The first call isn't a sales pitch, or at least it shouldn't be. It's where we figure out whether there's a real problem worth solving, and whether I'm the right person to solve it. Get this conversation right and everything after it goes smoother.
I'm not trying to hear a feature list. I'm trying to understand the business underneath the request.
What I'm listening for
A useful discovery call digs into a few things:
- The problem behind the ask. You might want a booking system; what you actually need is to stop losing an evening a week to phone tag.
- What success looks like. If we can't describe the outcome, we can't tell when we've hit it.
- What's off the table. Budget, deadlines, and hard constraints are far kinder to know up front than to discover later.
A request tells me what you want built. The reasons behind it tell me what to build instead.
Why it matters
Skipping this step is how projects end up technically finished but practically useless. Fifteen minutes of good questions at the start saves weeks of building the wrong thing, and it's how a fixed price becomes possible in the first place.
