Module · Project requests
A brief, not an email
saying “are you free?”
When somebody wants you to quote for a job, what arrives is the thing you actually need to quote from — the scope, the budget band, the deadline and the files — in your dashboard rather than your inbox.
What arrives
Everything you would have asked for in the first three emails.
The form asks once, and the answers come attached to the person who gave them.
Example brief
A hard deadline is its own field
Because “six to eight weeks” and “it must exist by the fourteenth” are different constraints, and the second one decides whether you can take the job.
Files come with it
Brand guides, references, an old site export. Stored against the request rather than sitting in an email thread you will search for in three weeks.
An estimate is produced
Generated from what they told you, as a starting figure for the conversation. It is not sent to them and it is not a quote.
Where a request sits
Example pipeline
The pipeline
Five states, and one of them is lost on purpose.
Five states, moved by you. New, reviewing, quoted, won, lost — which is the whole pipeline a small studio needs and considerably less than a CRM will sell you.
Lost is a state worth having. A request you turned down for a reason is worth being able to find again when the same client comes back with a real budget.
How you get it
It is already on when you get the dashboard
This one is not on a checkout page, and you do not have to ask for it. Module flags are set while your dashboard is being built — if the site needs it, it is switched on before you ever log in. Nothing extra on your plan, and nothing to request.
If your site invites briefs, project requests is switched on during setup, with the form already on a page of your own.
Where the form lives, and what it does
Where it sits
On your site, one click from the work.
The form is a page on your own site, so a request arrives from someone who has already read your work rather than from a marketplace where you are one of forty.
Pair it with the portfolio and the path is short: they read three projects, they fill in a brief, and it lands with the budget band already in it. That is a very different first conversation from “hi, are you taking work?”
Before you start
What this does not do, said now rather than later.
The estimate is not a quote
It is a starting figure calculated from what they told you, for your eyes. Nothing is sent to the client and nothing commits you to a number.
No proposals or contracts
Helm collects the brief and holds the pipeline. Writing the proposal and getting it signed happens somewhere else.
No automatic replies beyond the acknowledgement
They are told it arrived. Everything after that is you deciding whether the job is worth having, which is not something to automate.
Getting started
Ask once, and stop quoting blind.
Switched on per account rather than bought. Plans start at $20 a month.