Get Every Project Detail Before You Quote a Single Number

Here's how most projects start: a client reaches out with a rough idea and asks what it costs. You ask follow-up questions over email. They answer some of them. You put together a quote based on incomplete information — and two weeks in you find out the location is three hours away, or they actually need six deliverables, not two, or the deadline was never as flexible as they made it sound.

The problem isn't that clients are difficult. It's that they don't know what information you need. They're not producers. They don't think in terms of shoot days, camera ratios, or delivery formats. They think about what they want the final video to feel like.

FirstSlate bridges that gap with a guided intake brief. You send your client a link — no account required — and it walks them through every detail that matters for scoping a project accurately: goal, audience, budget range, deliverables, timeline, location, and more. By the time they submit, you have what you need to quote with confidence.

And FirstSlate doesn't just collect the data. It reads it. The producer report automatically cross-references the answers and flags anything that doesn't add up — a broadcast-quality deliverable expectation against a budget that won't support it, a same-day turnaround against a full production day. You see the contradictions before you ever open a quote.