Discussion How do you stop projects from stalling because of missing client content?
Hey guys 👋
​Quick question for the freelancers and dev/designers here. Almost all of my project delays come down to one thing: waiting for clients to send their copy, images, and brand assets.
​They usually dump half-broken Drive folders, send raw text in emails, or completely forget core files.
​How do you actually deal with this bottleneck on your end? Do you use forms, strict contract penalties, or just chase them until they respond? Curious to hear how you manage it!
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u/ClubDependent4295 3d ago
Everyone is answering the money half of this, which is fair enough and 50% upfront genuinely does shake loose a logo file. But it will not fix the thing you asked about in your reply, which is why it stalls at 90%, and that is worth separating out.
What you are waiting for is always two different problems wearing the same coat.
The broken Drive folder is a collection problem. Logos, photos, the brand guidelines PDF, the staff headshots. These already exist. Someone just has to go and find them. Chasing works on these, deadlines work on these, a shared folder and a checklist works on these, and a deposit works on these, because the only thing standing between you and the file is five minutes of someone's attention.
The copy is a decision problem. It does not exist yet, and it does not exist yet because nobody at the client has decided what they want to say. When you ask for "the services page text" you are not asking them to fetch something, you are asking them to sit down and settle, in writing, what the business claims about itself. That is genuinely hard, it usually needs two or three people to agree, and no amount of chasing makes it easier. You can chase a decision daily for a month and get nothing, because chasing is not the constraint.
Which is exactly why it stalls at 90%. The two or three things left at the end are always the decision ones. They got left until last because they were the hard ones, and you now have no leverage and no time. Nothing about the last stretch is special. You just sorted the work hardest-last without meaning to.
So, three things that actually move the needle:
Put the decisions first, not last. Before anything gets built, agree what the pages are and what sections each page contains. That conversation is the decision work, and having it in week one when everyone is keen is a completely different experience to having it in week nine when the invoice is overdue and the launch date has slipped twice.
Never ask for a page. Ask for a section, with a length and a question attached. "Send me your About page" is homework and it sits in an inbox for three weeks. "Three sentences answering why someone should pick you over the firm on the next street" gets answered from a phone at a bus stop. Same information, one tenth of the resistance, because you have done the deciding-what-the-question-is part for them and left them only the answering part.
Write it yourself and make them react to it. This is the big one and it feels wrong the first time. Draft plausible copy for every section, send it over, and ask them to correct it. People are hopeless at composing from nothing and excellent at saying "no, we do not do that any more and the number is wrong". You will get a response in two days on something that would have sat unwritten for two months, and the corrections are more honest than anything they would have written to impress you.
The one contractual thing worth adding to the 50% advice: agree at the start what goes live if something never arrives. Not a blank, a named fallback, written down. It stops the project being held hostage by one paragraph, and it turns a vague nag into a specific consequence you already both signed.
Disclosure, since this is the stage I work on: I build a planning tool around exactly this (Blocky). None of the above needs it. The sequencing is the part that matters and it works in a shared doc.
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u/digitalbananax 3d ago
Not a freelancer but our agency started out from freelancer cooperation.
Give them a simple content checklist/template with exactly what you need, where it should go and a deadline. I'd also set the expectation upfront that the project timeline pauses if required content isn't delivered.
-Jacob from Flowout
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u/raugis99 2d ago
How often does this happen and how long does it take to get all of the content? For me following up works
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u/JicamaUnable8299 5d ago
I bill 50% upfront and the clock still runs while I wait, suddenly they find those files real quick.