Three months in: what Proffer is, in plain words
A reflective post distilling what was learned about positioning, audience, and the product — a quiet, informed statement of what Proffer actually is.
The Proffer blog
Notes on scheduling, hospitality, and the work.
Short essays on the social side of scheduling, the design choices behind Proffer, and the lessons that keep showing up as I build.
Why I'm not building this for everyone (and why that's the point)
A thought piece on the strategic discipline of narrow positioning, and how naming who a product is not for makes it better for the people it is for.
What I learned from the first ten Proffer users
A distillation of the first customer interviews: the surprises, the unanticipated use cases, and the phrase that came up in three separate conversations.
Building four products at once: how the portfolio model actually works
The Keyser Forge model: one consistent operating system across several products, the daily marketing flywheel, and the honest tradeoff of the support tail.
Group meetings, without the spreadsheet
A walk-through of Group Proffer's logic: why the sender picking candidate times beats letting everyone propose, and the spreadsheet meeting nobody named.
A scheduling tool that sends from your real mailbox, not ours
Microsoft Graph Mail.Send as a design choice, and what sending from your actual mailbox preserves: deliverability, sender identity, the relationship.
The architecture choice I almost got wrong
YAGNI in practice, told as a story: the temptation to over-architect for an imagined future, and the cost of building for a future you haven't earned.
Why Proffer is Microsoft-only at launch (and why that's not a limitation)
A build-in-public case for narrow scope: why launching focused on Microsoft 365 beats launching half-built for everyone.
The small ritual of offering three times
What the three-times pattern accomplishes socially that a booking link doesn't: specificity as respect, constraint as a gift to the recipient.
What scheduling tools forgot about hospitality
Hospitality used to be the default in professional scheduling. Software talked us out of it — and we forgot we ever had the choice.
Ten people sent me Calendly links last week. Here's what I sent back.
On the grassroots experiment of replying to scheduling links with a different kind of scheduling — and what it taught me about the product I'm building.
Why sending a Calendly link to a federal judge feels wrong
Booking links work great for some scheduling. They go strange for the kind that's built on respect. A short reflection on why.
Why I'm writing a blog about scheduling
Scheduling is one of those subjects nobody thinks deserves an essay. That's part of why I'm writing one.
Try it on yourself
Send a Proffer to your own inbox.
Connect Outlook, pick a few times from your real calendar, and send one to your own inbox to see exactly what your recipients see. Five Proffers a month on the free tier. No card required.