279: What to Do If You've Already Spent $100K on Developers and Have Nothing to Show for It

Founders assume that if they just hire “good developers,” the product will magically take shape.

Sadly, that’s rarely what happens.

Too many non-technical founders burn through $50K … $80K … even $100K, only to end up with half-baked code and zero users. Not because they’re careless but because they skip the unsexy, zero-glamour work that actually protects their budget.

In this episode of Tech for Non-Techies, Sophia Matveeva breaks down the real reason this problem keeps happening and what to do if you’re already deep in the mess.

In this episode, you will hear:

• The hidden trap that causes founders to waste $50K–$100K before they even realise it
• Why skipping design validation guarantees confusion, rework, and blown budgets
• What to salvage from a broken build and what to ruthlessly cut
• The one mindset shift that stops perfectionism from quietly killing your product

Resources from this Episode

Free AI Mini-Workshop for Non-Technical Founders

Learn how to go from idea to a tested product using AI — in under 30 minutes.

Get free access here: techfornontechies.co/aiclass

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TRANSCRIPT (Unedited)

Sophia Matveeva  00:00

Have you spent $100,000 in developers and still don't have a working product, let alone users? Sadly, I've heard this story many, many times, and in this lesson, I'm going to show you what usually goes wrong, so why this happens, and what you can do next. Because the good news is some of these mistakes are fixable, but only if you stop repeating them.

Sophia Matveeva  00:28

Hello and welcome to the tech for non techie podcast. I'm your host, Sophia matveiza, if you're a non technical founder, building a tech product or adding AI to your business, you're in the right place. Each week, you'll get practical strategies, step by step, playbooks and real world case studies to help you launch and scale a tech business without learning to code. And this is not another startup show full of jargon venture capital theater or tech row bravado. Here we focus on building useful products that make money without height and without code. I've written for the Harvard Business Review and lectured at Oxford, London Business School and Chicago Booth. So you are in safe hands. I've also helped hundreds of founders go from concept to scalable product, and now it's your turn. So let's dive in.

