The intro call is twenty minutes on Google Meet. People sometimes apologise for not having “a proper brief” ready. Good news: the proper brief is usually just the problem, said plainly.
Bring these five things
- The problem, in one sentence. Plain words beat strategy language. “Nobody under 25 registers until the last week” is a good brief.
- What “worked” looks like. If we’re celebrating in twelve months, what happened?
- Who has to care. The actual person, not the demographic.
- What already exists. The current site, last year’s campaign, the photo folder nobody opens. If your team already runs its own CMS, bring the login: it tells us more than a description would.
- The real deadline. Not the padded one. We can work with honest.a
Leave these at home
The slide deck can stay home; it answers questions nobody’s asked yet. Same with the feature list, since features are outputs of the message, not inputs. And the apology isn’t needed either: “this might be a silly question” has started some of the best projects on our books.
You don’t need the answers on the call. That’s what the twenty minutes is for.
Afterwards, you get a written scope inside two working days: what we’d make, why, and the number, together. No surprises at proposal stage, ever.b If the scope doesn’t match what you said on the call, that’s on us to explain, not you to accept.