Would You Pay $10,000 to prevent a $100,000 Mistake?

A few months ago, I talked with a business owner who was working with a team of developers hailing from India and Pakistan. He had gone through a company in the United States that projected that they were developing from US talent, but then the owner noticed the developers' names.

At first glance, he was a little worried, but who can complain when you pay less than 70% of the next competing price for the same work, right? That was his mindset throughout the project.

In furthering our conversation, I asked, in a seemingly interested tone, if he wouldn't mind if I took a look at what he'd asked of them. I would be lying; I wanted to see if they did good work that I could maybe leverage in the future.

"No problem," he said. He admitted that he didn't know much about the process or the technology used to build his app. He trusted his US liaison, who promised him a well-developed, robust, and scalable solution.

Now, in my head, I thought he was reasonably early in production and had yet to spend much on the project. He's paying roughly $10-$20 an hour for development. His project seemed like a simple three-month job with a few resources working full-time. He has a project manager on the project who was provided by the company as a bonus to ensure good work, on time and within budget.

So, you can imagine that I'm expecting to see a pretty well-defined project with decent-quality code and something that could be usable at this juncture of the project.

After a few days, he gave me his credentials to access the project.

First, I noticed that he really didn't have raw visibility into the application's code, infrastructure, cloud accounts, and many other technical tools and resources the development team was using to build his project. This included the repository that housed the raw code, which shows you all of the work and "commits" of code with detailed notes as to what was worked on.

Second, the supposed project management information provided was via email: "Here's what we worked on, what we accomplished, what "doubts" we have, and so on and so forth." The information was so general, which is understandable because he is not a tech person. However, it doesn't provide any clarity about where the project is to date.

The third thing that caught my attention was his lack of visibility into anything that allowed him to truly assess the project's status. I asked, "So how far are you into this project, and what have you spent?"

A long pause ensues. "We've been working on this project for a little over a year, and I've put about $700,000 into it." By the way, he said that as if this was normal, okay, everybody does this.

I really did everything in my power to not say, "WHAT THE F___!!"

No, seriously, WTF!

Did I really hear that you... You couldn't have...

I immediately asked him to provide me with all of the information they had provided him, such as logins, emails, requirements, etc., and to introduce me as your new CTO. I didn't care about my consulting fees or what it would cost for my team to jump in and look into this. I was like, "Hell to the Nah!"

Next... I'll tell you what transpired and how, with a simple $10,000 assessment, we could have saved him hundreds, not one hundred, but hundreds of thousands of dollars with a fully functional and delivered solution in less than half of that time.

Comment "What happened?" to see the conclusion of the story.