Sophia Matveeva  01:22

Hello, smart people. How are you today? So I got the idea for this class because I was actually teaching an in person class on non technical founders recently, and there were a couple of people who came up to me after class, and they were essentially business owners, and they both had this pretty unhappy look on their faces, and they said, Well, you know, we really enjoyed this class, but we wish we had heard about you before. We wish we'd heard about tech front techies before, because essentially, both of those business owners had spent a lot of money on developers and didn't have anything to show for it. One person spent, I think, about 80k and another one was like upwards of 100 and I really, really felt for them, because it wasn't just money, it's time, it's effort, it's energy, but it's also, in some ways, your reputation, you know, your reputation, or even around your team, that okay, you're going to create a new project. You're going to go through this transformation. You're going to, you know, become a tech founder. You've spent a lot of money, and then you have nothing to show for it. It sucks. This happens so, you know, maybe you've spent 20k maybe you've spent 2k maybe you spent 200 this happens. You're not alone, you're not stupid, but you do need to take responsibility and figure out what went wrong, because unless you learn this lesson, your next 100k is going to go the same way as the first. For those of you have come to my live classes online, you would have seen that. Actually, the statistic that I normally shows that if people don't do proper design validation at the beginning, they are likely to spend somewhere between about 50 to 100k on on redevelopment. I'll explain what that means later on in the lesson, but essentially, it just means that if you don't know what you're doing, you're likely to waste money. So don't feel bad if that's what happened with you, because you because you don't know what you're doing, you're now going to learn and you're not going to have this the same mistakes again. So first of all, we need to diagnose what went wrong. A lot of people think that, oh, the developer scammed me. And yes, this happens sometimes, but actually it doesn't happen that often. What normally happens is that the founder doesn't give good directions, and so the developers either misunderstand the directions, or they kind of make up their own vision. And so when the founder gets what it is that they thought that they had ordered, they're getting something completely different. So first of all, Mike is, if you are in the situation, ask yourself, did you honestly define what success looks like like? Did you just say, Make me a healthcare app? Did you say, make me an app that's going to drive revenue for my business? Did you have a clear product goal. So in a previous lesson, we talked about product goals. Essentially, when you are creating a new tech product, it's a minimum viable version of something. So it's a really, really simple version of what you're going to create, and that needs to solve one or two problems. So let's think about Airbnb. The original problem that it solved was by helping people who needed a place to stay and basically linking them to people had a spare room. So the way you measure success is, do people book spare rooms? That's it. You don't really care about anything else at. The beginning. So in your case, did you have this clear product metric that you are measuring, that you're going to measure? Because if you didn't, I just don't see how it's possible for you to have a successful product. And here, I hate to say it to you, but whose fault is that it's not the developer's fault, because it's not their job to define the vision. It's the founder's job to define the vision. But if you didn't know what you're doing, you didn't know how to define the vision. So basically, having a clear product goal is defining your vision. If you didn't have one, no wonder you got a disaster next time, just have a clear product goal if you don't know what I'm talking about, at least listen to last week's episode. That will give you an idea of what product goals are now. Second question about why things went wrong. Did you really test demand before you build something? Did you interview your target customers? Did you interview them properly rather than say, Hey, we're building this. Do you want it? Because you kind of, you need to learn how to do proper user interviews. Because basically people, people please, and everybody says they will want your thing, and then you create it and they don't want it. This happens a lot. So before you sink money into expensive professionals. You need to learn how to test demand properly. This is something that actually we teach in our courses, and there are lots and lots of sessions. There are lots of lessons on this podcast about how to do that. Okay, another question about why things might have gone wrong. Did you actually show what you're going to build to people before you're going to build it? So essentially, what you need to do and long term listeners, you would have heard me say this before. So what you need to do is you need to create a really simple design and test that design, bring that design to your target audience, so your target customers get their feedback, and only once that design is clear, only once the very simple version without any code is understandable, only then you show it to developers. Essentially, I see that a lot of people who have never done anything in tech before and who have a tech idea, they just hire developers, and they skip this step, which is called design validation. So what you need to do first is you need to create a design of your product before you create the whole thing. It's a bit like, you know, in Hollywood movie sets. I mean, I've never been to Hollywood, but we can all imagine them. In Hollywood movie sets, there will be, like, rows of buildings, but they're just the front of the building, like they don't actually have the rest of the building is just for the set. That's the kind of thing that you need. You need to create for your product. So you need to just have an outline, like a drawing of what your platform or your app, or your app website, what that's going to look like, and then you need to show it to your target customers. Previously, in the olden days, we used to have to hire designers to do this. Now, for the first version, you can use free AI tools to actually create that mock up. And if you want to learn how to do that, I highly recommend that you take the class that I've created for you, and it's on at Tech for non techies, dot tier, forward slash, free class, or AI class. Anyway, I've now forgotten, but I've forgotten the link, but the link is in the show notes, and it's also on the tech phone techies website as free class, free AI class. Anyway, in that class, you will learn how to use AI to create this mock up, and then this is the mock up that you need to go and take to your target customers, and then get real feedback from them, because if you don't do these steps, on average, founders who don't do the step waste 50 to 100k on developers, and it is not the developers fault. They are going to create a crappy product, but that is because the direction that they're getting is crappy. It's not because you don't know how to give good directions in general. It's just because, if you're entering the tech world for the first time, of course, you don't know what you're doing. Okay?

