Notes from the Build: Where Signal78 Stands This Fall

Signal78 is in production, our pilot agencies are proving it out on real work, and the next six months are mapped.

Our pilots are where Signal78 earns its keep. Agencies bring live pursuits, real deadlines and zero patience for anything that doesn’t hold up — and that’s exactly the point. What’s changed this fall is what those pilots run on. They’re no longer testing a prototype. They’re working in a production platform, built secure from the ground up, and every week of real use makes it sharper.

So this is a status report. What we’ve built, what it’s proven and what’s coming.

The platform is live — and secure from day one

Signal78 went into production during the summer and has progressed quickly. We demoed a brain for one of our agency clients in early August. By the time we kicked off with another client in early September, the platform’s capabilities had grown exponentially.

Signal78 is built on the part most people never see. It has run on secure, multi-tenant infrastructure from day one — every agency’s knowledge walled off from every other agency’s. An agency’s proposals, pricing and client history are among the most sensitive things it owns, and our clients ask about data security before they ask about anything else. We knew we couldn’t vibe code our way to protecting that, so we didn’t try. The plumbing came first.

Here’s what our clients are doing with Signal78 today:

• Building a brain from their own material — past proposals, case studies, positioning, the way they talk about their work
• Running live new-business pursuits from RFP intake through prospect intelligence to a strategic point of view, in the right voice for each brand
• Settling the brain’s questions as it flags gaps and conflicts and routes each one to the person who can answer it

What we've proven

The core bet was that an agency’s knowledge is more useful synthesized than searched. Pointing a large language model at years of document history and asking it to reason its way through works about as well as handing a new hire the shared drive and wishing them luck. Here’s what live agency work has shown us:

• A synthesized brain beats a searched one. A brain that has already read everything, organized it and reconciled what it could gives sharper, more consistent answers.
• The right question to the right person gets the right answer. A question sent to a group gets answered by whoever has a minute. Routed to the one role who can settle it, it gets answered correctly.
• Every correction compounds. Each call people make gets recorded, so the brain gets sharper instead of just bigger.
• Setup went from weeks to days. Standing up a new brain took six weeks in July. It now takes one to two days.

That’s the human in the loop in practice. The platform does the reading. People make the calls. And live RFPs — the best stress test there is — showed us exactly where to reinforce the brain next.

The next six months

Here’s what’s shipping between now and spring.

October: Output that looks like the agency made it 

• Additional structure in the brain — a knowledge graph that maps which client, which capability, which result and which person connect, so outputs get more reliable run after run
• Pursuits that end in a fully branded proposal, in the agency’s own template, as editable Word and PowerPoint files
• Upload documents and the platform builds the brain itself
• Ask the brain to update itself, and see what changed and why

 November: Workflows and an editor that respects the work 

• The full proposal process, with scoping and pricing proposed from what the brain holds
• Comment on any part of a proposal and the platform revises only that part — edits stick, and the platform learns from them
• New workflows configured rather than built, starting with the rest of new business, then delivery

December: Integrations and holding-company scale

• First integrations with other systems of record
• Client brains walled off by agency, built for holding companies with several shops under one roof
• Brand templates the system builds from an agency’s own materials

Early 2027: Beyond new business

• Cost tuning
• Resourcing and finance
• Then operations and HR

Where you come in

We’re opening Signal78 to more agencies this fall. Three ways to get started:

• Sign up for a demo. It’s the best way to see what Signal78 is capable of.
• Email me to sign up for a pilot. We’re still onboarding new pilot clients to the platform. It’s fast and easy and you’ll see nearly immediate value.
• Invest. If you’re interested in helping us accelerate Signal78’s progress, we’re in the middle of an angel round of funding and would love to talk with you.

If you run an agency and any of this sounds like the problem you’ve been trying to solve with a stack of chat windows and a shared drive nobody can search, I’d like to show you what it looks like now.

The platform is live. The work is getting more interesting every day.