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Starting With A Problem You Can’t Outsource to ChatGPT

If you’ve ever sold into governments or Fortune-500 procurement departments, you already know the pain: 60-page RFPs, last-minute amendments, and Excel trackers that groan under version 99_FINAL(2).docx.

I lived that grind for eight years while scaling pi-top, an EdTech company that shipped STEM hardware into 90 countries. We won the deals—raised $30+ million from VC doing it—but the hidden cost was thousands of human hours spent stitching together source material, compliance matrices, and project plans.

That frustration became a simple “what-if”: What if proposal writers had perfect, on-demand access to perfect information? The idea had only just become a reality with early retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technology in 2022. So three years ago I teamed up with two longtime friends @reuben @rosie to build AI technology and find a use case to apply it toward.

We called the company Intellectible and shipped our first product: a production-grade retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) engine that lets users drop their PDFs into a library and instantly use it to write sections of proposals. It was slick and got us the attention of some great early adopter consultancies. Sounds old hat now but in early 2023 - this was a big deal.

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When Bespoke Meets a Bottleneck

We had the RAG pipeline but to what purpose? Our early customers were federal-grant consultancies cranking out SBIR proposals. They loved the instant drafting power, but soon asked for something we hadn’t planned…

‘This is great, but our process is the special sauce not the source material. Can you make the AI follow our playbook, not just deliver facts?’

Enter the age of hand-coded “document models.” Think of them as tightly-scoped, agentic workflows built to nail one complex output—say an AFWERX Phase I SBIR proposal. They were magical when they worked … and painfully slow to build:

• 2–3 months of prompt-engineering, edge-case tuning, and test runs to get a single model rock-solid
• Every new solicitation tweak meant diving back into code
• Clients loved the results though—and instantly asked, “Great, can you automate our Phase II? Our technical volumes? Our investment memos?”

We tried to shoehorn extra branches into each model, hoping a “super-model” would handle every document. The more generic we made it, the more we diluted the laser-focused flow that made the individual document models so good.

That’s when reality clicked:

Elite teams win because of their playbooks—25 years of heuristics, checklists, and edge-case tricks—not in spite of them. A vanilla chatbot will never replace that expertise, but hand-coding every custom flow would never scale.

Answer: Build the tooling so custom flows could be assembled in hours, not quarters.

Enter the Intellectible No-Code Editor—drag-and-drop nodes, and a basic form builder that let us spin up new “document models” at light speed.

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High-value Knowledge Workers Needed UX—Not a Form

Digital-twinning a client’s SOP is only half the battle; the people who live that SOP still have to drive the work. We discovered something fast:

Complex documents create complex user journeys—no one writes a Phase II proposal the same way they fill out a Google Form.

A grant writer might jump between five sections, a reviewer might need to insert real-time guidance, and a compliance lead might insist on their own checkpoint flow. A linear form simply can’t bend to that choreography.

So we replaced “Form Builder” with a drag-and-drop Web-App Builder wired directly into the node editor. Now every automation can surface an interface that mirrors the client’s actual playbook—sub-sections, parallel reviews, conditional paths and all—in a matter of hours.

The impact:

• Users stay in flow. They work inside an interface that unfolds exactly the way their SOP says it should.
• SOP fidelity stays intact. No one is forced to dumb-down a 25-year process to fit a single-page survey.
• Iteration becomes instant. When the playbook evolves (and it always does), the front end evolves with a few drag-and-drops instead of a dev sprint.

That shift—from “fill in these boxes” to “work the way you already win”—unlocked the kind of high-value, document-heavy automations that pushed Intellectible beyond grant bots and into full-stack territory.

But there was just one thing missing - all these teams have so much unstructured source material - they are constantly searching for opportunities on Sam.gov and Grants.gov and Intellectible needed to solve this mess or them… Enter the era of one click SQL databases that turn unstructured data into structured perfection.

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The SQL Update That Changed Everything

Until recently, external data sat on the side lines—spreadsheets, cloud drives, ad-hoc APIs. Our latest release bakes an SQL engine directly into the node canvas and the front-end builder.

Now every automation can read, write, join, and embed millions of rows as easily as dropping a node down on a canvas.

Why it’s a game-changer

Old way	New way with Intellectible SQL
Shuffle CSVs between scripts	Query live tables inside the same drag-and-drop build
API calls stitched together with code	Native SQL nodes—no endpoints, no glue code
Data team needed for every schema change	Drag and drop visual nodes, hits Run

Do you want clean data that stays in your organisation forever? Intellectible is how you do it.

The SAM.gov Firehose (live in production)

• 2:00 a.m. – Scheduled pipeline ingests every new solicitation from SAM.gov
• Clean + dedupe automations write the data into Intellectible SQL
• Embedding node tags each opportunity for instant semantic search

At 8:00 a.m. your BD portal shows:

• Ranked matches to your capability keywords
• Go/No-Go score based on ceiling, contract type, past-performance fit
• One-click to spin up a pre-filled proposal model, compliance matrix, and SOW draft
• Team starts shaping the win strategy—not hunting PDFs

Swap SAM.gov for FDA 510(k) filings, USPTO patents, or ESG disclosures—the blueprint is identical.

Data in - organized with Intellectible automations - stored in SQL = super human insights out, revenue potential that was previously a pipedream—all without leaving the visual canvas.

Result: business-dev teams work on deals, not document wrangling.

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Looking Back: The Pivot That Set Our Destiny

The breakthrough wasn’t a new model or a clever prompt—it was the moment we admitted a hard truth:

Winning teams don’t adapt to software. Successful software adapts to winning teams.

