I Built the $6 AI Company: From Client Intake to Verified Proposal | EP 2

In the first film, we build the foundation. In this episode, we give that foundation work to do. We take one client inquiry from source material to a proposal and a follow-up draft. These are the tools we use, not as a shopping list. Dockling reads the client PDF. Crawl for AI reads an authorized website. Markdown converts notes. Twenty and Active Pieces manage the handoff. Present and PowerPoint, cal.com, and List Monk take us from proposal to review and follow up. You do not need every tool before you begin. Follow the request. Here is the request we follow. North Star Studios fictional, but the workflow is real. A workshop document, a website link, and one question. Can you help us launch it? A checked brief, a lead with a next action. An editable proposal, human approval. Follow the request. Each tool earns its place by moving that request closer closer to something a customer can use. Start with the material the client already has. Dockling converts the PDF into a form our next step can read. Check the date, opacity, and delivery format against the original source. The useful information is accessible, and we can still point to where it came from. The client also sent a website with the audience description and common questions. For this page, we use Crawl for AI. Watch the real page load, then look at the extracted markdown. The useful section is something we can compare, quote, and attach to the request. We save the address and retrieval date with it. A page can change, but a saved paragraph with its source is easy to verify. One more attachment arrives, the client's notes in a Word document. Markdown converts the file to markdown. The client's exclusions matter just as much as the sales copy. Here is the working brief. Practical workshop and launch materials included. No advertising budget, no new product development, and no unverified revenue promises. I approve the brief and lock version one. That gives you a service you can explain. Organize a client's source material and deliver a brief they can approve. Agree the scope, the review, and the handover before you quote. But useful research still needs somewhere to go. Let's make sure the inquiry gets an owner and a next action. In 20 CRM, we create the client record, attach the source inquiry, and set a visible next action, review the workshop proposal. One person, one owner, one next step. Now we connect the handoff in active pieces. When the inquiry form submits, a webhook triggers, checks the fields, and creates the lead in 20 CRM with the request ID attached. A repeated job with a visible input and a visible result. What happens when the client clicks submit a second time? In a naive setup, you get two leads, duplicate tasks, and duplicate follow-ups. Here our webhook validates the request ID. It detects the duplicate, logs the attempt, and keeps the lead count strictly at one. Safe by design. You do not have to use active pieces. If you need a vast library of pre-built integrations, choose N8N. If you want code-first workflows in Python or Windmill is built for that. For vector search, start with PGVector in Postgres before jumping to dedicated clusters. Pick the simplest tool that does the job. Now, we make the offer visible. From our approved brief, Present and Draft an editable six-slide proposal. The scope, dates, and exclusions carry over directly. No hallucinated promises, no invented deliverables. What the client agreed to in the brief is exactly what appears on the slides. A client will always ask for adjustments. Because this is a standard PowerPoint deck, a human opens the file, changes the headline to team session, and saves it. No AI regeneration loops, no loss of formatting. The deck updates cleanly, and version two is locked. You just watched one real inquiry, a PDF, a website, a Word document, move all the way to a proposal, a lead record, and a follow-up draft. Every step ran on open-source tools you can install today. No API bill, no vendor lock-in, no hallucinated promises. Eight tools, each one free, open, and replaceable. DocLink turned the brief into text, Crawl4AI read the client's website, Markdown parsed their notes, 20iCRM captured the lead, ActivePieces ran the flow idempotently, so clicking submit twice changes nothing. Present and Draft edited the deck, PowerPoint let the client edit one line. The whole run, $6 of infrastructure once. In the next episode, we take the same pipeline and stress test it. 10 more tools, one harder client, and a workflow that has to survive a bad data day. If this was useful, subscribe, leave a comment, or share this with one founder who is still doing this by hand. The next episode ships next week.

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