TL;DR: Most discovery calls are vibes. Vibes price wrong, scope wrong, and scope-creep-prone. The 28-question discovery questionnaire below replaces vibes with specifics. Send it before the first call, use the answers to write a proposal that prices correctly, and watch scope creep drop because there's nothing left to be vague about. Copy-paste version at the bottom.
A SaaS founder books a 30-minute discovery call. You spend the call asking the obvious questions ("what's the project?" "what's your budget?" "what's your timeline?"). You hang up, write a proposal, send it, win the project. Six weeks in, you discover they actually need three custom integrations, a Spanish language version, and a CMS migration you never priced for. None of it was in the proposal. None of it was discussed. It's not the client's fault. You asked the obvious questions and got obvious answers. The non-obvious answers, the ones that change the project, never came up because you didn't ask.
I'm Sammie Oku, founder of Eximius Studio, a web design and dev agency in Tyler, TX. The 28 questions below are the ones I've added over three years of learning what should have been on the discovery form the whole time. Each one was added after a real project where the missing answer cost me hours, dollars, or a relationship.
This is the discovery questionnaire I send before every sales call. Use it as-is, adapt it to your stack, but ask the questions. Vague discovery is what makes vague proposals, and vague proposals are what makes vague scope.
For context on where this fits, how to run a web design agency is the pillar guide. Discovery and proposal is System 2. The scope creep playbook covers what happens when discovery is sloppy.
What a discovery questionnaire is actually for (it's not a vibe check)
A discovery questionnaire has three jobs. Most agencies use them for one (vibes) and miss the other two.
Job 1: Filter bad-fit leads before they cost you a call. A serious lead will spend 12 minutes filling out a real questionnaire. A tire-kicker will not. The form is a qualification gate before you spend an hour on Zoom.
Job 2: Give you enough information to scope correctly. Most underpriced proposals are written by agencies that didn't ask the right questions. Specific answers let you price specific scope. Vague answers force you to guess, and guesses skew low.
Job 3: Set the precedent that you're organized. A well-built discovery form is the first concrete deliverable the client sees from you. If it's clean, structured, and respects their time, it signals competence before the call even happens.
A bad discovery form has 8 generic questions ("Tell us about your project"). A good one has 28 specific questions that map to the project decisions you'll need to make.
The 6 question categories every form needs
The 28 questions below are organized into six categories. Order matters. Start with the easy contextual stuff to warm the client up, then move to harder questions about budget, scope, and constraints.
- Business and goals (questions 1 to 7)
- Audience and competitors (questions 8 to 12)
- Scope and functionality (questions 13 to 19)
- Brand and design preferences (questions 20 to 23)
- Budget and timeline (questions 24 to 27)
- Risk and worst case (question 28)
Business and goals questions (1-7)
These set the strategic context. Without them, the design decisions you make later have no anchor.
Q1: What does your business do, in one or two sentences? The version they'd give at a networking event. This forces them to articulate the business clearly. If they can't, you'll be writing copy from scratch and should price for it.
Q2: What's the single most important goal of this website? Force one answer. "Increase leads, build brand authority, and improve user experience" is three answers and helps nobody. Push for the one that matters most. The site's structure flows from this answer.
Q3: What would a successful project look like to you 6 months after launch? Specifics here are gold. "We'd be getting 50 qualified leads a month" is a measurable goal. "It would look modern" is a vibe. The specificity of this answer is a predictor of how easy the client will be to work with.
Q4: What's wrong with your current site (or why don't you have one yet)? The answer tells you what not to repeat. If they say "it's slow and the navigation is confusing," you know two things to fix. If they say "I don't like the colors," you know they're focused on aesthetics over function. Both are useful signals.
Q5: Who internally will be making the final approval decisions? Name. One person. If they list a committee, follow up. Discovery is the time to identify the actual decision-maker, not week six.
Q6: Is there a specific event or date driving this project? Product launch, conference, funding announcement, fiscal year. A real deadline anchored to an external event changes how you price urgency. No deadline at all is a yellow flag for indefinite delays.
Q7: Have you worked with an agency before? What worked or didn't? Past agency relationships predict future ones. Clients who fired their last agency for "poor communication" need overcommunication. Clients who fired their last agency for "going over budget" need ironclad scope. The answer tells you which failure mode to defend against.
Audience and competitors questions (8-12)
These shape design and content decisions.
Q8: Who is the primary audience for this site? (Demographics, role, context.) "Small business owners" is too broad. "Operations managers at 50 to 200 person manufacturing companies in the Midwest" is useful. Push for specificity. The audience definition drives copy, design, and information architecture.
