About
This started as a spreadsheet.
Like most freelancers, I bought connects, spent them, and had no idea what happened next. Upwork lets you save a job. It does not let you ask which of your proposals were opened, which cover letter earns replies, or what a hire costs you in dollars.
So I kept a spreadsheet: date, job, connects, boosted, refunded, status. It worked, and it immediately showed me something uncomfortable. Only two of thirteen proposals had been opened at all.
I had spent weeks rewriting my cover letter. The cover letter was never the problem. Both of the two clients who actually read a proposal wrote back. Everything I had been fixing was the one thing that was already working.
That is the distinction a spreadsheet cannot make on its own, and it is the one this app is built around. A low view rate and a low reply rate look equally bad and mean opposite things. One is about which jobs you pick and how fast you apply. The other is about what you wrote.
ProposalIQ is that spreadsheet with the arithmetic done properly: a real connect ledger, the conversion between every funnel stage, boosted and unboosted scored separately, and drafting grounded in the proposals that actually got you hired rather than in generic advice.
It is not trying to automate applying. It is trying to make the twenty seconds after you apply worth something.
The month that started it
- Proposals sent
- 13
- Opened by a client
- 2
- Replied
- 2
- Hired
- 1
Eleven proposals died before anyone read a word of them. These are the same figures the analytics test suite runs against.
Boundaries
What this is not. Worth saying out loud.
Not an automation tool
It never signs in as you, submits a proposal, or sends a single request to upwork.com. If you did not open a page yourself, it was never read.
Not affiliated with Upwork
It stores what you entered, imported, or captured from pages you opened. Nothing is sold or shared, and nothing is scraped from Upwork on your behalf.
Not a replacement for judgement
It will not tell you which job to bid on. It tells you which of your habits is costing you the most, and leaves the decision to you.