Charge for the brief, not just the call: order-form questions
Order-form questions do the discovery before you sit down together. That is preparation you stop giving away, and it belongs in your rate.
Ten minutes into the call, you finally understand what they actually want. There are fifty minutes left, and you have just spent a sixth of a paid session doing the thing you could have done for free at two in the morning by reading four sentences. Multiply that across a month of calls and you are handing back several hours a year, quietly, to people who would happily have typed the answers.
The unbilled half of a paid hour
Every piece of advice you give has two parts: understanding the situation, and responding to it. Buyers think they are paying for the second part. In practice you spend a third of most sessions on the first, and because it happens inside the hour they booked, it looks free. It is not free. It is the most costly labour in your business, performed live, without notes, at the exact moment you are least able to think slowly.
The honest difficulty is that you cannot simply demand a brief. Ask for too much before payment and people leave. Ask for it after payment by email and half of them reply an hour before the call, or not at all, and now you are chasing. The window where somebody will happily tell you everything is remarkably narrow: it is the moment they have decided to buy and are already typing their card details. That is the moment worth using.
There is a second difficulty nobody mentions. Good briefs need good questions, and good questions are hard to write because you already know the answers you are fishing for. "Tell me about your business" produces an essay you will not read. "What have you already tried that did not work?" produces the one paragraph that changes how you run the session.
Where the discovery happens
Nothing about the work changes here. What changes is when it happens and who is being paid while it does. Bookings on store.fan let you attach questions to the order form itself, so the brief arrives with the payment rather than chasing it.
| Discovery inside the session | Discovery on the order form |
|---|---|
| The first ten minutes go on context you could have read | Minute one starts on the actual problem |
| You prepare nothing, because you know nothing until you are live | You prepare once, calmly, from written answers |
| Follow-up emails chasing the brief before the call | The brief is a required field before payment completes |
| Vague buyers book anyway and the session drifts | Writing the answers makes vague buyers get specific, or self-select out |
| Nothing is written down, so the next session starts cold too | The answers stay attached to the order and to that customer's record |
| Your quoted rate silently includes unpaid discovery | Your rate covers a session that is fully working time |
Setting it up on a booking product
Order-form questions come in three shapes on store.fan: short answer for facts, long answer for the brief, and multiple choice for anything you want to be able to scan. Use them in that order of preference — the shorter the input, the higher the completion.
Before you publish the booking
0/8Three questions that earn their place
- "What would make this hour a success for you?" — long answer. It surfaces the real goal, which is often not the one in the enquiry.
- "What have you already tried?" — long answer. It stops you spending twenty minutes recommending something they abandoned in March.
- "Where are you now?" — multiple choice with four honest bands. It sets the level you should pitch at before you have said a word.
What the brief is actually worth
Take a 60-minute session at $120. If ten minutes of it are discovery, you are billing $100 an hour for advice and effectively donating $20 of every booking to a task you could have done from a form. Across eight calls a month, that is $160 of your own time returned to you — not as extra revenue, but as an hour you did not spend.
The more interesting move is what you do with the hour you get back. Some creators keep the price and use the reclaimed time to send a short written summary afterwards, which is the single most requested thing buyers ask for. Others raise the rate modestly and say why: the session now starts at minute one and comes with notes. Both are defensible. What is not defensible is keeping the price, keeping the unbilled discovery, and calling it your hourly rate. These are worked figures rather than predictions — your rate is yours to set — but the direction is the same for everyone.
Create a bookable session that collects the brief at checkout, before the slot is held.
Set up paid bookingsThe mistake most people make
They build the form for themselves instead of for the buyer. Eleven fields, three of them internal admin, one asking for a company registration number on a $75 coaching call. The buyer reaches the form, feels audited, and closes the tab. A brief is not a contract and it is not a CRM record — your customer list builds itself from the purchase anyway, so you do not need to duplicate it on the order form. The second version of the mistake is asking for the brief and then not reading it. Nothing destroys form completion faster than a buyer discovering, in minute two, that you are asking live for something they typed a week ago.
Short answer, long answer and multiple choice. Mix them: short answers for facts and links, long answer for the brief itself, multiple choice for anything you want to filter or scan later.
Yes. They arrive attached to the order, so you can read them whenever it suits you rather than in the two minutes before the session starts.
A few, honestly. The buyers you lose are usually the ones who had not decided what they wanted, which is why many creators consider the trade worthwhile above a certain price point. Keep the form short and the effect is small.
Yes. They work anywhere the order needs a detail from the buyer — a name for a personalised file, a size for a physical item, a topic for a commissioned piece. See the features overview for the ten product types they attach to.
Preparation is not overhead. It is the part of the work that makes the visible part good, and it deserves to sit inside the price rather than outside it. Three questions on an order form is a small change that moves a real cost from your unpaid hours into your paid ones. Write them once, read them before every call, and let the session start where it should. Order forms sit on every plan, and there is no platform commission on any of them — the plans page covers what else differs.
Start free, add a booking product, and let the brief arrive with the payment.
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