Before the first pixel, word, or wireframe, there’s thinking. Strategic, curious, connective thinking.

Most new clients come to us with either a) a list of deliverables they need, or b) asking what their deliverables should be. We love and can work with either approach! 

Whatever your approach (but particularly when the list of deliverables isn’t yet defined), any creative team worth their salt will start with discovery: AKA reconnaissance, AKA onboarding. You just can’t get around it!

At True Story, we call this Phase 0 – and yes, it’s billable. Because it’s mission-critical!

What happens during Phase 0?

Great creative starts before the scope.

Think of Phase 0 as your new team’s onboarding. If you make a new hire, you pay for their onboarding, right? A good onboarding is thorough, curious, and oriented to strategy.

In a perfect universe, every new client would start with a formal (but fun!) Discovery session. We ask 15 questions to get at the heart of what makes your brand beat. These sessions are designed to extract insights, deliver value, and create momentum, and our goal is for our clients to walk away feeling, yes, a little wrung out, but also re-aligned to why they launched their business in the first place. 

Smaller clients (we see you and love you, solopreneurs!) don’t always have the budget for a full Discovery, so we dig in to context, direction, and intent throughout our early calls and do research on our own. What we look at: 

• What assets you currently have (website, social, email, tech stack)
• What your audience looks like 
• What competitors are out there and what they’re doing
• What you’ve done to get you here
• What your goals are for the quarter

And we have to get curious before we get creative! That curiosity might look like:

• Reviewing what already exists to see if you can find anything quietly breaking it
• Asking “why” five times before deciding “what”
• Spotting tone, gaps, or opportunities the brief doesn’t mention
• Sketching early frameworks or creative maps that later become the scaffolding for the project
• Taking notes on early impressions, opportunities, and whatever our intuition bubbles up
  

Why it matters

Phase 0 is the invisible layer of work that makes every bit of visible work better.

In our humble-but-seasoned experience, budget overages and endless revisions don’t come from bad design – they’re almost always the fault of unclear direction and poor understanding.

Phase 0 creates shared clarity up front so everyone’s solving the same problem and speaking the same creative language, preventing frustration from:

• U-turns mid-project
• Slow approvals from unaligned stakeholders
• Guesswork-based creative decisions
• Poor metrics from a failure to reach and resonate with the right audience

Phase 0 saves time later.

It’s also a safeguard against draining our resources on clients who never quite materialize. You have a business – you know how easily this can happen! (We’re sharing our thinking here in case it’s helpful to your business, too.)

• It protects everyone’s time. Phase 0 keeps us from pouring hours into projects that never quite take flight and makes sure our best thinking goes to clients who are as committed as we are to moving forward.
• It creates clarity early. It’s too easy to over-invest too soon, chasing ideas before foundations are set. By formalizing discovery, we can show up fully, confidently, and sustainably. This is why you’re working with us instead of your neighbor’s niece who “does graphic design.”
• It keeps our focus sharp. When we keep our team’s bandwidth focused on clients who are all-in and ready to create work that moves the needle, our creative energy can fire away.
  

“When do you bill for Phase 0?”

This is actually a tricky question, because in new client conversations, there’s often not a definitive line we cross between “we’d love to work with you” and “here are the deliverables – ready, set, go.” But in general, Phase 0 sits before your official project scope.

Creative work rarely fits a clean, linear timeline, but we’ll be as transparent as we can here.

We used to work like this:

Proposal → Signatures → Down Payment → Discovery → Strategy, Scope, & Roadmap

Of course, it’s tricky (and many, many agencies struggle with this!), because in real life, Phase 0 tends to overlap with the proposal. Some agencies don’t write a proposal until after a paid Discovery. Others build part of that Phase 0 into the proposal process itself… which is what we used to do but found ourselves dumping hours of creative energy into proposals for clients who ghosted us. “Generosity” is one of our core values but of course sometimes this bites us in the cinnamon buns when a client decides to bounce because “it’s not the right time.”

So now we work more like this:

Intro call → Contract → Down Payment → Phase 0 → Discovery (if doing) → Proposal → Strategy, Scope, & Roadmap

“But I don’t know if I want to work with True Story yet because I don’t know what I need…”

We get it! That intro conversation is always on us. It’s where we get to know each other and see if the project feels like a fit (meaning: we can meet your timeline, budget, and goals). But once we start digging in – reviewing assets, sketching direction, or building early frameworks – that’s Phase 0. And at that point, yes, it’s billable, because it’s real work that sets the whole project up for success. 

At the end of the day, Phase 0 is a risk reducer. For us, up front – and for you, because when work gets underway you’re wasting your money if The Work isn’t doing something for you.

“Does Phase 0 have any deliverables?”

Phase 0 informs the proposal – which becomes your first tangible asset. It outlines our recommended strategy, associated deliverables, and budget. You could hand it to another team, build your own team around it, or sit on it for months. Either way, it’s a value-rich document that’s yours to hold on to.

Just good business advice: Have a budget ready to share during your intro call. Creative teams will always, always propose a higher budget than what you want to hear, so you can head this off by coming in with a number you need to stay within. We know how to honor a clear budget.

“Okay, so how much does Phase 0 cost?”

We’ll list Phase 0 as its own line item on your first invoice with your down payment. For small projects, we might be looking at 2-3 hours ($250). Most projects are in the $450-700 range. And for larger, strategic engagements leveraging our full team, expect more in the $1200-$2500 range or higher as we do our reconnaissance and get invested in your business. We’ll give you a flat price for your unique Phase 0 in the contract so there are no surprises.

Parting thought

Every great story starts before the first line.

Phase 0 is where you flesh out the plot and the players.

We’d love to find yours. Let’s talk →