Getting started with ProposalLift

Set up personas, portfolio, hooks, and templates, connect Upwork, and draft your first proposal. The order that matters, and what to skip on day one.

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Prefer to read? Every step in the video is written out below.

The fastest way to be disappointed by any AI proposal tool is to generate a proposal before you have given it anything to work with. Drafts here are assembled from your stored context, so the setup is the product.

The video above is a full walkthrough. The written version below is the same steps in the order that matters.

Do these three first

Fifteen minutes on this changes every proposal you write afterwards.

1. One persona

A persona is the version of you a proposal is written as: what you do, who for, and how you talk about it. If you sell more than one service, you will want one per service eventually. Start with one.

2. Two or three portfolio projects

For each: the work, the stack or skills involved, and the outcome. These are ranked against every future job by semantic similarity, which means the description matters more than the presentation. A project described as "Next.js, Prisma, Stripe, cut checkout abandonment by a third" gets matched to the jobs it should. One described as "E-commerce site" does not.

3. One hook and one template

A hook is how the proposal opens. A template is the structure that follows. One of each is plenty to start, and you will improve both by noticing what you keep editing out of real drafts.

Then connect Upwork

This is what turns on job discovery: the live feed, saved filters, alerts, and AI qualification.

Two routes. Register your own developer app, which gives you the full daily request quota to yourself, or use the shared platform app on a paid plan and skip the setup entirely.

Then narrow the feed

Create a saved filter

Make it narrower than feels comfortable. The common mistake is a broad filter that returns forty jobs a day, which is a feed you stop reading within a week. Two tight filters beat one loose one.

Add qualification criteria to it

Write, in plain language, what makes a job wrong for you: the wrong stack, no budget, a client with no hire history, a brief that reads like a copy of someone else's spec. Each job in the feed is then graded against your criteria and marked qualified or disqualified, with the failing criterion shown.

This is the step that saves Connects, and it is the one people skip.

Then draft something and change it

Generate a proposal from a real job, then edit it. Pay attention to what you edit, because that is your feedback loop: if you delete the same opening sentence every time, your hook needs work, not the model.

Finally, install the Chrome extension so you can draft on Upwork's apply page and answer screening questions without switching tabs. It never submits and never spends Connects.

What to skip on day one

  • Every persona you might ever need. One real one beats five sketched ones.
  • A complete portfolio. Three well described projects out-perform fifteen vague ones, because matching runs on the descriptions.
  • Model selection. The default is the cheapest and is good. Revisit it once you have a baseline.
  • Team setup. If you are solo, Pro is the plan. Agency exists for shared personas, portfolio, and a credit pool.

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