Client intake from the inbox to the board

New briefs arrived at a shared studio address and lived there, so whether a project got started depended on who read the inbox that morning. Two jobs were missed in one quarter, and both were found weeks later underneath a newsletter.

The problem

What they built

Applying one label to an email turns it into a Trello card, a Notion project page and a message in the studio channel within about a minute. The inbox goes back to being a mailbox, and the board becomes the only place anyone has to look.

The flow, step by step

<ol class="sy-steps"><li><b>gmail</b> Anyone in the studio applies the new-brief label to a thread, which is the deliberate human decision that starts everything else.</li><li><b>trello</b> A card opens on the Intake list titled with the sender company and the subject line, carrying the email body, any attachments and a six item qualifying checklist.</li><li><b>notion</b> A project page is created in the Clients database with the contact email, the source, a blank scope section and a link back to the Trello card.</li><li><b>slack</b> The studio channel gets one line naming the client, the budget if it was mentioned, and a link to the card, so whoever has capacity can claim it.</li></ol>

What changed

<div class="sy-table-wrap"><table><thead><tr><th>Metric</th><th>Before</th><th>After</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Briefs with no owner after 24 hours</td><td>4 in 10</td><td>under 1 in 10</td></tr><tr><td>Time to first reply on a new brief</td><td>2 days</td><td>3 hours</td></tr><tr><td>Briefs lost entirely per quarter</td><td>2</td><td>0</td></tr></tbody></table></div><blockquote><p>Six people had access to that inbox and that was exactly the problem. The label is a decision anyone can make in one second, and after that the work exists somewhere other than my memory.</p><footer>Nell Ferraro, Founder at Cobalt Row Studio</footer></blockquote>

<p>Cobalt Row is a nine person branding studio that takes on roughly forty projects a year. Every one of them starts as an email to a shared address, mixed in with invoices, supplier newsletters and the occasional recruiter. Six people had access to that mailbox, which sounds like coverage and behaves like nobody being responsible.</p><p>The founder wanted to fix this without adding a form, because clients do not fill in forms and the studio wins work by being easy to talk to. The compromise was to keep the inbox as the front door and add one deliberate action: a label. Anyone who reads a brief and thinks this is real applies it, and the flow does the rest.</p><p>That single label matters more than the three steps after it. A trigger that fires on every incoming email would have filled the board with newsletters within a day and been switched off by Friday. Letting a person decide keeps the volume honest, takes one second, and gives the flow a clean signal to work from.</p><p>The Trello card is where the work lives and the Notion page is where the thinking lives, which is a split the studio already had informally. The card carries the checklist that stops a brief being answered before anyone has asked about budget or timeline, and the page carries the scope, the notes and eventually the proposal. Each links to the other, so nobody has to remember which app they were in.</p><p>The one thing they got wrong at the start was the Slack message. It repeated the whole email body, which meant the channel was unreadable and people stopped opening it. Cutting it back to the client name, the budget line and a link brought the channel back to life, and it is now where jobs actually get claimed.</p><p>After a year they added a second flow going the other way. When a card reaches the Won list, the Notion page status flips and a kickoff email drafts itself in Gmail for the founder to check and send. She still edits about half of them, which is the point of it being a draft.</p>

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