Accepting a proposal in the portal is the kickoff signal — for both sides. Here's what happens in the hours and days right after.

Within a few hours — confirmation

You receive a confirmation email from your point of contact at DMU. It typically:

• Acknowledges your acceptance and thanks you.
• Lists any inputs we need from you to start work (see below).
• Points you at the first invoice and how to pay it.

If you don't see the confirmation within one working day, reply to the proposal email — the acceptance might not have reached us cleanly, or our reply might be sitting in your spam folder.

Inputs we collect

What we ask for depends on the project. A few examples:

• For a website build. Contact details to display (phone, email, address), an optional short company description, an optional 1-2 photos to enrich the page.
• For brand work. Existing logos, brand guidelines, any reference materials, the social-media accounts we'll be working with.
• For a domain registration or transfer. The exact name and TLD you want, plus (for a transfer) the auth code from your current registrar.

You upload these to the shared Drive in the portal — see the Drive article (coming soon) for how that works. Anything you send by email we'll also drop into the Drive so we both work from the same set of files.

We won't start the build until we have what we need; we'll chase you if something's missing.

Your first invoice

Right after acceptance, we issue the first invoice. What it covers depends on how your project is staged in the proposal:

• Most projects are split into three phases (a deposit on acceptance, an interim milestone, a final balance on delivery). Your first invoice is for the deposit — the remaining phases get their own invoices when they become due.
• Smaller jobs are sometimes billed as a single phase — in which case the first invoice is for the whole project.

Recurring subscriptions (hosting, maintenance, SEO) are billed separately on their own cycle and auto-charged via Stripe on a card you'll put on file — they're not bundled into the project invoice and not paid the same way. See Subscriptions & billing for the recurring side.

You can find your invoices in the portal under Invoices, and the project phase breakdown under Project Payments. See Payment for how to read an invoice, the methods we accept, and the steps for paying.

For most projects we wait for payment of the first invoice before starting build work in earnest — the proposal terms state the exact split.

Delivery timeline

Every project has its own timeline — there's no single rule that applies across all of them. The proposal you accepted states the delivery expectations for your project specifically; that's the document to refer back to.

What's the same across every project: the clock starts once we have both your payment and the kickoff materials we asked for, not the moment you click accept. Delaying either delays the start.

If the timing is critical for you (a launch event, a fiscal deadline, a campaign window), tell us during Discovery & brief so we can build it into the proposal up front rather than chasing it after acceptance.

Ongoing communication

From this point on, your main channels are:

• Email — for substantive decisions and anything you want on the record.
• Phone — for quick questions; details on How to reach us.
• The portal Drive — for shared files (briefs you send us, brochures and brand palettes we send you, work-in-progress assets).
• The portal itself — for the canonical view of invoices, service status, and active projects.

You don't have to use any one channel exclusively. Pick what fits.