Every Foundation engagement we ship starts with the same thing: a 12-area intake document. We don't write a line of code or buy a single ad before it's complete.
There's a temptation, especially in an industry that confuses speed with quality, to skip it. To say "we'll figure it out as we go." We don't. The intake is the difference between an engagement that ships in 14 days and one that spends six weeks doing discovery theatre. This post is what's in it, and why.
The 12 areas
In order:
1. Offer & economics
What you're selling. To whom. At what price. With what unit economics. What the cost of acquisition is today. What you believe LTV is. What you actually know it is.
The absence of an answer here doesn't tell us the business is bad. It tells us the business hasn't been audited from a numbers-first lens recently, which is fine, that's part of what we do. But we don't start the build until we have at least a working hypothesis on each line.
2. ICP & positioning
Who's your customer? Not "small businesses." Not "service businesses." Who specifically. What do they call themselves. What do they not call themselves. What do they buy you instead of buying. What's the second-best alternative to you.
If the ICP is fuzzy, the funnel will be fuzzy. We can't pre-qualify a generic.
3. 90-day baseline metrics
The numbers as they stand. Leads per week. Booked calls per week. Show rate. Close rate. Average order value. Refund rate. Top channel and second-place channel.
These give us a baseline. Without one, we can't measure whether what we ship in 14 days actually improved anything.
4. Sales process
The current shape, in detail. Who's selling. How many touches. What the discovery question is. What the close looks like. What the most common objection is. What follow-up cadence runs after a no-show. What the customer does once they say yes.
This is the area founders most often think they have answered well and most often haven't. "We have a sales process" is rarely the same thing as having a sales process written down in the way the team actually executes it.
5. Tech stack & access
What's running today. Calendly or Cal.com? GoHighLevel, HubSpot, Salesforce, or a Sheet? Stripe, Stripe Connect, or something else? Meta, Google, both, neither? Who owns the accounts? Who has admin? Where's the domain registered and who can change DNS?
We can't migrate, integrate, or replace anything we don't have a complete map of. Getting admin access to all of it on day one cuts about three days off the build cycle.
6. Creative & brand
What's the brand. Where do the assets live. Who decides on visual direction. What's the tone of voice. What's the current creative inventory. What's been tested. What's worked.
We are not going to start from scratch on brand. We are also not going to ship something off-brand. Knowing where the line is between "use what they have" and "fix what's broken" saves a week of polite back-and-forth.
7. Existing funnel assets
The current site. The current lander, if there's a separate one. Any VSL scripts. Any sales decks. Any onboarding pages, thank-you pages, upsell pages. Any old funnels that worked once but have been retired.
What we don't want is a fresh start when a fresh start isn't needed. If there's a lander that's converting at 8%, fine, we tighten it, we don't rebuild it.
8. Team & delivery capacity
Who's on the team. What's the bandwidth. Who handles fulfilment when leads come in. Who's the closer. Who's the ops person. What happens to the schedule if lead volume doubles next month.
Acquisition systems are a constraint problem. The system in front of fulfilment can't outpace fulfilment's capacity, or we end up shipping unhappy customers. Knowing the upstream constraint shapes the system we build.
9. Goals & constraints
What does the business actually want? Cash flow this quarter, headcount expansion, multiple-acquisition, owner-exit, geographic expansion. None of those answers is wrong, but they shape the system meaningfully.
A founder optimizing for cash flow this quarter gets a different system than one optimizing for hireable infrastructure 18 months from now. We need to know which one.
10. Communication systems
How do we work together over the next 14 days. Slack, email, Loom. Decision-makers and their response time SLAs. Weekly sync cadence. Single-point-of-contact on the client side. Approval thresholds, what needs sign-off, what doesn't.
If this isn't agreed up front, we lose two days to coordination friction in the back half of the build. Always.
11. Legal & paperwork
The MSA. The DPA. The NDA, if there is one. The payment terms. Any specific compliance constraints (HIPAA, regulated industries, data residency requirements).
We're not legal advisors. We are the people who have to actually build inside whatever constraints you have. So tell us.
12. Qualitative context
The catch-all. What does the founder want the team to know that nobody else has thought to ask. The skeleton in the system. The previous agency horror story we should know about. The product roadmap shift coming in Q3 that will change the offer.
This is the area people fill in last, and where the most important context tends to surface. We've had engagements where the 12th-area answer changed the entire build plan. Don't skip it.
Why all twelve
The temptation, when reading a list like this, is to think we could trim it. Just do 1, 4, and 5, offer, sales, stack, and figure the rest out as we go.
We've tried. It costs more than it saves. The gaps between the missing answers and the build show up later as rework, scope creep, and "we should have known this on day one" decisions.
The intake is two and a half hours of work for the founder, spread across two or three sessions. The downside is two and a half hours. The upside is a 14-day delivery cycle that actually delivers in 14 days. That math is easy.
If the intake list itself is useful, you can subscribe to operator notes to get the rest as we publish them. If you want to use it on your own engagement, that's why we publish it. If you want us to run it for you, that's the strategy call.