The payment has landed in Stripe. Here is what you send, collect and check, in order, over the next 72 hours until the client's first request is ready to start. And here is the exact point where your turnaround clock begins.
This page is the hour-by-hour walkthrough. If you want the wider view of what onboarding has to achieve, the client onboarding guide covers that. The steps below assume a Trello board as the request queue, because that is where most solo and small studios start, with a note on where a portal changes things.
Before the first client: agree the start condition
Write one sentence before anyone pays: "Work starts when the first request is marked Ready, not when payment clears." Paid does not mean brief-ready. A client who pays at 4pm on a Friday and sends a one-line brief has not started your 48-hour clock. Say so in writing before they assume it has.
Name one billing owner on your side. If you work alone, that is you. In a six-person studio it is whoever checks the Stripe dashboard, not whoever happens to see the receipt email. That person confirms the subscription is active in Stripe itself and tells the onboarding owner "paid, go". A forwarded receipt is not confirmation. If you ever start work before payment clears, write down who agreed it and until when, so the exception does not quietly become the rule. The billing and retention guide covers what to do when a first payment fails.
Then decide what your promise actually is. DesignJoy's pricing block lists "Avg. 48 hour delivery" and "Up to 2 users" on its $4,995 a month plan. DesignJoy does not publish its onboarding steps, so we will not guess at them. Both promises still depend on onboarding: 48 hours needs a defined start, and "2 users" needs you to know which two people they are on day one.
The first 72 hours, step by step
The timeline below is illustrative, not a benchmark. It is what a tidy first three days looks like for a studio running on Trello, Loom, Google Drive and Figma. Stretch the hours to fit your working week, but keep the order.
- Hour 0: confirm the payment. Tool: Stripe. Owner: billing owner. Check the subscription shows as active in the Stripe dashboard, not just that an invoice email went out. Post "paid, go" to whoever runs onboarding.
- Within 2 hours: send the welcome message. Tool: email. Owner: onboarding owner. One message with the board, the walkthrough video and the three things you need by tomorrow. The wording is further down this page.
- Within 2 hours: invite them to the board. Tool: Trello. Owner: onboarding owner. Invite the named people only, to their own board, with a brief card template already sitting in the first list. Trello's free plan allows up to 10 collaborators per Workspace, and Standard is $6 per user a month billed monthly. So count heads before you add a fourth client. If you run a portal instead, this step is the portal invite. ManyRequests Core is $59 a month, and Zendo's Essential plan is free for up to 3 clients (both). Our client portal comparison covers when a portal is worth paying for.
- Within 2 hours: record the walkthrough. Tool: Loom. Owner: onboarding owner. A three-minute recording of the client's own board: where a request goes, what Ready means, where feedback lives, where final files land. Loom Starter costs $0 and is enough for this. Recording on their board, with their name on the lists, lands better than a generic tour.
- Day 1: collect brand files and name the approver. Tool: Google Drive. Owner: the client, chased by the onboarding owner. Share one Drive folder that you own, with subfolders for logos, fonts, imagery and guidelines. Ask for the requester and the final approver by name, and who decides when the approver is on holiday.
- Day 2: review the first brief. Tool: the Trello card, laid out with the fields from our design request brief template. Owner: delivery owner, meaning the designer or lead who will do the work. Open the Figma file you will work in, check every linked asset opens, then either move the card to Ready or return it with one list of what is missing.
- From Ready: the clock starts. Tool: a Trello list move. Owner: delivery owner. The moment the card lands in Ready, your normal turnaround applies. Add the date and time as a comment on the card so nobody argues about it later.
Two refusals belong in this stage. Do not accept passwords by email or chat; if you need their CMS or social account, ask them to add you as a user from their side. Do not accept loose files in Slack or WhatsApp either; reply with the Drive folder and ask them to put the files there. Files scattered across threads are how a revision goes missing three weeks later.
Test the brief, not just the checkbox
"Brief received" is not a check. Write down what Ready means for each type of request you sell, then test the first brief against it. Two illustrative examples:
- A sales deck. "Brand assets supplied" is not enough if the studio cannot access the font licence or the linked imagery. Load the fonts in Figma and click every image link. If the brand font is licensed to the client's in-house team only, you need a decision before layout, not after.
- A landing page. "Copy supplied" is not enough if the founder and the marketing lead are still rewriting the headline in a shared Google Doc. Ready means one copy version, marked final by the approver.
Ask whether each input is usable and authorised for this job, not merely present. That question takes ten minutes on day two and saves a revision round in week two.
The messages to send
You need two messages. Write them once, save them as email templates or as a pinned Trello card, and change the names each time. Both examples below are illustrative, for a client called Sam.
The welcome, sent within two hours of payment:
Hi Sam, your payment has come through, thank you. You should have a Trello invite in your inbox now. That board is where every request, comment and final file will live, and there is a three-minute Loom walkthrough pinned to the first card. By tomorrow afternoon we need three things: your logo, fonts and brand guidelines in the shared Drive folder linked on the board, and the name of the one person who approves work. Please also get your first request written up on the Brief card. Once that brief is checked and marked Ready, our 48-hour turnaround starts. Please do not send passwords or files by email or Slack. The Drive folder and the board are the only places we look.
The missing-input list, sent on day two if the brief is not ready. Here is the day-two message for the sales deck brief above, with the three items still open:
Hi Sam, the sales deck brief is nearly there. Three things are open before we can mark it Ready:
- Final copy for slides 4 to 9. With you: the Google Doc still has two versions of the headline.
- The brand font files. With you: the Drive folder has the guidelines PDF but not the fonts.
- Slide size. With us: we will use 16:9 unless you tell us otherwise by 3pm today.
The 48-hour clock starts when the card moves to Ready. If the first two arrive today, the first draft is with you on Thursday. Every day they stay open moves that date by a day.
Send it as one message. Three separate "oh, and also" notes make the studio look disorganised, even when the gap is on the client's side.
Use the first request to teach the rules
Show the client where their request sits and how a second one joins the queue behind it. If they send three on day one, put all three in the backlog in their order and move only the top one towards Ready. That is the one-active-request rule working in front of them, and the first week is the cheapest time to show it.
Decide, and say out loud, whether a request waiting on their feedback keeps its active slot. Then ask the approver to find the current version on the card and leave one clear decision: approved, or one list of changes. Five minutes of that teaches more than a long tour of features they will never touch.
Keep the words identical in your written policy, the Loom and the board's list names. If the policy says Ready and the board says To do, someone will argue about when the clock started.
Review the first cycle before adding tools
When the first request is delivered, spend fifteen minutes on it. Note what you had to chase and how many times. Check whether the client used the board or drifted back to email. Ask whether the approver could actually act, or was missing access to something.
Fix the welcome message if a required input was easy to miss. Fix permissions if the right person could not approve. Neither problem needs new software. Look at a client portal only when the same access or visibility complaint turns up across several clients, not after one awkward week. If a client's work is confidential or regulated, agree storage and access rules with them before you collect a single file; this walkthrough does not cover compliance.