# Derek Foss, Co-Founder at Northgate Digital — read of RFP AI, May 16 2026 > 9 years building and selling small SaaS tools, currently a 7-person dev/growth shop looking for the next thing to build or adopt. Sold a $180K/yr contractor project-management tool in 2024 and have been shopping since. --- ## How I got here Someone I follow on X retweeted a post about "idea factories that show their math." I clicked because that phrase is unusual enough to mean something or to be bait. It was a link to wishdeal.com and I browsed to RFP AI from there. I wasn't searching for RFP software specifically. I was shopping for ideas to adopt. ## What I clicked first The hero. "Win More Bids. Faster." is the kind of headline that exists on 300 SaaS homepages right now. I almost closed the tab. But "Stop losing deals to slow RFP responses" is at least a real sentence with a real villain in it. Slow responses. Okay. I stayed. Then I scrolled fast to the bottom to see what the actual ask was. I landed on the pricing grid before I read anything in the middle. ## Where I paused The honest disclosure block. "We don't have live customers on this idea yet." I read that twice. That is not something idea marketplaces say. Usually they bury a stat like "early users report X" and you have to go looking for the asterisk. Here it's just in the open. That kept me on the page. The Fermi math also stopped me: "$-27,040 Year-1 take-home." I've seen idea decks that promise $500K ARR with no assumptions shown. This one says you'll probably lose money in year one. I don't love that number but I respect the exercise. ## What I distrusted "Professional services firms report cutting RFP response time in half while increasing win rates by 23% on average." There are no live customers. The page says so. So where does 23% come from? Either it's a number lifted from a competitor's marketing, generated by AI, or it's aspirational modeling dressed up as reporting. Any of those three is a problem. "Report" is doing a lot of work in a sentence that the honest disclosure undercuts completely. Also: the feature list reads like it was generated. "Competitive Alignment. Automatically structures responses around buyer evaluation criteria and highlights your advantages at every decision point." I have no idea what that means concretely. What does "automatically structures" look like in the interface? What does "highlights your advantages" actually do? I don't know if this is a templates system, a classifier, a reranker, or just a long prompt. The features list gives me vocabulary, not understanding. ## What would convince me Show me one real RFP document going in and one real draft coming out. Not a mockup. Not a cropped screenshot. An actual before/after where I can read the section headings, the tone, the compliance language. I want to see if the output sounds like something a proposals manager would send or something they'd spend two hours editing. Also: tell me what the code starter actually contains. "Working code starter" could mean a polished Next.js app or a folder with a readme and three API calls. The difference between those two is whether I'm buying a foundation or buying a prompt. ## What I'd ask in an email reply 1. The $49/mo Professional plan is on the page. Have you run that price by anyone in the actual ICP, meaning a real proposals coordinator or BD manager at a consulting firm? Or is that a number that felt right? 2. What is the hardest technical problem in the build, and have you solved it in the code starter? Specifically: training on a customer's past wins without leaking proprietary content across tenants. 3. The Fermi says 1 in 7 odds of meaningful success. What's the primary failure mode you're modeling? Is it distribution, is it ICP pain being lower than expected, or is it the AI output quality not being good enough to replace the proposals writer? ## Verdict: on-the-fence The honesty section earns enough goodwill that I'm not closing the tab. But the 23% win rate claim sitting directly above "we don't have live customers" is a trust tax the page hasn't paid yet. I'd reply to a founder email if the subject line showed they understood the adoption risk, not just the product vision. --- *Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-05-16. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*