Sophia Matveeva  09:17

Now I've got two more questions to help you diagnose what went wrong and you know why all of this money has been wasted and we've got no product or no success. So another question is, did you focus on creating something that you thought was absolutely perfect as opposed to actually releasing it? And I'll give you an example. So this example actually makes me sad. This was a student of mine last year, and he joined the techno technical co founders course, but he'd already been working with developers. He'd already been working on his product for quite a long time, and by the time the call. Course was over. I was saying, okay, you know, you're kind of ready to release even before the course. You joined the course to really understand the framework so you could kind of lead the project better. Why are we still not releasing anything? And he said, Oh, there's a feature that the developers just can't get right, and until they get it right, I can't show it to my customers. So no. And the feature that he talked about was, I mean, it would have been nice to have, but it wasn't absolutely critical to the success of this product. And I tried cajoling him and coaxing him every way that I could, because I was saying, you know, it's actually much more important that you release something decent, get people to use it. And whilst that's happening, this feature is going to be developed, or maybe you'll realize that actually this feature doesn't really matter. But my skills of persuasion did not work, and as far as I know, he is still fiddling with this thing, fiddling with it basically in private, as opposed to releasing it out into the public. This is where I find that it really helps for founders to work with an external person. You know, when you join tech for non technical founders, you actually work one on one, with a coach, with me, or with one of my team to basically make sure that you don't end up focusing on creating some sort of impossible, perfect thing that's going to take years to create, and you're creating that in silence and in isolation from your target market. That is a bad thing. Founders want to do that because we often have this perfect idea of what something should look like, and we essentially need somebody to help us ruthlessly edit. Obviously, we can't, as you know, as your instructors, we can't make you do what you don't want to do, but we'll make strong suggestions anyway. Don't focus on perfection. Focus on utility, like that Airbnb example that I gave you, as long as the first version of Airbnb could match a person looking for accommodation with a person who wanted to rent accommodation. Everything else was basically kind of superfluous. So stick to that example. You know now Airbnb is massive. Do not try to make that kind of product as your first version, because you'll be stuck there forever and nothing else, nothing will move forward. Okay, my last question to you to help you analyze what went wrong. So basically, Did you blow all your effort and all your money on creating a product and completely forgot about marketing, and is it now sitting on the App Store or sitting online, and it's like the world's best kept secret. So that also happens a lot, because when we think of big, traditional companies, we often think that, okay, you know, the product development sits on one side of the building, or maybe even on one side of the country, and marketing and sales just sit on another. They're completely they're basically two different worlds. So first of all, when you're creating a startup, you're creating a new business, you don't have two different worlds. And secondly, a successful tech product has marketing and sales baked into it right from the start. So if you have only focused on creating a product and you didn't think about, okay, how can we incentivize people to share our product when they have it? You know, I'm sure you've seen apps that say share this on social media or share this with a friend and get a reward, or share this with a colleague, and then you'll get whatever, I don't know, free storage space, like Dropbox used to do that. So if you didn't give any thought to how you're going to get people to use your product and how you're going to get people to share your product. You could have spent 100k on a really good product, and you could actually have a really, really good thing, but if you then have no budget and no energy and no enthusiasm to get it into people's hands, that product might as well not exist, because when you hear about things going viral, variety only happens when there's a really well paid marketing team running experiments to make something go viral. So don't think that just because you have a good product, you don't need to essentially think about marketing. So let's just quickly summarize. Here are the top reasons why non technical founders, first time non technical founders, end up wasting a lot of money on a product that goes nowhere. They don't define what success looks like, because they don't have a clear product goal, because they don't know. What product goals are. Number two, they don't test demand before they build it, or they try to test it, but they end up getting people pleasing answers where everybody says, Yes, I'll definitely use it. And they actually don't, because they've never learned how to do user interviews properly. It's a skill people. Number three, where things go wrong. Non technical founders built a whole product before showing it to anybody, and you mitigate that. Essentially, these days, you mitigate that by using AI to build your prototype. If you don't know how to do that, then you can learn in a half an hour by taking a free class on how to use AI to make a prototype. The link is in the show notes, Okay, number four reason why things go wrong is founders focus on perfection and on creating this massive product with all of these bells and whistles and all of these features and super polished and as a result, it basically never gets released, and you're just tinkering and tinkering until kingdom come. And last reason, in general, like a last big reason that I've seen things later on, is that marketing and sales and making the product shareable was never built into the product in the first place. So you could have a great product and seven people using it, and that is still like, that's a business failure, that's a product failure, sadly, so now that I have really spoilt your mood, but you know, if this has happened to you, at least you know what's going on, because once you diagnose the illness, then we can treat it, right? So now let's talk about what's salvageable. So I've just painted this horrible picture. And by the way, if you are not in that unfortunate position, and you're listening to this, well done, you. Because if you listen to this before you spend money on serious professionals, then you're much less likely to waste money on them, and you're much more likely to get proper ROI. So if, however, you have wasted 100k or more or slightly less on developers, all is not lost. Let's assess what to keep and what to get rid of and what to do next. So ask yourself, is the product functional? Like, does something work? Strip it down to the core features and test it with real users. So if you have created something with, I don't know, 30 screens, I bet you do not need those 30 screens. You just need, like, 1010. Is going to be fine intense screens. Can Can a user solve a basic problem? If yes, just salvage those, get rid of the rest. Test it with the real users, and go from there. My second question to ask you, what's salvageable is, have you managed to collect any data? And I'm not talking about big data. Well, you know, we're not open AI here.

