I built a document analytics tool because I was tired of sending proposals into silence. Here is what I learned.
Every salesperson knows this feeling. You spend hours preparing a proposal, you hit send, and then nothing. Complete silence. You have no idea if they opened it, which parts they read, whether they forwarded it to someone else, or if it landed in their spam folder.
That silence is not just uncomfortable. It costs deals.
I built DocMetrics to fix that. It is a document analytics platform that tells you exactly what happens after you hit send. Who opened it. Which pages they read. How long they spent on each one. Whether they came back. Whether someone else at the company opened it too.
But here is what I discovered while building it. Raw metrics are not the real product. A founder here told me something that stuck — the value is not in showing the numbers. It is in turning those signals into deal judgment. Is this deal moving. Who is really involved. What does the silence mean. What should I do right now.
So I built that interpretation layer too. DocMetrics now generates a plain English summary per prospect that answers those exact questions automatically and sends it to your Gmail, Slack, HubSpot, or Microsoft Teams the moment something meaningful happens.
What it does today
Per viewer re-read detection across sessions — know exactly which pages each prospect keeps returning to
Dead deal scoring — combines multiple signals to tell you if a deal is alive or dying before you waste more time on it
Gone silent detection — fires after inactivity and tells you what the silence probably means
AI-style deal intelligence per prospect — one plain English paragraph with a clear recommended action
Real-time viewer presence — see who is reading your document right now
E-signature tracking with hesitation detection
Heatmaps, page engagement charts, location tracking, bounce analytics
The hard honest truth I learned
Building was not the hard part. Distribution is. I am still climbing that mountain. I have the product. I do not yet have the audience. That is the real work now.
If you send proposals, pitch decks, contracts, or any document where you need to know what happens after send — I would genuinely love for you to try it. Free to start.
Three questions for this community
When you send a proposal and get silence — what do you do? How long do you wait before following up?
What is the one signal that would tell you immediately whether a deal is worth chasing?
If your document analytics tool could tell you one thing it currently does not — what would that be?
Happy to answer anything about how I built it, what worked, what failed, and where I am headed. This community has already shaped the product through feedback I did not even ask for directly. That means a lot.
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the did-they-even-open-it anxiety is the worst part of consulting fr. before i had any tool i'd just send the proposal as a link instead of an attachment and watch a dumb bit.ly to see if it got clicked. crude but it told me when to follow up vs when to let it die. the per-section read thing is the real upgrade, knowing they bailed on the pricing page beats a plain open by a lot tbh
The bit.ly workaround is actually clever and shows you understood the real problem before any tool did. Most people just refreshed their email and hoped.
The pricing page bail signal is one of the most useful things DocMetrics surfaces. Not just that they stopped there but how long they spent before stopping, whether they came back to it in a later session, and whether someone else from the same company opened it after them which usually means your original contact forwarded it to their finance team or manager.
If you are still sending proposals I would love for you to try it on one live send and tell me what you think. You clearly already know what signals matter so your feedback would be genuinely useful. docmetrics.io takes about five minutes to set up.
been thinking about the forwarding piece since your post. when a proposal suddenly gets opened by two or three new people inside the company, that always felt like the strongest buying signal to me, way more than my original contact rereading it. does DocMetrics surface that explicitly or does it just show up as extra anonymous views? asking because that was always the moment i never knew whether to jump in or sit tight.
That's exactly the signal DocMetrics is built around, and you've described it better than most of our existing users have. Yes, it's surfaced explicitly, not lumped in as anonymous views. When a second or third person from the same company domain opens the document, the dashboard shows it directly: how many people, whether the new viewers are skimming or actually reading (we score time spent and pages covered, not just an open), and a plain-English read on what that combination usually means.
One honest nuance worth knowing upfront: that detection relies on matching company email domains. If someone forwards your proposal to a personal Gmail or Outlook address, we still catch that more than one person opened the same link, but we label it differently — "different people, same link" rather than claiming we know they're at the same company, since we can't confirm that from the email alone. We'd rather under-claim than tell you something we don't actually know.
The "jump in or sit tight" moment you're describing is the exact decision point we're trying to make less of a guess — we show you the combined picture (who's reading deeply vs. who just glanced) so you're not deciding blind.
Would you want early access to try it on a live proposal? One thing I'm genuinely unsure about: now that you know we draw that line between "confirmed same company" and "same link, can't confirm," does that distinction feel useful to you, or would you rather we just said "multiple people opened this" and skipped the caveat? Curious which way you'd lean once you see it on a real deal.
the proposal-into-silence feeling is so specific and so brutal, i've refreshed an empty inbox more times than i'd admit. tracking whether they even opened it changes the whole follow-up game. does it tell you which section they actually read, or just that they opened? thats the part i'd kill for.
Yes it tells you exactly which sections they read. Not just that they opened it but which pages they spent time on, which ones they came back to across multiple sessions, which sections they skipped entirely, and whether someone new from their organisation opened it after they forwarded it internally.
The refreshing the empty inbox feeling is exactly what DocMetrics is built to fix. Instead of wondering you see a real time feed of what they actually did with it. If they spent four minutes on the pricing page and skipped the case studies you know that before you follow up. If they came back three days later and re-read the ROI section you know the deal is still alive before they say a word.
I built this because I felt exactly what you described. I would love for you to try it on a real proposal you are currently waiting to hear back on. You can be up and running in about five minutes. Here is the link. docmetrics.io
What kind of proposals do you typically send? I want to make sure the setup makes sense for your specific situation.
glad the bit.ly thing landed, sometimes the janky manual version teaches you the real feature. per-section read tracking is your wedge, lead with 'see exactly where they bailed' over 'track opens'. unrelated, since you clearly know the 'sent into silence' pain, that's basically the founder-fundraising experience too and what i'm building around groundwork, would love your read whenever. anyway, the where-they-bailed data is the thing i'd put on the homepage
That's really helpful. I hadn't thought about positioning "where they bailed" as the primary message, but I can see why it's more compelling than simply talking about opens. Thanks for that.
I'd definitely be happy to take a look at Groundwork as well. Send it over when you have a chance I'd be glad to share my thoughts.
Sending proposals into silence is one of the most demoralizing parts of solo consulting. The anxiety of not knowing if they even opened it is real.
The root issue is that most solopreneurs don't have a proper client pipeline system - proposals go out but there's no CRM tracking status, no follow-up cadence, no history of what worked. It's all in their head or scattered across email threads.
That's exactly what I'm building toward with a Solopreneur Notion OS - a linked system where your client portal, CRM, and project tracker connect so proposals don't disappear into a void. Would love to know what you found about how solo consultants were tracking proposal follow-ups before you built this.
The linked system where client portal, CRM, and project tracker connect so proposals do not disappear into a void is the right architecture. DocMetrics sits on the proposal and document side of that system. The CRM layer you are building in Notion handles the pipeline and follow up cadence side. They are complementary not competing. What solo consultants were doing before any system existed was exactly what you described. Everything in their head or scattered across email threads with no way to see the pattern across proposals over time.
I know a couple of salespeople who regularly send proposals and pitch decks who might be willing to answer your questions for free, happy to forward them if you'd like.