We take on a small number of projects each quarter. Not because we’re gatekeeping — but because everyone we work with deserves a real team, not a rotating cast.
The consequence: our intake call is short and blunt. If we’re a fit, you’ll know in 30 minutes. If we’re not, you’ll know in the same 30 minutes and we’ll refer you to someone who is.
Here are the four questions we actually care about.
1. What are you optimising for?
Revenue? A pitch? Retention? A specific customer segment? If you can’t answer this in one sentence, we’ll spend the first sprint helping you find the answer — and everything else stays on hold.
2. What have you already tried?
Nobody comes to a build partner with a blank sheet. Whatever you’ve tried — no-code, another agency, a friend who “does Wordpress” — tells us more about the real constraint than a pretty brief ever could.
3. Who owns this after we leave?
If the answer is “nobody yet”, that’s fine — but then part of the scope has to include hiring or handover. We won’t leave the codebase in a black box.
4. What’s the failure mode you can’t accept?
“We miss the launch date.” “The site goes down on demo day.” “Legal isn’t happy with the data flow.” Naming the failure mode upfront lets us design around it — instead of pretending it won’t happen.
That’s it. No pitch deck. No SoW draft in the first meeting. If those four questions have clean answers on both sides, we can be scoping by the end of the week.