The forty-minute conversation that saves the project.
Why we won't quote anything serious without a discovery call.
We get asked to quote things sight-unseen. Sometimes from a one-line brief, sometimes from a three-paragraph email, sometimes from a Notion document a procurement team forwarded.
We do not quote any of those.
What we do is reply with a calendar link to a 40-minute call. Free. No pre-call questionnaire. We will be on it, and we will ask questions until we either understand the problem well enough to estimate, or until we both agree we're not the right team and part on good terms.
What 40 minutes buys
Four things that no written brief has ever surfaced for us:
Who actually decides. The person sending the brief is rarely the person whose budget will sign off, and almost never the person whose team will live with what we build. We need to understand the chain.
What was tried before. Almost every "new" project is the third or fourth attempt at solving the same thing. The history of what didn't work tells us more than the spec of what's wanted.
What scares them. Every client has one or two anxieties about the project that they won't put in a brief because they don't want it to influence pricing. We need to hear those.
What success looks like in twelve months. Not the launch criteria. The "is this still in use, has it earned its keep" criteria. That's almost never in the brief.
You cannot get those four things from a document. Forty minutes is what it costs to get them.