Here Are the Six Questions We Ask on Every Discovery Call

We publish this because we think you should know what to expect before you get on the call. Most first calls with agencies are a pitch in disguise. Ours is a 45-minute diagnostic. Here is exactly what we ask, and why.

Why we ask questions instead of presenting

When a prospect asks us to send a deck first, we decline. Not because we are difficult, but because a deck written before a conversation is a guess. We have no idea whether your biggest problem is a broken checkout flow, a misconfigured analytics setup, or a team that is shipping too slowly. The questions below are how we find out.

Every engagement Rhytmelo takes on starts from a defined metric — a number that was X before we arrived and should be Y after. We cannot name that number until we understand the business. These six questions get us there.

The six questions

1. What is the one number this project needs to move?

Not "what do you want to improve." A specific metric: conversion rate, average order value, checkout completion rate, organic sessions per month. If the answer is "all of them," the project has no anchor and we will push back until there is one.

This question does two things. It tells us whether the business is instrumented well enough to measure the result of our work. And it forces a conversation about what actually matters, which is usually different from what the brief says.

2. What does that number look like right now, and how do you track it?

The baseline. We ask for a screenshot from their analytics tool or a recent report, not a verbal estimate. If the answer is "we think it is around X," that is useful information too — it means the first thing we will need to fix is the measurement, not the product.

“If you cannot measure the problem, you cannot measure whether we fixed it.

3. What have you already tried?

This is where we learn the most. Every team has a list of things they tried that did not work. Understanding that list tells us which approaches are already ruled out, which vendors or tools they have been burned by, and which assumptions are baked into the brief that we should probably challenge.

It also tells us whether the team has the discipline to run proper experiments, or whether "we tried that" means "someone changed a button colour for a week and nothing happened."

4. Who owns this problem inside your organisation?

Projects fail when nobody is accountable. We ask for a name, not a team. The person who owns the metric we are being hired to move should be in the room on kick-off day and available for a 30-minute call once a week. If that person does not exist, the project will drift.

We have turned down work where the answer was "we are not sure yet." Not because we need a hierarchy, but because ownership is what lets us make decisions quickly when the engineering uncovers something the brief did not anticipate.

5. What does success look like in 90 days?

Not the full project vision. Ninety days. If the project runs for six months, what should we have shipped and measured by the end of October? This question anchors the scope to something achievable and shows us whether the expectations are realistic given the budget and the complexity of the problem.

If the 90-day answer and the budget are incompatible, we say so in the call, not in the proposal.

6. What would make you stop working with us?

This one surprises people. We ask it because we want the answer on record before a contract is signed. Common responses: "if you go dark for a week," "if you miss a deadline without warning," "if the work ships and nothing moves." These become the informal rules of the engagement.

Asking this question also filters out clients who expect perfection with no room for iteration. We work in weekly cycles with live demos, so imperfection is visible early. Teams that want to see rough work and improve it are a better fit than teams that want a finished product revealed at the end.

What happens after the call

If the call goes well on both sides, we write a one-page scope note, not a 30-slide deck. It states the metric, the baseline, the 90-day target, the first milestone, and a range for the engagement. We send it within 24 hours.

If the call does not go well — if there is no clear metric, no ownership, or the budget and expectations are obviously mismatched — we say so directly and do not send a proposal. This saves everyone time.

Why we publish this

We publish this so you can prepare. A client who comes in having already thought about their metric, their baseline and their 90-day target is a better client than one who hears these questions for the first time in the call. We would rather have a shorter, sharper conversation than a long one where we are doing orientation.

If you want to run through these questions before we speak — write the answers down, share them with us when you book the call. We will read them beforehand and skip the parts you have already covered.