OurFX 1.0

On January 5, 2025, I wrote down a list of people I wanted to build a software solution for. Top of the list?

#1. Vince, the SE

Vince is an old friend who had just moved into the SE - Sales/Solutions Engineer - role for the first time. The company he was working at was moving up market, going from individual business sales to corporate franchise deals. And with it, complexity in the requirements. The RFPs started coming.

Ugh - RFPs. RFIs. Request for anything - RFXs. I remember that. When I was an SE, hundreds of rows, 1 day turn arounds, AEs who didn't deeply understand the product and pinging me in #ask-product, having to hunt down the answer. Copy and past old answers and reworking.

In 2014 SE John saw no solution. It was too complicated.

In 2025 - the solution was there. AI chatbots were getting agentic capabilities and LLMs better at writing and reasoning.

I set out to automate the RFX process. So Vince and I pulled up the chatbots -- Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude. Oh, they could do it! But wait, those answers were hallucinated, sounded generic, it tapped out at 10 requirements. Hmmmm... But close.

I reached out to my other SE friends. If not manual or some sort of hacked AI chat, it was a legacy tool like Loopio that required carefully curating a response library and having a proposal/bid team run the process.

What if the solution moved beyond the library (fancy "AI" copy and paste) and was truly agentic. SEs were getting pinged daily about product functionality, answering a few client questions in an email, hopping on a last-minute 15 Q&A with a prospect to demo "some features." What if we could "hire" a solution into the team.

SEs are the most valuable people in any Software company. Fight me on it. Then why are they doing a ton of low-value, manual stuff? Let's get them out of the critical path and empower the entire sales org to win the technical sale. And bring in the personal secret sauce that so many of the automation and GenAI solutions failed. What would SEs actual say to win the sale? RFX automated in "Our" voice -- OurFX.

Winning the technical sale

The mission of OurFX is to build the ultimate solution to winning the technical sale .

OurFX 1.0 is the first step towards that: you bring your product docs with feature details and your historical RFPs. OurFX learns them. And when an RFP comes through, you drop in the requirements — paste them, import a CSV, whatever — and OurFX matches each requirement to your product's capabilities, pulls in relevant answers from historical RFPs, and drafts responses in your voice. It has built in quality controls to reduce hallications and make the responses shine like your best SE writes (not generic slop). Our initial testing is showing cutting the turn around time for responding to RFPs by 4x.

As we dug in further, the idea of an AI Sales Engineer came out of nearly every convo. Since product and sales (through historical RFPs) info is already embedded in OurFX, what if you could expose that across the sales process? Thus, esee was born. The first version of the SE Agent can answer any question and do anything you'd do as a user in the software -- create an RFP, answer a question, update product docs. Next up, 'esee' will begin integrating into where SEs are getting hit up most -- chat and email.

The idea is OurFX is that it sits between "paste it into ChatGPT and hope" and "pay $30k/year for an enterprise platform only your dedicated proposal team uses." RFX for the SE who's doing the RFP process mostly by themselves.

Here's a short overview of the solution:

Open core

Agentic coding tools are getting really really good. I'm technical: I understand systems and data and UX and can have an informed conversation with both an engineer as with a CIO. But before this year, I only wrote a few lines of python and javascript in college and hobby side projects. I'm not a "true" engineer per se, but I've built OurFX.

If you watch closely, Claude Code and other coding tools are making their way from traditionally trained software engineers to sales engineers. SEs increasingly building their own homegrown solutions with full-code. SaaS is both dead and very much growing.

So what are a bunch of B2B SaaS, walled garden, RFP automation products doing trying to sell to SEs? There's no longer space for that. Agents are going to win. Nearly every SE now has the power and skills to fork Github repos. Open-source / open-core software is going to win. It's about building community. It's about building solutions together. The new B2B SaaS for SEs needs to look more like dev tools/ packages and less like Salesforce.

OurFX 1.0 is open core. You can email me at john@ourfx.ai for instructions how to access the repo. If you're a non-technical SE (there are a TON) or don't have time to build (don't pretend 10pm - 1am is your time to build for your day job), then there's a hosted version you can pay for.

This is my gift as a career SE to the SE community.

I'm both excited and terrified of releasing 1.0. While I've had dozens of Alpha testers over the past months, I know it's not perfect, and that it's far from my dream RFP / AI SE solution. There's. So. Much. More. To. Do. And the roadmap is really up to us in the SE community to define and build out together!

I'd like to do this full time, so if you're compelled the project and me on my journey, please contribute as a paying customer and/or to the open core version. I'm even experimenting with bringing paying clients into the hosted version's code (with protection) to be design partners and co-build the ultimate SE solution.

A huge thank you to the sales engineers who have partnered on this project, from casual chats to alpha testers: Vince, Corey, Katie, Ashley, Joshua, John, Peter, Adam, Jeremy, Eddie, Ryan, Al, Eric.

To the sales leaders and advisors: Joe, Ben, Bradford.

To the fellow builders - product, design, and engineers: Nick, Ayuba, Paul, Fedor, Christian, Arielle, Aaron, Teresa, Jonathan, Symon.

And lastly to my wife, who is both a marketing & UX wiz as well as a life partner supporting my many projects, both weird and pratical: Kelsey.

Let's win that technical sale!