What do you need from us to start?
What agencies and studios need to publish
They are trying to work out the hidden cost — their own team's time — which is often larger than the invoice and is almost never stated. Projects fail on this more often than on budget.
How customers actually ask it
The same intent arrives in wording your page probably does not use. All of these mean the same thing:
- “What do you need from us to start?”
- “what is our involvement”
- “how much of our time will this take”
- “what do we have to provide”
- “client responsibilities”
What a complete answer contains
For agencies and studios specifically, an answer is only complete when it covers all 5:
- 1
The client time commitment, as hours per week rather than 'some involvement'
- 2
What must be provided and by when — content, access, brand assets, approvals
- 3
Who needs to be available, by role
- 4
What happens to the timeline if inputs are late
- 5
Which decisions need a single named approver
A worked example
Illustrative — not a real business
Expect about four hours a week from one person on your side, plus a two-hour workshop at the start. We need brand assets, access to your analytics and hosting, and final copy for each page by the date in the schedule. Content is the usual thing that slips: a week late on copy is a week late on launch, because the build waits. We ask for one named approver, because two is how a project loses a month.
Which page should own it
How we work or process page
What silence costs
The project starts, the client's time is not there, the timeline slips, and both sides blame the other for something nobody wrote down.
More questions agencies and studios get
Related
industry
AI customer support for agencies
Agencies field two kinds of question: what do you do, and what does it cost. Both are answerable from the site, and both currently interrupt someone senior. RubyRep answers them from your services and case study pages, and doubles as something you can deploy on client sites.
term
What is AI customer service?
AI customer service means answering customer questions with a language model rather than a person. The useful implementations are grounded in a specific business's own content; the poor ones let a general model improvise, which produces confident answers that are wrong.
term
What is a knowledge base?
Traditionally a knowledge base is a help centre humans read. For AI support it is the source material a representative answers from — which means an ordinary website, well written, can serve as one without a separate help centre.
Does your site answer this already?
Point RubyRep at your website and ask it this exact question. If it cannot answer, neither can your customers.