A Discovery Call is 30 minutes long. It is free. It is the first conversation we have with anyone considering working with us, and it is the single most important conversation in our entire sales process. If we run it well, both sides walk away knowing whether the engagement makes sense — and the next step is obvious. If we run it badly, we waste 30 minutes of your time and ours.
We've codified the protocol because consistency is what makes the call useful. Every senior person on our team runs Discovery the same way, with the same five sections, in the same order. Here is exactly what that looks like.
Minutes 0–5: What's the situation?
The first five minutes are entirely yours. We ask one open question — "Tell us what's going on" — and then we listen. We don't pitch. We don't try to slot you into a service category. We don't interrupt to clarify until you've finished the version of the story you came to tell.
This sounds simple and it's the part most agencies skip. They jump in within 60 seconds with "so what you really need is…" because they already have a service to sell. We've trained ourselves not to do that, because the version of your problem you tell unprompted is almost always more honest than the version we'd extract with leading questions. The longer we let you talk, the better the rest of the call goes.
What we listen for
Specific symptoms (tools that broke, hours wasted, deals lost), the workaround you're already doing, who's frustrated and who's protecting the status quo, and the language you use for your own operations. That language tells us how you actually think — which we'll need later when we scope.
Minutes 5–15: The diagnostic questions
Once we have the situation, we ask a fixed set of diagnostic questions. They're designed to surface the operational reality behind the symptoms you described. The full list isn't long, but each question is chosen carefully and we ask all of them.
Examples: "Walk us through what happens when a new client signs up — every step, every tool, every person." "Who in your team would be most affected by a change to this process? Who would resist it?" "If we built the perfect system tomorrow and gave it to you for free, what would have to be true for you to actually use it?" These questions sound innocuous. They almost always uncover the constraint that decides whether a custom build is the right move.
What this surfaces
The political reality of who owns the workflow internally, the integration constraints we'd need to design around, the change-management cost of switching, and the unstated success criteria the project will be measured against. Skipping any of these is how engagements end up technically successful and operationally rejected.
Minutes 15–22: Our honest read
Around the halfway mark, we stop asking questions and we tell you what we think. Specifically: which of our solutions (Client Portal, Operations System, Workflow Automation, etc.) fits your situation, what the rough scope and timeline would look like, and — critically — whether we think it's the right move at all.
Sometimes our honest read is "this isn't a Mindflows project." If you need a marketing site, we'll tell you to hire a Webflow agency. If you need a CRM, we'll say HubSpot or Pipedrive — don't custom-build. If your operational pain is actually a hiring problem, we'll say so. We send away roughly one in three Discovery calls. We get more long-term referrals from those rejected calls than from the ones we win.
Why this matters for you
An agency that won't tell you when their service is the wrong fit is an agency that will sell you the wrong thing. Our protocol makes "this isn't us" an explicit option in every call, because we'd rather lose 30 minutes than spend three months shipping something that shouldn't have existed.
Minutes 22–28: Your questions
The last seven minutes are for you. Most calls fill them naturally — by minute 22 you'll have specific questions about timeline, pricing, ownership, what happens if it doesn't work, what the team looks like, who you'd actually work with. We answer all of these directly. No "it depends" without explaining what it depends on. No quoted figures we can't back up.
If you don't have questions, we offer ours. The most common one we ask: "What would have to be true at the end of this engagement for you to consider it a success?" The answer becomes the implicit acceptance criteria for the entire project. We write it down in our internal call notes and we hold ourselves accountable to it later.
Questions worth asking us
How do you decide between Softr and Lovable? What's a project you turned down recently and why? Who specifically will own this engagement? What's your worst project from the last year and what did you learn? We've prepared answers to all of these and we'll give them to you straight.
Minutes 28–30: The decision
The last two minutes are explicit. We don't end calls with "we'll send some thoughts." We end them with one of three outcomes: "Yes, let's move to Discovery week — here's what that looks like and what it costs," or "No, this isn't the right fit because [specific reason] — here's who you should talk to instead," or "We need to think — let's reconvene in N days with [specific information]."
Ambiguity at the end of a call is what kills momentum on good projects and prolongs the death of bad ones. By forcing ourselves to name the next step explicitly, we keep both sides honest. If we hear "we need to think" too often from prospects, that tells us our diagnostic questions weren't sharp enough — that's our failure, not yours.
What you'll have at the end of 30 minutes
A clear sense of whether we're worth working with, a named next step on either side, and (if we said yes) a written summary in your inbox within 24 hours covering everything we discussed. No hidden contracts, no follow-up sales sequence, no "have you had a chance to think it over?" emails. That's the deal.
Why we publish this
We publish the protocol because we think transparency about how we sell is itself a form of trust-building. If you know exactly what's going to happen on the call, you can decide whether you want to have it. If we behave differently than what we wrote here, you can call us on it. That's the accountability loop we want.
It also forces us to keep refining the protocol. Every quarter, we review the calls we ran and ask: where did the protocol fail us? Which questions stopped surfacing useful information? Which agencies are doing this better than we are? The version above is the May 2026 protocol. The version a year from now will look different — and we'll publish that too.
If this is the kind of process you want at the start of an engagement, the way to test it is to book one. 30 minutes. Five sections. Either we move forward together, or we don't, and either way you walk away with something useful.