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Comment by AmericanChopper | Hacker News Reader

I agree that it usually doesn’t fly with clients, unless you already have a good relationship and track record with them. But I don’t think it’s supposed to be a trick. On the client side somebody either has some funding for a project and needs to know whether you can deliver within the budget, or they need to go and apply for some funding to complete the project, but in either case the deliverable they’re committing to provide in exchange for this funding is the completed project, not a scope for the project.

From that perspective the “discovery project” is just a much worse version of “contact us for pricing”, it’s “pay us $5,000-$20,000 or more for pricing”. Paying a lot of money to find out how much something will cost, or what you’re going to get from it (if anything) just isn’t a valuable proposition to a lot of people, and doesn’t fit in nicely with their existing business processes.

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I've been advised to charge for a discovery, but at a ridiculously low price, say $500. It's likely they can expense it without approval, shows they are serious, and, helps you feel good about putting effort into a serious proposal.

Have you seen anything like that succeed?

I haven't had problems with discovery projects. The framing is usually that both sides genuinely don't know enough about what needs to be done, you'll produce a rough plan at the end of it, and you've agreed to a rough ballpark budget beforehand where discovery is helping you decide on the scope and specifics.

Otherwise, even for simple projects, the process is usually you do a couple of rounds of questions for a few hours, then you're forced to give a quote when you don't know enough which is bad for both sides.

People get weird about charging for discovery, but gathering requirements, evaluating the current situation, researching options and proposing a solution, is tricky and valuable work, and doing this properly can save a lot of pain later.

I’ve seen folks successfully implement a process where discovery is ‘free’ if the client hires them for the implementation. Otherwise discovery is $10K or whatever

The deal is that you’d have to provide the customer not just with a price quote but a complete requirements doc based upon the discovery. They can shop this to other contract houses. Just a bid leaves them I’m the hole with absolutely nothing to show for it.

Of course no customer would accept that.

Yeah.

Back in the day a proper requirements doc was something a client would pay for. It’s a tangible thing with real value.

These days we sell design sprints that produce validated prototypes instead (thank god for Figma). This is a much easier sell and still gives the client the opportunity to decide if we implement the thing or if they hand it off to someone else.

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