Client intake form
The questionnaire a prospect fills in before you'll book a call, so budget, timeline, and scope are on the table before you spend an hour.
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What it is
A client intake form is the questionnaire a prospect fills in before you will book a call. It does two jobs at once: it filters out the people who were never going to hire you, and it briefs you on the ones who will, so the first call starts at 'here is how I would approach this' instead of 'so, tell me about your business'.
The load-bearing questions are budget range (as a set of bands, not an open text box), desired timeline, what they have already tried, who signs off, and one open field asking what success looks like in six months. Budget bands are the single highest-value field: an honest range on a form saves both sides a 45-minute call that ends in a wince. Keep it to eight or nine questions. A 30-field form does not filter for seriousness, it filters for patience.
Gotcha: a form is a gate, and gates only work if you actually hold them. If you take calls from people who skipped the form, the form stops being a filter and becomes a slow contact page. Also send an immediate confirmation with your process and typical price range, because the gap between submission and your reply is where good leads go and book someone else.
Ask AI for it
Design a client intake form for an independent design studio, delivered as a short questionnaire plus the logic behind it. Include: name, company, and website; what they need built, in their own words; what problem it solves and what success looks like in six months; budget as single-select bands (under 5k, 5k to 15k, 15k to 40k, 40k plus, not sure yet); desired start date and hard deadline with the reason behind the deadline; who else needs to approve the decision; what they have already tried or who they worked with before; and how they found me. Cap it at nine questions, mark which are required, and write helper text for the budget question that explains why I ask. Then give me the auto-reply email (confirm receipt, state my typical project range and lead time, say when I will respond), plus a simple scoring rule for which submissions get a call, which get a templated referral out, and which get a polite decline.