From zero to launch: a consultant checklist

This checklist walks you through everything between "I just heard about Draftl" and "I just delivered my first paid review." Each step tells you which page to visit, which button to click, and what happens next. Steps 3 and 7 are optional — everything else is required before you can appear in the marketplace.

If you are brand new, start with Getting started as a consultant for a broader tour, then come back here to work through the launch sequence.

1. Create your organization

Head to the consultant landing page at /advisors and click Get Started. You will be asked to sign in first, then land on a short onboarding form with a single field: your organization name (for example, "Beacon College Advising"). Submit it and Draftl creates your organization, switches your account to a consultant account, and drops you into your new dashboard.

Each account can belong to one organization, so if you have already joined one, you will be redirected straight to the dashboard instead.

Take a minute to look around. The sidebar is organized into three sections: Overview (Home, Analytics, Review Queue), People (Clients, Advisors, Broadcasts), and Organization (Marketplace, Integrations, Payments, Settings). Home greets you with stat cards for total clients, essays, advisors, and upcoming meetings, plus a weekly activity chart and a feed of your clients' most recent essays — mostly empty for now, but this is where your practice will live.

2. Connect Stripe so you can get paid

Before anything else, open Payments in the sidebar (under Organization) and click Start setup. This launches Stripe Express onboarding, where you will enter your business details, bank account, and identity verification. If you leave partway through, the page shows Complete setup so you can pick up where you left off.

This step is not optional if you want marketplace clients: your listing cannot be submitted for approval until Stripe reports that charges are enabled. Do it early so it is not the thing blocking your launch later. See Getting paid on Draftl for details on fees, balances, and payouts.

3. (Optional) Connect a scheduling provider

If you plan to offer 1-on-1 meetings, open Integrations and connect either Calendly or Cal.com through OAuth. The page shows your connection status, and you can disconnect at any time. You will link specific event types to booking packages in step 7, so this only needs to be done once.

4. Build your marketplace listing

Open Marketplace in the sidebar. This is your public profile — the page students see when browsing for a reviewer. Fill in your display name, a short headline, your bio, up to 12 specialties, and an avatar. Choose Individual or Business depending on whether you work solo or with a team.

A strong bio and specific specialties do a lot of work here, since students compare listings side by side. Creating your marketplace listing covers field limits and profile strategy in depth.

5. Add at least one review offering

Still on the Marketplace page, click Add offering. Each offering is a review product with a name, description, price, and turnaround window between 1 and 720 hours (up to 30 days). Free offerings are allowed — a $0 price is a common way to earn early ratings. You need at least one active offering before you can submit for approval.

6. Submit for approval

Once the pieces are in place, click Submit for approval. The requirements are:

• Display name filled in
• Bio filled in
• At least one active offering
• Stripe Connect connected with charges enabled

Your listing moves from DRAFT to PENDING while the Draftl team reviews it. If approved, it goes live in Find a Reviewer, where any student on Draftl can discover you. If rejected, you will see the reason on the status banner — edit your listing and resubmit. Once approved, you can also toggle your listing's visibility on and off without losing approved status, which is handy if you ever need to pause new requests.

7. (Optional) Create booking packages

If you connected a scheduling provider in step 3, go to Payments and open the Packages manager. Click Add package and give it a name (like "30-min college coach call"), a description, a price ($0 works here too), and link it to a Calendly or Cal.com event type. Your organization clients can then book and pay through Draftl. See Meetings and booking packages for the full flow.

8. Invite clients and fellow advisors

Grow your organization from the People section of the sidebar:

• Clients → Invite client: enter a student's email, and they receive an invite to join your organization. Once they accept, you get commenter access to all of their essays.
• Advisors → Invite advisor: bring teammates into your organization the same way.

As your client list grows, you can organize students into groups (like "Class of 2026") from the Groups tab and send announcements to everyone at once with New broadcast on the Broadcasts page.

Organization clients are different from marketplace customers — Marketplace reviews vs. organization clients explains the distinction, and Managing clients, groups, and broadcasts covers day-to-day client management.

9. Work your Review Queue

When a student purchases one of your offerings, you get an email and an in-app notification. The request appears in your Review Queue: auto-assigned to you if you are an Individual listing or a solo team, or in the shared Claimable tab if your Business organization has multiple advisors.

Click Claim to take a request, read the essay snapshot, leave inline comments, write a summary, and click Deliver review before the due date. Delivering essay reviews from your queue walks through the whole workflow.

Your first few deliveries matter more than most: listings are sorted by rating by default in Find a Reviewer, so on-time, thoughtful early reviews compound into more visibility.

10. Track earnings and activity

Two pages keep you on top of the business side:

• Payments shows your available and pending balances, gross earnings, platform fees, net earnings, and counts of paid reviews and bookings, filterable by month or all time, with a link to your Stripe payout dashboard for withdrawals. Draftl's platform fee is 10% of each transaction, so a $100 review pays you $90.
• Analytics shows your full client list with their essays (type, title, score, word count), groups, meeting history, and booking records.

That is the full loop: listed, paid, reviewed, and growing. From here it is a cycle of delivering great reviews, collecting ratings, and inviting more clients.