To honor each client’s battle-tested playbook and still move at startup speed, we rebuilt Intellectible on three non-negotiable pillars:

Pillar	Purpose	Why it matters to elite teams
Visual Automation Engine	Drag-and-drop nodes for logic, LLM calls, APIs, and conditionals	Reproduces decades-old SOPs exactly—from Phase II SBIR flows to multi-stage RFP reviews—without forcing anyone to write code
One-Click SQL Databases	Create, join, and query live tables inside the same canvas	Keeps every contract clause, resume, or SAM.gov row at the automation’s fingertips—no spreadsheet juggling, no external DBA
Front-End Builder	Assemble fully branded web apps straight from the workflow	Gives writers, reviewers, and execs an interface that feels like their process—not a generic form—so adoption sticks and iteration is instant

Together these pillars let any non-developer clone an SOP, inject AI horsepower, and iterate in hours instead of quarters.

It’s the reason Intellectible jumped from “grant bot” to a full-stack platform trusted to automate whatever complex workflow our clients tackle next.

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Case Study #1 — Inspiralia

Pain: Relentless proposal deadlines, ever-changing grant rules, no headcount budget.

Solution: 25 bespoke automations spanning opportunity discovery, first-draft generation, and compliance scoring.

“We knew AI could help with our growing workload and constant changes, but we didn’t have a clear way—or the right partner—to make it actually work for us. After trying multiple service providers, Intellectible stood out by taking the time to deeply understand our operations and delivering a tailored solution that now supports several key areas of our business"

— Fernando H., VP of Sales and Operations at Inspiralia USA

Outcome: Deadlines met, workload up, headcount flat.

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Case Study #2 — MakerBot Nebula

Challenge: Build a category-defining AI teaching experience—fast.

Numbers: Typical dev cycle: 9 months → Intellectible: 8 weeks.

Why it worked:

• SOP-to-automation mapping means adding a new subject area in hours, not weeks
• Visual engine eliminates engineering bottlenecks; educators own their UX
• Reusable components let MakerBot spin up student, teacher, and admin portals on the same stack

“Intellectible let us think like educators and build like a top AI lab. We shipped a category-defining platform in under two months, and the partnership felt like we’d hired an entire senior AI team overnight.”

— Dottie Stewart, VP Sales Americas & Global Education Strategy, MakerBot - UltiMaker Education

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Built, Not Bolted-On—Why Full-Stack Matters

We didn’t stitch together LangChain here, Pinecone there, and a dozen SaaS APIs in between. We built Intellectible the same way the best cloud platforms are built: everything that matters lives inside one roof. Vector search, orchestration, SQL, UI, auth, billing—engineered to work together from day one.

That decision isn’t about shaving micro-seconds; it’s about erasing the hundred hidden costs that show up when you try to weave half a dozen point solutions into something production-ready.

Why it matters to real teams

• Frictionless shipping
  No SDK hopscotch, no “read the docs, then read three more.” Open the editor, drag in a node, test, deploy. Most customers hit a working proof-of-concept before the coffee is cold.
• Head-count neutral
  You’re not hiring DevOps or glue-code wranglers. The orchestration, scaling, and monitoring are already done—your current team just plugs in the logic.
• Operates like cloud, bills like SaaS
  You dodge the payroll, licensing, and maintenance line items that turn DIY into a money pit. Classic “rent the cloud, don’t build the data-center” economics.
• One brain to pick, one throat to choke
  Support, roadmap, and security all come from a single vendor. When something breaks, there’s no round-robin blame game across six dashboards—just a ticket and a resolution.
• Governance without gymnastics
  Data never leaves our VPC unless you say so. Fewer external services means faster audits, simpler contracts, and retention rules you can actually enforce.

Net effect: You spend your time refining workflows, not wrestling infrastructure. We absorbed the complexity so your team can ship faster, learn less tooling, and stay laser-focused on the work that wins deals.

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Next Move — Build, Ship, and Scale on Intellectible

Real-world proof.

• MakerBot turned years of lesson plans, CAD files, and training docs into a live AI teacher portal — in eight weeks, with no extra developers.
• Federal consultancies pipe fresh SAM.gov data straight into Intellectible SQL, trigger go/no-go scoring, and auto-draft proposals before lunch.

The fork in the road:

1. Keep stapling ChatGPT prompts onto 20-year-old workflows.
2. Recreate those workflows in Intellectible and let AI amplify what already makes you great.

Choose #2 and you get:

What you gain	Why it matters
Weeks, not months, to launch	Drag-and-drop your SOP into a visual canvas. Intellectible handles the plumbing so your team can focus on logic, not boilerplate.
Fewer moving parts	One unified stack means less to deploy, less to learn, and far less that can break. We’ve tackled the hard stuff—vector search, orchestration, security—so you don’t have to.
Straightforward economics	Pay a single token rate for a fully managed platform. Total cost of ownership stays low because you’re not burning budget on DevOps, middleware, or piecemeal APIs.
Enterprise-grade control	Data lives inside our VPC under your retention rules. Revoke access or rotate keys anytime—no sprawling third-party trail.
Future-proof extensibility	Snap in any content—RFP clauses, grant solicitations, past-performance docs—through one-click SQL or API nodes, then iterate without touching code.

Bottom line: Launch a branded web app that walks any employee, partner, or customer—across teams and industries—through the precise steps that drive results, without hiring developers, wrangling infrastructure, or juggling a dozen micro-providers.

Intellectible is the best platform for AI-powered automation.

AI isn’t a strategy if you can’t build with it. From front-end flows to back-end logic, our visual framework lets your team design, deploy, and evolve AI systems—no code required.