What happens in a first consultation, and what you take away

A first consultation is not a sales call. It is an hour spent understanding your problem well enough to say whether and how we can help — and sometimes that you do not need to build anything at all.

We understand the worry. For a lot of people the word "consultation" is a euphemism for an hour of being sold to. It is not that here, for a simple reason: selling you the wrong project pays off for nobody.

What we ask

Most of the time we ask "why". Not what system you want, but why you want it. What is not working today. Where time or money is leaking. What you have already tried and why it did not work.

We also want to know what happens when it fails. Who catches it, how quickly, what it costs. Those answers often reveal where the real priority is — and where there is only a sense that "it ought to be digitised".

Why we put the weight on context rather than a ready-made solution is covered in why context comes before code.

How to prepare

There is nothing to prepare, and above all no need to arrive with a solution. The worst consultations are the ones where a client shows up with a finished brief — "I want an app that does X" — and resists any question about why X.

It helps to think through one thing beforehand: if you had a magic wand, what exactly should improve in the business tomorrow? Not by which technology — what result. That is enough to start.

What you leave with

Ideally three things: a clearer statement of the problem, a rough sense of what a solution would involve, and an honest opinion on whether it is worth doing now.

Sometimes you leave with "do not do this". If your problem can be solved by configuring a tool you already own, we will say so. Losing one job is cheaper than a client who discovers a year later that somebody sold them something pointless.

What comes next

When it makes sense to both sides, we prepare a proposal with scope and price. This is also where the engagement model is decided — on when a fixed price beats hourly, see fixed price or hourly.

If you want to see how the process continues, look at how it works, or simply book a consultation. It is free of commitment — not as a slogan, but as the condition that makes it worth having.