Week-one feedback usually kills half the plan anyway, and better now than after a quarter of building.
Say no a lot
Every product gets bloated unless someone pushes back. One thing done well beats a settings panel full of half-measures. Most of the work is deciding what's not in scope.