Most discovery calls go off the rails in the first ten minutes. Someone shows up with a feature list, the agency starts nodding, and an hour later you have a quote for the wrong project.
Bots runs every first call. Here are the five questions, in order, that we actually ask.
1. What happens if you don't build this?
If the answer is "nothing changes," we have a problem. Either the project isn't urgent enough to commission, or the prospect hasn't articulated the cost of inaction, or the project is a vanity build.
A good answer sounds like: We're losing X deals a month because Y. We'll lose more next quarter unless this exists.
A bad answer sounds like: I just thought it'd be cool to have.
2. Who specifically is going to use this on Monday morning?
Not "users." A person. Their job title, their inbox, their existing tooling. The number of projects that fall apart because no one ever asked who was actually going to log in is staggering.
If you can't name a person — by job, not by persona — the project doesn't exist yet.
3. What did you try before you called us?
Most prospects have already tried something. Off-the-shelf SaaS. A previous freelancer. A team member built a Notion thing. We want to know what failed and why.
This is the single most useful answer in the call. Half the time the failure mode tells us exactly what shape the real solution needs.
4. What's the budget?
I know. Everyone tells you not to ask this. Ask it.
Budget isn't about cost — it's about scope. A project with a $20k budget and a $200k budget aren't the same project at different prices. They're different projects. Knowing the budget tells us which version to design.
If they won't share, we share first: a rough range based on the brief. Anchors the conversation.
5. Who else is in the decision?
The most expensive question we never used to ask. We'd build a perfect pitch for the founder, and three weeks later their CFO would kill it because nobody had told the CFO it was happening.
Now we ask up front. If there's a CFO, a board, a CTO, a head of ops — they get included in pass two.
What we don't ask
We don't ask for technical specs on the first call. We don't ask what stack they want. We don't ask for a feature list. Those answers come from us, not from the prospect, after we understand the actual problem.
If your discovery call starts with "what tech stack are you thinking?" — get a different agency.