Q9: What's the one action you want this audience to take on the site? Book a call, fill a form, buy a product, download a guide, request a quote. Force one. The whole site optimizes for this single action.
Q10: Name 3 competitors or sites you admire (and one thing you like about each). You're not asking them to copy. You're calibrating taste and identifying the design vocabulary they understand. If they admire stripe.com, brex.com, and linear.app, you know they want clean, modern, B2B SaaS aesthetic. If they admire warbyparker.com, allbirds.com, and glossier.com, you know they want lifestyle DTC. Different work, different price.
Q11: Name 1 site you actively dislike (and why). The "what not to do" list is as valuable as the "what to do" list. Often more honest, because clients are clearer about what bothers them than what inspires them.
Q12: Where does your audience currently find you? (Search, social, referrals, ads, events.) Tells you where to focus on-page SEO, social meta, share images. Also signals whether the site is a primary marketing channel or a credibility check after they meet you elsewhere.
Scope and functionality questions (13-19)
This is where most underpricing happens. The questions below surface scope that vague briefs would miss.
Q13: List the pages you expect the site to have. Don't accept "about 10 pages." Ask for the list. Home, About, Services, Pricing, Contact, Blog, Case Studies, Privacy, Terms. Then add the ones they forgot: 404 page, blog post template, case study template, legal pages. Every unnamed page is a future Change Order.
Q14: Will the site have a blog or content section? How many existing posts need to migrate? Migration is the most underpriced part of most projects. If they're moving 80 blog posts from WordPress to Webflow, that's 8 to 12 hours of careful work nobody priced for. Ask now.
Q15: Do you need any of these features: e-commerce, member login, search, multi-language, calculator/interactive, third-party integrations? List the big buckets. Each one is a 5x to 50x cost multiplier. "We need a basic membership area" is a $4,000 to $15,000 line item that doesn't fit in a "marketing site" proposal.
Q16: List every third-party tool the site needs to integrate with. HubSpot, Salesforce, Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Stripe, Calendly, Typeform, Zapier, Make, custom APIs. Each integration adds hours. Most clients name two and forget five. Force the list.
Q17: Who will write the copy? Three options: client writes it, agency writes it, or hybrid (client writes draft, agency edits). Copy is the single most common project delay. Confirm now who owns it and when it's due.
Q18: Who provides photography and visual assets? Stock photo budget, custom photo shoot, client-provided assets, illustration. Each option is a different cost. Same for video.
Q19: What CMS or platform should the site be built on, or do you want us to recommend? If they have a strong preference (WordPress, Webflow, Framer, Shopify, Squarespace), that's a constraint on the build. If they don't, you recommend based on their needs. Either way, locking this in before the proposal prevents rebuild conversations later.
Brand and design preferences (20-23)
Lighter questions but they save design rounds.
Q20: Do you have existing brand guidelines? If yes, share the link. If yes, you're constrained. If no, brand work becomes a scope question. Many clients answer "yes" then send a logo PNG. Discover the actual gap during the call.
Q21: What's the emotional tone you want the site to convey? (Choose up to 3: professional, friendly, premium, playful, technical, bold, calm, energetic, trustworthy, innovative, exclusive, accessible.) Forcing the choice from a list prevents "all of them" answers. The combination they pick (e.g., "premium, calm, exclusive" vs. "playful, energetic, accessible") drives typography, color, and layout decisions.
Q22: Are there visual elements that are non-negotiable? (Specific colors, fonts, imagery style, brand elements.) The non-negotiables are easier to design around if they're stated upfront. Discovering in week five that "the logo must be teal because the founder's daughter chose it" is bad timing.
Q23: Mobile vs. desktop priority for your audience: roughly what split? If 70% of traffic is mobile, the mobile design is the primary design and desktop adapts. If it's 70% desktop, the reverse. Most clients haven't checked. Asking forces them to check.
Budget and timeline (24-27)
The questions clients hate. Ask anyway.
Q24: What's the budget range for this project? (Pick one: under $5K, $5K to $15K, $15K to $30K, $30K to $75K, $75K+) Ranges are easier to answer than specific numbers. They self-select. If they say "under $5K" and you don't do projects under $15K, the lead disqualifies itself before you waste a call.
Q25: What's the ideal launch timeline? Hard deadline or flexible? "Hard deadline of October 15 for product launch" is different from "we'd love it by Q4." The first is a constraint that justifies a faster price. The second is a wish that justifies a normal timeline.
Q26: Is the budget approved and ready to spend, or are you exploring options? The polite version of "are you actually going to buy this?" Clients exploring options will say so. Clients who have approved budget will say so. Both answers help you allocate sales attention correctly.
