Thediscoverytax

Walk into almost any mid-sized agency and the first line of the proposal will be some variation of: "Phase 1 — Discovery." Six weeks. €20-40k. A slide deck with a persona or two, a competitive audit you could have written yourself in a weekend, and a workshop you’ll remember for the sandwiches.

We call this the discovery tax. It exists for one reason: the agency hasn’t committed to what it’s actually going to build, and it needs paid runway to find out.

The problem isn’t research. Research is good. The problem is selling research as insurance against a project you haven’t scoped yet.

Here’s what we do instead. Before we send a proposal, we spend two unpaid hours reading everything you already have — your current site, your deck, your last two investor emails, any analytics you can share. Then we come back with a point of view: what we’d do, why, roughly what it costs, and how long it takes. If that document isn’t useful, you owe us nothing.

If it is useful, the engagement starts at week one of the actual work. No discovery invoice. No re-onboarding. Our first deliverable is a draft of the thing we’re going to ship, not a brief about the thing we’re going to ship.

The counterargument from traditional agencies is that this is reckless — that proper discovery de-risks the build. In our experience the opposite is true: discovery phases create the illusion of risk reduction while letting both sides postpone the real disagreement (what the site should actually be) until after the cheque clears.

The better risk-reduction tool is a short first milestone with a real deliverable and a paid exit clause. If we get to week two and you think we’re wrong about the direction, you walk with what we’ve produced and €0 further owed. We’ve never needed it, but offering it changes how carefully everyone thinks.

Transparent pricing, a published starting price, and a refusable first milestone do more to de-risk the work than any six-week workshop we’ve ever seen.