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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"Proposals into silence" is a brutal stage — usually means you're reaching people who aren't in active buying pain yet, or the message sounds like a pitch not a diagnosis.
Are you hunting founders who already describe doc/proposal pain in public, or mostly outbound from lists?
That's a great question. Right now it's been mostly founder-led outreach and customer discovery rather than list-based outbound. I'm intentionally speaking with sales reps, sales leaders, and GTM professionals who have experienced deals going quiet after proposals, to understand whether the problem is painful enough to solve and whether the product fits naturally into their workflow.
The conversations have actually changed the product quite a bit already. My next step is working with a small group of design partners who'll use it on real opportunities and help shape it before scaling outreach.
design partners on real quiet deals sounds like the right move — better than guessing from proposal analytics alone.
curious what you're hearing most: "need to think about it" silence vs they went dark after pricing vs internal approval stuck?
that split usually changes whether the fix is follow-up timing, call moment, or proposal content.
This is a very real problem.
The silence after sending a proposal is weird because you don’t know if they ignored it, forgot it, shared it internally, or are actually interested but slow.
I like the point that the value is not just “they opened page 3”, but what that means and what you should do next.
The interpretation layer feels more useful than the raw analytics.
That's the exact distinction we're building around, and you've put words to it better than our own landing page does right now. "They opened page 3" is a fact. What we're trying to answer is the question underneath it — is this a question they're stuck on, a point of hesitation, or just where they got interrupted — and then give you a plain-English next step instead of a chart to interpret yourself.
The silence problem you mentioned is one we think about constantly, because you're right that silence means at least four different things and they call for different responses. We try to combine signals rather than read silence in isolation — for example, silence after someone re-read a specific page reads very differently than silence after someone skimmed the whole thing once and never came back.
Would you be interested in trying it on a real proposal you're sending soon? One thing I'd genuinely value your read on: when the data is thin, we say so directly — "low confidence, not enough to read this yet" — rather than forcing a verdict. Does that feel honest and useful when you see it, or does it feel like the tool is hedging when you'd rather just have a number, even an imperfect one? That tension is one we go back and forth on internally.
I know a few sales professionals who use tools like this and have dealt with that exact silence, so I could ask them your questions if you want. They'd likely be happy to share their insights for free.