Q27: After launch, do you anticipate ongoing support / retainer needs, or is this one-and-done? Tells you whether to position a retainer in the proposal. Clients who anticipate ongoing needs are higher LTV. The retainer pricing math covers what to charge.
Risk and worst case (28)
The single most underused question in agency discovery. It's worth its own category.
Q28: What's the worst-case scenario you want to avoid with this project? The answers are usually one of these: "We don't want surprise fees." "We don't want it to feel generic." "We don't want to babysit the project." "We don't want to lose our existing SEO rankings." "We don't want to look like our competitors."
Each answer tells you exactly what to overdeliver on. If they say "surprise fees," you overcommunicate on scope and Change Orders. If they say "generic," you push harder on distinctive design. If they say "babysitting," you overcommunicate on status updates. The worst-case fear is the priority you need to address most explicitly.
Clients will tell you exactly how to win them if you ask what they're afraid of.
How to deliver the questionnaire
Three options. Pick one based on your aesthetic and tooling.
Option A: Typeform or Tally. Best for completion rates. Clean UX, mobile-friendly, easy to fill on a phone. Tally is free and clean. Typeform is $25/month and prettier. Both work.
Option B: Notion page with form fields. Best if you already run client work in Notion. The answers land directly in a database you can reference during the proposal write-up.
Option C: Google Doc with the questions. Lowest friction to set up. Higher friction for the client (typing in a doc feels heavier than a form). Use if you're starting out and want minimum tool overhead.
Whichever option: send the form within 1 hour of the initial inquiry, with a one-line cover note:
"Hi [name], thanks for reaching out. Before we hop on a call, could you spend 10 to 15 minutes on this short discovery form? It helps me come to our call prepared with relevant ideas rather than asking obvious questions. Once you submit, I'll review and send a few times we could meet."
That message does three things. It positions the questionnaire as respect for their time (the call will be better). It sets expectation (you're prepared, you don't waste meetings). And it gates the call (no form, no call). Once the contract is signed, the answers also feed the 14-day onboarding checklist and the kickoff meeting agenda so the same information doesn't get re-asked at every stage.
Red-flag answers and how to respond
The questionnaire surfaces problem clients before you've invested an hour on a call. Watch for these patterns:
"Budget: under $5K" but scope description requires $20K+. Misaligned expectations. Either educate them on real cost ranges or decline the call. This is the entry point for most underpricing, which is Leak 1 in the agency margin leak post.
Q5 names a "committee" instead of one person. Indecision risk. Either ask for clarification before the call or expect long approval cycles.
Q6 has no deadline at all. Indefinite project risk. Projects without deadlines often drag for 6 to 12 months. Prefer clients with real timeline pressure.
Q7 mentions firing 2+ previous agencies. Pattern. The client may be the problem. Have the call but qualify hard.
Q24 budget range is "haven't thought about it." Tire-kicker. Decline politely or send them a pricing guide and see if they respond.
Q28 worst-case is "wasting money." Anxious client. Will need extensive reassurance and process documentation. Either price for the extra communication or decline.
Building this from scratch is slow. The full 28-question discovery form, the cover-note templates, the proposal template that pulls from the answers, and the red-flag rubric are inside Agency Operations OS. Deploys in an afternoon, $79. Link at the end.
How to use the answers in the proposal
The whole point of the questionnaire is to write a tighter proposal. Two specific moves.
Quote their own words back to them. When a client sees their own language in your proposal ("you mentioned wanting to avoid surprise fees, so we've structured this with..."), they feel heard. Heard clients sign faster. Use answers from Q3, Q8, and Q28 in the proposal's framing.
Convert their scope answers (Q13 to Q19) directly into the proposal's deliverable list. Every page they named, every feature they listed, every integration they mentioned: name it explicitly as a noun in the proposal. Anything they didn't mention but you suspect they want: name it as out-of-scope or as an add-on. The proposal now matches the discovery, and there's nothing left to be vague about. This is what the pillar guide calls "deliverables as nouns, not vibes."
