Inquiries
Why client inquiries get lost in your DMs.
The problem usually isn’t that prospects aren’t reaching out. It’s that they reach out in five places, and you only check three.
The problem
Where the inquiries actually go.
Someone saw your work and wants to talk. They’ve got options: your Instagram DMs, a Facebook message, the contact form on your site, a comment under a post, the phone number on your card. They pick one. Whether you ever see it is partly down to luck.
You didn’t decide to collect inquiries five ways — it accumulated. And most of those inboxes aren’t where you spend your working day. Social apps tuck messages from non-followers into a separate “requests” folder that’s easy to forget. A contact form quietly emails an address you stopped watching months ago. A DM slides under a pile of notifications before you’re free to answer.
The inquiry was real. The path to you wasn’t reliable — and a prospect ready to talk now rarely tries twice.
The fix
What a reliable inquiry path looks like.
You don’t need more channels. You need one that works. A dependable setup does a few specific things.
The five things that matter
One place to point everyone. Pick a single “reach me here” and send every prospect to it, instead of splitting your attention across five inboxes.
It lands where you already are. The destination should be the inbox you open every day — your email — not a side folder in an app you check on Sundays.
It’s easy for them, with clear expectations. A short form — name, email, what they need — and a plain line about when they’ll hear back.
It leaves a real trail. An email thread is still findable next week. A DM buried in a feed isn’t.
Their information comes to you — not into a platform’s machinery to be repackaged.
You can rig a version of this yourself: one form, routed to your real inbox, linked everywhere your name shows up, with an honest response-time note attached. The tool matters less than the move — collapsing five leaky channels into one you trust.
The version where this is handled
One page in. One inbox out.
Heard gives you an inquiry page at youhostd.com/heard/your-handle. A prospect sends their name, email, and message; it lands in your inbox; you hit reply and your answer goes straight to them — no separate app, no extra inbox to babysit, no dashboard to remember. See how Heard works. It pairs with the hub page that one link belongs on, and both are part of looking professional online as a solo business.