Intake questions that actually help

The default intake question on most booking pages — "What would you like to discuss?" — produces three kinds of answers and none of them are useful:

1. "Just want to chat." Tells you nothing.
2. A 300-word saga. Tells you everything, including what they had for breakfast.
3. The literal name of the meeting type. Tells you they didn't read the question.

The fix isn't more questions. It's better ones.

What a good intake question does

A good intake question does exactly one of three jobs:

• Routes. Tells you what to prep before the call.
• Qualifies. Reveals whether you're the right person for them.
• Grounds. Gives you an opening line that isn't "so, what brings you here today?"

Anything that doesn't do one of those is just adding friction to the booking flow.

Three patterns that work

The forced choice. Instead of "what would you like to discuss," offer a short list of the work you actually do, with a free-text fallback. People who book your time will pick one. The ones who can't pick one are usually the ones you wouldn't have enjoyed the call with anyway.

The constraint. Ask for the deadline or budget that's driving this. It surfaces real urgency, and it filters out tire-kickers without sounding gatekeeper-y. ("When does this need to be done by?" works better than "what's your budget?")

The asset. Ask for a link to the thing they want to talk about — their site, their doc, their repo. Two effects: you walk into the call already oriented, and they self-select for being prepared.

Anti-patterns

• Open-ended essay questions. If you're asking for more than a sentence, you're asking the wrong way.
• Marketing-survey questions. "How did you hear about me?" belongs in an email after the meeting, not before it.
• Compliance theater. Don't make people confirm they've read a 200-word policy to book a free intro call.

A worked example

Here's a real intake block we shipped for a fractional CTO who books advisory calls:

1. What stage is your company at? (pre-seed / seed / Series A / later)
2. What's the question you most want a second opinion on? (1–2 sentences)
3. Optional: link to anything I should read first. (deck, doc, repo)

Three questions. All forced-choice or short-form. Each one earns its place. He says he reads them on the morning of, and they cut his "five minutes of context at the top" down to thirty seconds.

That's the whole bar: would this question save you time on the call? If yes, ask it. If no, cut it.

— The MeetingWith team