What’s new at CivStart

What discovery hands back after the first pass is now called a Challenge Outline, and it is presented as what it is: a genuine artifact, and an incomplete one.

The old version was framed as a finished Challenge Statement. That framing worked against people. If you already have "the answer," there is no reason to keep going, so a large share of sessions stopped at that screen with a half-formed problem statement they believed was done.

The outline now shows what it has, names what is still missing, and offers a single clear way forward into the deep dive. The screen previously carried several competing calls to action; it now carries one.

GovFit account admins can now purchase additional seats for their team directly, at $1,000 per seat per year.

Adding a colleague previously meant emailing us and waiting for someone to process it by hand.

You can now ask a question in the middle of discovery and get an answer, rather than having it treated as your response to whatever was on screen.

Ask "is my challenge private, or can vendors see it?" while the assistant is asking where you work, and you get a real answer about privacy, then it returns you to the question you were on.

Why this mattered

The moment people most want to ask about privacy is the moment they are being asked to share something. Before this, a question asked at that point was parsed as an answer to the current step, which produced a nonsense reply at exactly the wrong time.

The first time you run discovery, a short walkthrough now appears in the conversation itself while your initial patterns are being generated.

It explains the method: we work through the core of your challenge so you leave with clarity on the problem, connections to peers who have faced it, and the confidence to act. Previously that context lived on marketing pages you had already scrolled past, and the app dropped you straight into questions without saying why it was asking.

It runs in the time you were waiting anyway, and it does not block you. Keep typing and it gets out of the way.

You can export generated documents as Word (.docx) again, and the file you open matches the preview and the PDF.

Exports keep their masthead, running header and footer, colors and typography, styled key/value blocks, and data and approvals tables. Lists are real Word lists, so they renumber correctly when you edit them. Previously they were fixed text that looked right until someone inserted a row.

Page breaks are left to Word rather than forced during export. A document with hard breaks looks correct until your first edit reflows it, and then every break lands in the wrong place.

Challenges and signals now show a single, consistent status wherever you see them, running from Initiated through Connected, with the same wording and the same icons at every step.

Before this, the same underlying item could be described one way in one place and another way somewhere else, so status was something you confirmed by asking rather than by reading the screen.

Status badges also render correctly in dark mode, where some of them were previously unreadable.