Copy-paste version (the 28 questions, formatted)
For convenience, here's the form ready to drop into Typeform, Tally, Notion, or a doc:
DISCOVERY QUESTIONNAIRE
Business and goals
1. What does your business do, in one or two sentences?
2. What's the single most important goal of this website?
3. What would a successful project look like to you 6 months after launch?
4. What's wrong with your current site (or why don't you have one yet)?
5. Who internally will be making the final approval decisions? (One name, please.)
6. Is there a specific event or date driving this project?
7. Have you worked with an agency before? What worked or didn't?
Audience and competitors
8. Who is the primary audience for this site? (Demographics, role, context.)
9. What's the one action you want this audience to take on the site?
10. Name 3 competitors or sites you admire (and one thing you like about each).
11. Name 1 site you actively dislike (and why).
12. Where does your audience currently find you? (Search, social, referrals, ads, events.)
Scope and functionality
13. List the pages you expect the site to have.
14. Will the site have a blog or content section? How many existing posts need to migrate?
15. Do you need any of these features: e-commerce, member login, search, multi-language, calculator/interactive, third-party integrations?
16. List every third-party tool the site needs to integrate with.
17. Who will write the copy?
18. Who provides photography and visual assets?
19. What CMS or platform should the site be built on, or do you want us to recommend?
Brand and design preferences
20. Do you have existing brand guidelines? If yes, share the link.
21. What's the emotional tone you want the site to convey? (Choose up to 3: professional, friendly, premium, playful, technical, bold, calm, energetic, trustworthy, innovative, exclusive, accessible.)
22. Are there visual elements that are non-negotiable?
23. Mobile vs. desktop priority for your audience: roughly what split?
Budget and timeline
24. What's the budget range for this project? (Under $5K / $5K to $15K / $15K to $30K / $30K to $75K / $75K+)
25. What's the ideal launch timeline? Hard deadline or flexible?
26. Is the budget approved and ready to spend, or are you exploring options?
27. After launch, do you anticipate ongoing support / retainer needs, or is this one-and-done?
Risk and worst case
28. What's the worst-case scenario you want to avoid with this project?
Frequently asked questions
How long should a discovery questionnaire be?
10 to 15 minutes to complete, 25 to 30 questions total. Shorter forms feel like missed opportunities (you'll re-ask everything on the call). Longer forms get abandoned. The sweet spot is enough specificity to write a proposal without re-interviewing, without becoming a chore. If a serious lead won't spend 12 minutes filling out a form, they aren't a serious lead.
Should I charge for discovery?
For projects under $15,000, no. The discovery is a sales investment. For projects over $15,000, charge for a paid discovery sprint ($1,500 to $5,000 depending on complexity). Paid discovery filters tire-kickers, signals expertise, and often closes a larger engagement on better terms. The output is a strategy document and a detailed proposal, both of which justify the fee.
What's the difference between a discovery questionnaire and a creative brief?
A discovery questionnaire is filled out by the client before sales. It surfaces the information needed to write a proposal. A creative brief is filled out after the contract is signed, usually by you, based on the discovery answers plus the kickoff meeting. It directs design and development. Both documents exist for different stages: discovery for sales, brief for delivery.
What if a client refuses to fill out the questionnaire?
Decline the call. Politely. "I understand the form takes a few minutes. It helps me come to our call with relevant questions rather than basic ones. If now isn't a good time, happy to revisit when timing improves." Clients who won't spend 12 minutes on a form before a sales call will not spend 30 minutes on feedback during the project. The form is a filter and it works.
How do I get higher completion rates on the questionnaire?
Three moves. First, position it as respect for their time (the call will be better). Second, keep it under 15 minutes total. Third, use a form tool (Typeform or Tally) instead of a Google Doc, because forms feel lighter. Most leads who actually intend to hire will complete a well-designed 28-question form. Completion rate at Eximius runs around 75% on qualified inbound.
The shortcut: Agency Operations OS
Writing the questionnaire once is straightforward. Connecting it to the proposal, the project setup, the kickoff agenda, and the scope guardrail language is the harder part.
Agency Operations OS is the Notion template I use to run Eximius Studio. It includes:
- 7 core databases: Leads (where questionnaire answers land), Deals, Projects, Retainers, Change Orders, Financials, AR Aging
- 5 dashboards including a Pipeline view that surfaces incomplete discovery forms before sales calls
- 15 SOPs including the discovery process, qualification rubric, and proposal writing from the answers
- 5 bonus docs: Master Services Agreement, Retainer Agreement, Project Proposal template (built to pull from discovery answers), Discovery Call script, and the 47-item Pre-Launch QA Checklist
One template, deploys in an afternoon, $79.
The 28 questions above are the discovery questionnaire that kills scope creep before the contract is signed. Send it before every call. Use the answers to write proposals that price correctly. Watch the entire downstream system get cleaner.
For the broader system, how to run a web design agency shows where discovery fits, the scope creep framework covers what happens when scope shifts after the proposal lands, and the 12 SOPs every web design agency needs covers the discovery SOP that wraps this questionnaire into a repeatable process.
