Understanding how creatives create proposalsUnderstanding how creatives create proposals

As a designer, the business side was the part nobody trained me for. University covered the design work — quoting clients, writing proposals, and pricing services were not on the syllabus. It took me years of trial and error to figure out how to put a real proposal together.

Quoting is the slow, dull part of every project. The proposal is also the first thing the client sees. Designers usually pick between a fast plain Excel sheet or a slow, beautiful Adobe document. I went looking for something that gave me both — fast and good-looking, built for creatives — and nothing existed.

Existing tools are outdated and generic. There are almost no templates built for the Latin American (Spanish) market, so proposals end up taking longer than they should and looking like everyone else's. The other thing missing in most of them: a clear way to spell out the project boundaries so clients actually know what's in scope.

Understand what emerging creatives and freelancers in Latin America actually struggle with when they put a quote together — and where a better tool could save them time. The focus is people early in their careers, where the gap between design school and running a business is widest.

I started by mapping the quoting and invoicing tools out there, mostly in Spanish, with an eye on a few English-language ones worth comparing against.

GetBillage is full-featured invoicing with clean workflows and good mobile. Sage is the heaviest of the three — built for power users who want serious accounting. Debitoor combines invoicing and expense tracking in one straightforward dashboard.

FacturasCloud, AcentoCoop, Canva, Anfix, Billin.net, and Holded all sit in the middle. Each does the job, with very different ideas about what 'good design' means. Canva is the odd one out: it's a graphic design tool that happens to invoice — the documents look great, but the workflow isn't really built for it.

GetQuipu, ContaSimple, Nomo, TPVGratuito, ContaMoney, Gespymes, and ContaAutonomos all rank lower. Same set of problems across the group: dated interfaces, awkward workflows, weak mobile support, and not much help when you get stuck.

Objective: Understand how creatives in Latin America currently quote and where it hurts, and test whether a web app could meaningfully help.

Target audience: People aged 20 to 45 — designers, creatives, musicians, freelancers, and gig workers across Latin America.

I wanted creatives or freelancers who already wrote their own proposals. The pre-screen captured experience, specialization, and location so I could confirm fit before the interview.

I used the same questionnaire across every interview. The questions stayed focused on how each person actually works through a proposal — the steps, the friction, and what they wish they had.

The empathy map pulls together what creatives think, feel, and care about during the proposal process. Putting it on a single page made it easier to design with their actual experience in mind, not an idealized version of it.

I built a day-in-the-life scenario of a video editor from the interview material. A specific story moved stakeholders past abstract user descriptions and into the real context — the time pressure, the workflow, the moments where a proposal stalls a project.