What a scoping call is for

We ask every enquiry to start with a scoping call, and people reasonably assume that is a sales meeting wearing a polite hat. It is not. It is the cheapest hour in the whole engagement, and it is where most of the money is either saved or lost.

Three questions, in order

What breaks if this does not get built? Not what the software does. What happens to the business without it. If the honest answer is “not much yet”, that is worth finding out before anyone writes a proposal. Some of the most useful calls we have had ended with us saying the problem was a spreadsheet and a process change, not a product.

Where is it now? Greenfield, half-built, or inherited. Each has a completely different first month. Inherited systems in particular need a read of the code before anyone can quote honestly, because the gap between “it mostly works” and what is actually in the repository is where fixed-price projects go to die.

Who owns it after we hand it over? This changes the architecture. A team with a Laravel developer gets a different handover from a founder who will be the only person with the keys. Building the second one as though it were the first is how a client ends up locked into their own vendor.

What we produce afterwards

Within a day or two you get back a written summary: what we understood the problem to be, what we would build first, what we would deliberately leave out of phase one, and the shape of the commercial arrangement. Whether it is a fixed scope or a rate depends on how much of the above is actually known.

If the answer is that the work is not a fit for us, you get that in writing too, with a reason. An engagement that should not have started is more expensive than one that never did.

Why we do not quote from a brief alone

A written brief describes a solution somebody has already chosen. Quoting against it means pricing that choice without ever testing it, and if the choice is wrong, the estimate is precise and useless.

We would rather spend an hour understanding the problem and be slower to send a number.

What to bring

Nothing formal. If you have a document, send it. If you have a spreadsheet holding the business together, that is more useful than a document. Screens of the existing system, a rough sense of budget, and the date something has to be live by are enough to make the hour count.