Let’s play 20 questions, shall we?

Why I Ask 10+ Questions Before We Work Together

Freelancers should ask prospective clients just as many questions as clients do before starting to work together. It’s just good business sense.

5 min readOct 1, 2020

When prospects reach out to me about collaborating on a project, I have them pass through a quick Q&A before we even speak.

They answer a number of questions on my contact form, where I cover questions on project type, budgets, and referral information. In my email response, I send over another set of questions to dig deeper into the request.

I want to know:

What are your goals for this project?
What’s your timeline for this work?
When will this need to be completed/delivered?
Have you worked with an outside writer before? If so, what was your experience with him/her?
Who is involved in making the decision on whether we move forward on this project? Just you, or are there others you need to involve in the decision?

There are a few reasons why I ask even more questions at this point. I want to be sure we’re a good fit for each other and don’t waste each other’s time. We’re both busy, so no sense in spending a ton of time vetting each other if we’re not going to work with each other.

But also, these questions help me determine whether you’re a serious prospect or not. I can’t tell you how many times I get messages from people who have clearly not read anything on my website. They ask me to write for industries I am clearly not specialized in or they copy + paste a message into the form hoping for a response.

Again, the reason I ask questions is to ensure we’re a good fit and to save us both time. When you spam my form and ask me to write for your B2C product or you only want to pay me $25 for a 1,000 word blog post, you’re wasting your breath. I don’t bother to respond to those messages because we’re clearly not a good fit.