@ivaka99Verified
Founder·Member since Jun 2026·4h ago
The unpaid revision that taught me to never start work without a yes
generalresources
A few years back I delivered a batch of outreach work for a client. Solid placements, on time, everything I thought we agreed on. Then came the reply: "this isn't really what I had in mind, can we redo it?"
There was no written scope. Just a few messages and a call where we both nodded. So I ate the redo. Hours of unpaid work, and a weird tension with a client I actually liked.
What got me wasn't the lost time. It was realizing the problem was never the work. It was that we never pinned down what "done" meant before I started. Vague scope at the start always turns into an awkward conversation at the end.
Since then I changed how I open every project:
Write the scope in plain language, including what is NOT included
Get an explicit yes from the client before any work starts, not a vague "sounds good"
Keep that approval somewhere both sides can point back to later
Sounds basic, but it killed almost all of my "I thought that was included" moments. The clients who push back on signing off up front are usually the exact ones who would have pushed back at the end anyway. Better to find out on day zero.
I got tired of doing this with messy docs and email threads, so I ended up building a tool for it called ProofNod. The short version: you send the client a clean scope, they approve it with one click, and both sides get a timestamped record of exactly what was agreed. When someone later says "I thought that was included," you have the receipt instead of an argument. It also works the other way, the client feels safer because they see and agree to everything before paying.
Still early and I am building it around real workflows, so I would genuinely rather hear how you all handle this than pitch anyone. Do you get formal sign-off before starting client work, or do you keep it loose and deal with issues as they come up?