Startup enquiries are more alike than founders expect. Different products, different markets, different stages, and the same ten requests, usually in the same order, often inside the first ten minutes. That is not a complaint. Almost every one of them is a reasonable thing to want. But a request is not a brief, and the distance between what somebody asks for and what they are actually trying to buy is where most of a first budget gets spent on the wrong thing. What follows is that list ordere...