A response to New YouTube Channel: Answering the RFP (February 2024)
In February 2024 I launched a YouTube series called Answering the RFP. I opened it with a deliberately cranky premise: RFPs are evil. But the series wasn’t really about complaining. It was about turning questions into opportunities:
“answering questions is a golden opportunity to lay the foundations of trust”
The series was mainly for our agency partners: design firms, ad agencies, and marketing professionals who sell websites to their clients but rely on a developer to deliver them. I knew how risky those projects felt. A web project that goes badly can damage a client relationship an agency spent years building.
The answers were built on a different approach
I was upfront about where our answers came from:
“HOLTER Strategic provides exclusively WordPress development, and we follow a Low Code / No Code development philosophy.”
That was true at the time, and those answers were good ones. Low code was the best way we knew to deliver custom websites at a reasonable price. When a prospect asked how much a feature would cost, or how long a project would take, our answers were shaped by page builders, plugin frameworks, and the trade offs that came with them.
Today we still build exclusively on WordPress. But we’ve moved past low code. AI agents now write and revise custom code under experienced direction, so the expensive part of building a website, the development, has collapsed. I explain the full reasoning in why I moved from low code to agentic.
That means many of my old answers have new versions. “How much will it cost?” now has a much smaller number. “Can we have this custom design?” no longer comes with a warning about the budget. “Will the site be fast?” no longer needs an asterisk about page builder weight. I’m working through those answers one by one in this series of responses.
What was platform independent still is
I also said something in that first video that holds up even better than I expected:
“many of the questions and answers we’ll explore are platform independent”
The technology under the answers has changed. The value of a clear answer hasn’t. An agency still needs to know what to ask a client before a project starts. A client still needs to understand what drives cost, who will make decisions, what support looks like after launch, and who stands behind the site. Those questions don’t care whether the code was written by a person, generated by a page builder, or written by an agent.
If anything, the questions matter more now. When building is fast, the risk moves upstream. A project that starts with fuzzy goals can now produce a polished site that solves the wrong problem, very quickly. The strategic Q&A at the start is where that gets prevented.
Still evil, still worth answering
I stand by what I said about document-only RFPs. A process that forbids conversation produces a project as flawed as the process. I don’t respond to those, and I’d still encourage agencies to push for a real conversation whenever they can.
What’s changed is that we can now make the conversation concrete much sooner. Instead of answering only with documents and estimates, we can often show a working direction early, something a client can click and react to. That turns a question-and-answer process into a shared look at the actual thing.
For our agency partners, the deal is better than it was in 2024. The trust-building part is the same. The answers are just more generous: custom work, lean code, and a price that leaves room in the budget. If you’re an agency that wants to have that conversation with your own clients, let’s talk.
Be clear. Build trust. Win clients. That part I wouldn’t change.
¡Viva la Revolución!