The intake form is the product

The first thing I hand a new client is not a model, a demo, or a proposal. It is a form. People are usually a little disappointed by that, and then it turns out to be the most valuable object in the engagement.

A company brain is only as good as what it knows about the company. Not the model: the knowledge. Which makes the build mostly assembly, and makes the specification a question set. Sixty fields across eleven sections: identity, people, audiences, voice, hard rules, facts, market, brand, the collateral menu, modules, and history. The whole form is published on this site, because there has never been anything proprietary about asking good questions.

Every answer has a destination file

The part worth noticing is not the questions, it is the arrow beside each section. Identity feeds the constitution. Voice feeds the voice files. Hard rules feed the guardrails. Facts feed the layer that everything else is required to cite. Nothing is collected without a destination.

That constraint is really a filter on the form itself. If I cannot name the file an answer lands in, the question exists to make me look thorough, and it comes out. A form that collects things nobody will ever read teaches a client, correctly, that the rest of the system is theater too.

One field type is deliberately absent. Credentials are never collected on a form, ever. Accounts get configured in a dashboard, in the handoff meeting, with the owner driving. A questionnaire that asks for a password is telling you exactly how the rest of the engagement will treat your data.

The two questions that earn the most

The first is negative: what do you not do, and what do you never want to be mistaken for. Most intake asks what a business is. The refusals are what keep an AI in its lane, and a refusal has one enormous advantage over an aspiration, which is that you can test it. Hand the system a request it must decline and watch.

The second is personal: what are you good at, and what are you not. That pair decides which work the system absorbs and which stays human. It is the only question in the set that is about the person rather than the business, and it moves the architecture more than anything else on the form.

An unanswered question is a tracked item, not a guess

Nothing on the form blocks a build. A field left empty ships as a numbered open question in the new brain’s register, and until it is answered the system says UNKNOWN instead of filling the hole.

This is the rule the whole method rests on. A guess written into a facts file is indistinguishable from a fact one week later. It is in the same font, in the same folder, with the same authority. Nobody remembers which line was sourced and which was inferred by a helpful machine at eleven at night, and then it gets cited into a document a partner receives, and now the guess is a claim the company made.

Tracked questions have a second effect nobody expects. They hand the client a finite, ranked list of the things only they can answer. That is a far better ask than send me whatever you have, and it is the reason the packet actually comes back.

What submitting produces

An intake packet: every answer keyed to its destination, every unanswered field as a numbered question, every promised upload with its target path, and a completion percentage. Add a signed-off brand system and that is the complete input to the build.

Which is the whole argument in one line. The gap between a completed form and a finished brain is assembly, not invention. If the form is thin, no amount of model quality closes it. You get a system that is fluent and wrong, which is the worst thing a company system can possibly be.