Getting started as a consultant

Draftl gives college essay consultants a complete workspace: a dashboard for your clients and their essays, a marketplace where any student can buy a review from you, session booking with built-in payments, and tools for announcements and team management. This guide gets your organization created and shows you around before you open for business.

Create your organization

Everything on the consultant side lives inside an organization — even if you're a solo advisor, your organization is your workspace.

1. Go to the advisors page and click Get Started.
2. Sign in to your Draftl account, or create one if you're new.
3. Enter your organization name (for example, "Beacon College Advising") and submit.

That single form is all it takes. Your account becomes a consultant account, your organization is created, and you land in the consultant dashboard. From there, Draftl points you to your first steps: invite advisors to your team, add student clients, and track essay progress in one place.

Each account belongs to one organization. If you're joining an existing team rather than starting your own, ask a teammate to invite you instead — you'll accept by email and skip setup entirely.

A tour of your dashboard

The sidebar is organized into three sections.

Overview

• Home — Your landing page, which greets you by name. Stat cards show total clients, essays, advisors, and upcoming meetings, with badges like "+2 this week" or "1 invite pending" for recent changes. Below them you'll find a weekly activity chart covering the last eight weeks, a feed of the eight most recent essays across your clients, upcoming meetings, and your client groups.
• Analytics — The deep view: your full client list with each student's essays (type, title, score, and word count), groups, meeting history including status and payment, and booking checkout records.
• Review Queue — Where paid marketplace review requests arrive, organized into Claimable, Mine, and Delivered tabs. Each request shows the essay title, word count, client name, offering, price, and due date.

People

• Clients — Your student roster, with tabs for individual Clients and Groups (like "Class of 2026"). This is where you'll click Invite client to bring students in.
• Advisors — Your team. Use Invite advisor to add colleagues to the organization.
• Broadcasts — Announcements sent to all of your clients at once, by email and in their dashboards.

Organization

• Marketplace — Your public listing (profile, specialties, and status) and the review offerings students can purchase, each with a name, description, price, and turnaround time.
• Integrations — Connect Calendly or Cal.com via OAuth so students can book time on your calendar.
• Payments — Stripe Connect setup, your earnings and balances, recent bookings, and the packages manager for your session offerings.
• Settings — Rename your organization, view your advisor directory and pending invites, or delete the organization.

Two ways to work with students

Draftl supports two distinct models, and most consultants use both.

Organization clients are students you invite into your organization for an ongoing advising relationship. Every advisor automatically gets commenter access to all client essays — no sharing required — and clients can book sessions with you, receive your broadcasts, and work with you across their whole application.

Marketplace reviews are one-off purchases. Any student on Draftl can browse the marketplace, buy one of your review offerings, and receive your feedback on a single essay — no prior relationship needed. You review a snapshot of their essay (an immutable copy taken at purchase) and deliver inline comments plus a written summary, and the student can rate the review afterward, which builds your listing's star rating.

The two are independent: a student doesn't need to be your client to buy a review, and your clients can buy reviews too. For a full breakdown of how they differ, see Marketplace reviews vs. organization clients.

What to do next

Your organization exists, but a few setup steps stand between you and your first student. In rough order:

• Connect Stripe so you can get paid. Head to Payments and click Start setup to complete Stripe Express onboarding — reviews and bookings both pay out through it, and your marketplace listing can't go live without it. See Getting paid on Draftl.
• Build your marketplace listing — display name, headline, bio, specialties, and at least one review offering — then submit it for approval. See Creating your marketplace listing.
• Set up meetings if you offer 1-on-1 sessions: connect Calendly or Cal.com in Integrations, then create booking packages. See Meetings and booking packages.
• Invite your clients and team, and organize students into groups. See Managing clients, groups, and broadcasts.

You don't need to watch the dashboard for work to arrive. When a student purchases one of your offerings, you'll get an email and an in-app notification linking straight to your Review Queue, and each request carries a due date based on the turnaround time you promised. When reviews start arriving, Delivering essay reviews covers the claim-comment-deliver workflow end to end. As payments come in, the Payments page tracks your available and pending balances, gross earnings, and Draftl's 10% platform fee, with a link to your Stripe dashboard for withdrawals.

Want the whole path in one checklist, from brand-new organization to your first delivered review? Follow the Consultant launch checklist.