A founder sends the same two paragraphs to five agencies and gets back five quotes. One says three months, one says nine. One is a tenth of the price of another. Now what?
We see this a lot, and it’s rarely because some agencies are honest and others aren’t. It’s because a short brief leaves most of the decisions open, so every agency fills the gaps with its own guesses. You end up comparing five different imaginary products. A better brief doesn’t need to be long. It needs to close the gaps that move the price.
Start with the problem, not the feature list
The most useful sentence in any brief describes who has a problem and what they can’t do today. Feature lists come later, and they’re far easier to judge once we know what they’re for.
A good example is the problem we were given for Yard Sign Plus: buyers needed to price, design and order any sign themselves, even a single one. That one line told us the price calculator and the sign builder were the heart of the product, and that small orders mattered as much as bulk ones. Everything else could be weighed against it.
If you can, add who your users are and roughly how many you expect in the first year. “A few hundred clinics” and “anyone with a phone” lead to quite different plans.
Describe the main journeys
Agencies estimate journeys much better than they estimate features. Instead of “user accounts, payments, notifications”, walk through what someone actually does. A customer finds a slot, books it, pays a deposit and gets a reminder the day before. A staff member sees today’s bookings and marks no-shows.
Two or three of these, written in plain sentences, usually tell us more than a page of bullet points. A booking flow with partial payments and refunds is a very different job from one that just sends an email.
Mention the other people in the system too. Admins, suppliers, drivers, teachers. Each new role tends to mean new screens, new permissions and new edge cases, and it’s one of the most common reasons quotes drift apart.
Be clear about what’s in, what’s out and what’s undecided
This is the part most briefs skip, and it’s the part we’d ask for first. Split your ideas into three groups:
- Must have for launch
- Nice to have, could come later
- Not sure yet, would like advice
That third group is fine. Nobody expects you to have every answer. But when it’s labelled, an agency can quote the core with confidence and price the open questions separately, instead of quietly padding the whole estimate to cover them.
If you’re aiming for a first version to test with real users, say so. It changes how we’d scope it. Our piece on what an MVP in three weeks can and can’t prove goes into how we’d cut a product down to one journey.
The details that change the price most
Some details look minor and turn out to shift an estimate a lot. Try to answer these, even roughly:
- Web, mobile or both, and if mobile, iOS, Android or both
- Anything you need to connect to, like a payment provider, an existing database, a CRM or a booking system
- Whether there’s existing code, designs or data we’d be working with
- Languages, currencies or countries you need to support at launch
- Who will run the product day to day, and whether they need an admin panel
Integrations deserve extra attention. “Connects to our system” can mean a tidy, documented API or an old export file someone emails over on Fridays. If you can share documentation, or even the name of the system, we can tell you much more.
Things you can leave out
You don’t need a technical specification, a database design or a choice of framework. If you have strong preferences, mention them, but it’s normally better to let agencies propose an approach and explain why. How they answer tells you a lot about how they think.
You also don’t need polished wireframes. Rough sketches, screenshots of apps you like or a screen recording of the spreadsheet you’re replacing often help more than formal documents.
Budget and timing
Lots of people hold back their budget, worried agencies will simply quote up to it. We understand the instinct, but a range helps more than it hurts. It tells us whether to propose a lean first version or a fuller build, and it saves both sides from a long conversation about a product that was never going to fit. The same goes for deadlines. If there’s a real date, like a trade show, a funding round or a school term, put it in the brief.
A practical next step
Before you send your brief anywhere, give it to someone who doesn’t know the project and ask them to explain the product back to you. Wherever they hesitate is where agencies will guess. Fix those parts, then send the same version to everyone so the quotes are comparable.
If you’d like a second opinion on a brief, or want help turning an idea into a scoped first version, take a look at how we run an MVP in 3 weeks and get in touch.
