Pitch sites instead of PDFs: the proposal that is a website

The general manager of a beach resort gets more proposals than they can read, and nearly all of them are PDF attachments. Ours is a web address with the resort's name in it, their logo at the top, and a shuttle rendered in their colors driving across the screen.

What a proposal is for

A proposal has one job: make the reader picture the thing working at their property. A PDF makes that hard. It is a static document with our branding on it, describing their situation in our words, next to a generic photo. The reader has to do all the imagining. A pitch site does the imagining for them.

What a pitch site is

It is a small website, built for one prospect, that looks like it already belongs to them. Their logo. Their exact brand colors, taken from their own site or brand guide, never approximated. Their property name in the headline. The service described in terms of their guests, their parking problem, their walk to the beach. And in the middle of the page, a demo they can click through: a rider app with their name on it, a vehicle rendered in their livery, a map of their actual neighborhood with the stops where they would be.

The page is private, at an address only they have. It works on a phone, because the general manager will open it from the lobby. It prints cleanly if someone upstairs insists on paper.

One per prospect, without starting over

The trick is that the site is a template plus a configuration. Every pitch site shares one codebase: the layout, the sections, the demo, the animation that drives the vehicle across the top of the page. What changes per prospect is a single short list of values.

1. The property name and location.
2. The logo file and the brand colors.
3. The photos: their own, from their website or sent over by their team.
4. The proposed service: the route, the hours, how many vehicles, the stops on the map.
5. The specific problem we are solving, in their words, taken from the first conversation.
6. Who it is addressed to, by title rather than by name, so the page can be forwarded without awkwardness.

Fill in the values, render the vehicle in their colors, publish. A new pitch site takes an afternoon, not a week, and the next one for a similar property takes less.

Why it closes

• It gets forwarded. A PDF attachment gets buried in a thread. A link gets pasted into a message to the owner or the board with "look at this."
• It shows effort. The reader can tell this was made for them, and that reads as a company that will also run the service with care.
• It answers the real question. The reader is not wondering whether shuttles exist. They are wondering what one would look like pulling up to their front door. The render answers that.
• It is interactive. Clicking through the demo is a small act of using the product, and people who have used something find it easier to say yes to it.
• It can be updated. When the prospect asks for a second route option, we change the values and the same link now shows the new plan. No "final version three" attachments.

What we leave out

The pitch site is not the contract and it is not the full operating plan. There is no fine print on the page, no insurance language, no long schedule of terms. Those come later, in the documents built for them. The pitch page has one audience, the person deciding whether to keep talking, and one job, making that decision easy. Everything that does not serve that job is left off.

Where this goes beyond shuttles

The same pattern works for any business that sells a project to a decision maker. A custom home builder can show a prospect a page with their lot, their style references and a process timeline. A cabinet shop can show a kitchen with the client's layout and the finish they chose. A landscaper can show the yard with the plan drawn over it. In each case the proposal stops being a document about us and becomes a preview of them.

We built this template first for the shuttle company we came out of, pitching hotels and resorts from the Keys to Palm Beach, and we now build the same kind of per prospect page for the trade and professional businesses we work with.

Questions people ask