How to brief a software studio and get a useful estimate back

Most first conversations with a software studio go one of two ways. Either the founder arrives with a forty-page document that describes the finished product in detail and the studio quietly plans to ignore most of it, or the founder arrives with an idea and the studio asks for a document. Neither gets you a useful estimate.

What gets you a useful estimate is a brief: a page or two that answers six questions honestly. Here they are, with what a good studio does with each answer.

1. What problem are you solving, and for whom?

Not the product. The problem. “Tutors and parents lose track of which classes happened and which were paid for” is a problem. “A tutoring app” is a product, and it hides the problem.

A good studio uses this to find the smallest thing that would solve the problem, which is often much smaller than the product you imagined. That is where the time and money savings come from.

2. How is it being done today?

Almost always, the answer is “WhatsApp and a spreadsheet”, or “a system we bought that does not quite fit”, or “a person who remembers”. Say so. This is the most useful sentence in the brief, because it tells the studio what the first version has to beat, and what data and habits already exist.

If today’s process works badly, describe how. If it works well but does not scale, say that instead. They lead to different first versions.

3. What must the first version do?

Three or four things, end to end. Not a feature list. “A parent can see this week’s schedule and last week’s report without asking” is one thing. “Notifications” is not.

If you cannot narrow it to a handful, that is fine; a good studio’s first job is to help you. But try, because the act of choosing tells you what you actually believe the product is for.

4. What can wait?

Everything else. Write it down so it is not lost, and so the studio knows you know it is not now. Founders who can say “not yet” to their own ideas are the ones who ship.

5. What does success look like in 90 days?

Real users doing the real thing. Ten paying customers. One school running its whole week on it. A hundred orders. Pick a number that would make you confident the direction is right, and a number that would make you stop.

This turns an estimate into a plan. A studio that knows the 90-day goal can tell you honestly whether it is reachable, and what would have to be left out to reach it.

6. What are the constraints?

Budget range, even a wide one. A date that actually matters, and why. Anything that must integrate with what you already run. Anything about data that has rules attached. Whether you have technical people on your side, and who will own the system after launch.

Studios do not need these to be precise. They need them to be honest. A budget range given early saves a month of mutual guessing.

What you should get back

A useful estimate is not a number on a page. It is:

• A restatement of the problem in the studio’s words, so you can see whether they understood it.
• A proposed first version, usually smaller than your brief, with reasons.
• What it would cost and how long it would take, as a range, with what would move the range.
• What they would want to find out before committing to a fixed number. For us, that is a foundations phase: a few weeks of working through the flows, the stack and the plan, with a fixed price of its own.
• What they would not do, and why.

If you get a fixed price for the whole product from a one-page brief, be careful. Either the price is padded to cover the unknowns, or the unknowns will arrive later as change requests.

What to ask them

Who exactly will do the work, and will you talk to them directly. What happens after launch. Who owns the code, the accounts and the data. How they use AI, and whether people stay in charge of decisions. What they have built that is still running. We wrote a longer list in choosing a software development partner; it applies to us too.

A brief we would be glad to receive

“We run a coaching institute with four hundred students. Schedules, attendance and fees live in two spreadsheets and a WhatsApp group; parents call to ask what they could see themselves. In 90 days we want every class scheduled in one place, attendance taken on a phone, and parents able to see schedule and fees without calling. Fee payments online can wait. Budget is in this range; the new term starts in June, which matters. We use Tally for accounts and it must stay. Our admin will own the system.”

Two hundred words. Everything a studio needs to come back with something real. If you have one like it, send it to us.