We had three separate forms. Architecture firms took one, law firms took another, and everyone else clicked “Generic.” Before a prospect could tell us anything about their business, we were asking them to pick a category.
That’s not a welcome. That’s an obstacle.
The Hidden Off-Ramp
Every field on a form is a decision point. Fill this in. Keep going. The moment a busy founder pauses — because the question doesn’t quite fit, or because they’re already late to something — they’re likely to close the tab and not come back.
The data is blunt about this. The average web form abandonment rate sits at 67.9%. That means two out of three people who start a form never submit it. Most of them don’t decide to quit — they just stop.
We had nine questions on each vertical form. Nine decisions before anyone heard back from us.
What Specific Questions Actually Do
When you write specific questions, you’re answering what you assume matters — not what the prospect came to tell you.
One of our architecture-specific questions asked about submittal packages. That’s real work. Architecture firms spend hours every week on submittals, and an AI employee can take a significant chunk of that off their plate. But what if the firm that fills out the form doesn’t need help with submittals? What if their real pain is client intake, proposal follow-up, or scheduling? The specific question has already narrowed the conversation to something that might not be their problem at all.
Open-ended questions fix this. “What’s one process you’d hand off to an AI employee first?” gives someone the liberty to tell us what actually hurts — which is almost always more useful than anything we’d have thought to ask.
We also realized several of our nine questions belonged in the discovery call, not the form. One asked what platforms the team uses for operations and communication. That’s a legitimate question, but it’s better answered live — because when we know the answer, we can respond to it: “If you’re on Microsoft 365, we can build for that instead of Slack. If you use Google Workspace, we can work there too.” The form can’t have that conversation. A call can.
The Math on Fewer Fields
Here’s the counterintuitive part: shorter forms don’t just get more submissions — they often produce more qualified leads in absolute terms, not just better conversion rates.
A 2026 analysis of B2B form data illustrates this directly: a 4-field form that earns 200 submissions at a 30% SQL rate delivers 60 qualified leads. A 14-field form that friction-filters down to only 30 submissions — even at a 70% SQL rate — delivers just 21. The exhaustive form feels like better qualification. The math says otherwise.
B2B form studies consistently find that fewer fields correlates with meaningfully higher completion rates — and the relationship is non-linear. The first few fields you cut do more work than the last few. We had nine to cut. Four to five is the sweet spot for forms aimed at principals who are already stretched thin.
What We Changed
The new form is one path. Five questions, in this order: what industry is your business in, what’s one process you’d hand off to an AI employee first, how many people are on your team, your company website (optional), and your email address last.
Email goes last intentionally. By the time someone reaches that field, they’ve already told us something real about their business — which means they’ve already started the conversation. Asking for contact information before they’ve shared anything reverses that dynamic. You’re asking them to trust you before you’ve given them any reason to.
We also moved away from vertical-specific forms partly for a reason we’re honest about: we don’t yet have someone from each industry fact-checking whether the questions land. An architecture firm owner reading a question about submittal review cycles might find it perfectly calibrated. Or they might read it and think, “that’s not actually my problem.” With open-ended questions, they get to decide what’s relevant.
If you’re curious about how the form connects to the rest of the process, our welcome post has more context on how we think about the audit and what happens after you submit.
Less Friction, More Conversation
The form now takes about 90 seconds to complete. That’s by design.
We’re talking to principals, partners, and office managers who are already doing the work of two or three people. The audit form is the first thing we ask of them. What we ask — and how much we ask — should reflect how we want to work with them: efficiently, without wasted motion.