Sophia Matveeva  18:02

Like, do you have any data on user behavior? So for example, if 20 people have used your product and 15 of them have done the same thing, you have a pattern, right? You don't need lots and lots of people. If you have even 15 or 20 people, you can see using your thing, and they're 20 target customers, not you know, your parents, then you can actually start seeing some patterns. So what data do you have? Did anybody try to use the product? Where did they drop off? Where did they really? Really love it? This kind of what they hated and what they love. That's going to be your map for what to do next. Number three question to ask yourself to salvage the situation is, is your target user clear? Be honest with yourself here, did you try to make something for everybody, or did you have a specific target customer in mind? Because one of the things that really goes wrong, and this is a very, very early stage, and it's definitely not the developer's fault, is if you're trying to build for everybody, or you're trying to build for two very different customers, you're building a one product for them. It's not going to work. So if your target user is not clear, then stop everything. Pick one target user and basically rebuild now. Let's discuss how to do it better next time. So what should you do to avoid wasting 100k on developers? So number one, listen to this podcast. Go back to the early episodes. This podcast has now been running for five and a half years. There is so much free learning on here that actually just learning from the tech food and techies podcast will save you a lot of money and stress, and we'll get to spend lots of time together, which will be wonderful. Okay, so that's number one. What's number two is Defy. Your product goal before you even talk to developers before, before you start thinking about your tech stack. What does success look like in your product? Is it nice? Booked? Is it right? Books, a ride. Booked? Is it sales? Is it repeat? Engagement? Is it daily? Active? Use she. Don't know what I'm talking about. Go back to last week's episode and listen to it now. Number three, make sure you have a validated prototype. So even if you have already created a prototype before, I have seen some people go completely crazy and create prototypes with like 30 screens. That is not a prototype. That is insanity. A prototype should have five to seven screens. So create something very, very simple, test it with your target users. So my next point is that you must learn how to do user testing properly before hiring developers again. So we actually teach you how to do that within the technical and technical founders course. You can also just look up online how to do user experience interviews. In general, it's a bit like being an anthropologist. So you need to, you know, see the target users in their natural environment using or reacting to your product. Because what you don't want to do is kind of say, oh, yeah, we're going to release this. Would you use it? And generally, people just say yes, to be nice and to get them off your to get you off their back. Okay. Next thing to do properly is, if you're hiring developers again, which you know, if you're serious about this, you will do make sure that you're hiring for a specific outcome, not for them to just sit there and write random code. So basically, don't ask a development team to build you an app, ask them to deliver a working prototype, or ask them to deliver a working MVP based on the design that you've already given them and based on the user testing that you've already done, and that product must solve a specific problem which you can measure with a specific product metric. So basically, you're hiring a result, not lines of code, and yes, MVPs are always late, but essentially, make sure that you know you're not slipping by like three months. You're probably going to slip by a month, but that's normal, but don't, don't go overboard. For many of you who are in this situation, you don't actually need to rebuild the whole thing. What you need to do is you need to simplify. So take out what essentially is holding you back. Take out what superfluous. Take out the bits that are not working and see okay, what is working. How can we use that to basically start moving forward and finally, finally, and this is really, really important. Always think about how you are going to market your product and sell your product and get your users to share your product with other target users before you even write, before anybody writes any code, before you invest any serious money into this product. Because, essentially, the success of every tech product, let's just say it's an app depends on, okay, how usable is the product? You know, is it easy to use? Is it intuitive? Does it glitch? Does have lots of bugs? So basically, the product side and also marketing, that's growth hacking. That's basically, how do you get the product into people's hands? Let's take Instagram, for example. Instagram is a good product, but would people use it if their friends weren't on it? Would people use it if nobody they liked was on it? You know, it was basically like a bunch of random people that you didn't care about, random people you didn't know, and they were just posting random photos, and you know, you weren't particularly attracted to these photos, you wouldn't care. So this is an example of where you need to have thought, a thoughtful approach to your product and a thoughtful approach to how you spread the message about the product and how you get people to use it. Only when you have a combination of both can you actually have a success. So if you have gone through this process and you have spent lots of money on professionals, and you're licking your wounds, and either you've got seven users of you, or you've got no users or your product doesn't work at all. Remember, when you are starting again. You are not starting from scratch. You are starting from experience. A lot of people who have never done anything with technology sadly end up in the situation. I see this happen over and over and over again. So you're not alone. You're not stupid. You just went into a realm that was foreign to you and you didn't know what you're doing. It's very likely that you didn't get taken advantage of, but it's you probably didn't get appropriate pushback to when you said stupid things and you didn't know that you were saying stupid things, because you've never done it before. So le. At the money that has been spent kind of like your fee. It's like you've paid for a really expensive course to learn what not to do. Now that you have taken that course, let's take that learning and essentially implement it, and let's do better that next time, because if you take that course and you never use it again, then that's waste. But if you've taken that course, and even if it was really painful, and you use those learnings to do better, then actually you've been toy. What is it? Tilling the soil, and now you've got fertile ground, and so you can essentially grow something really, really wonderful out of this. So build like a founder who knows what they're doing next time? Because you now know how to do that. And tech, quantum techies, is here to help you. So listen to the podcast, join the tech for non technical founders course. Take the AI, the free AI class, because essentially all of these things are here to help you, to make sure that you're not blowing 100k when you could be spending that 100k on growth, as opposed to more painful lessons on that note. Thank you very much for listening. It has been a pleasure spending time with you today, and I will be back in your delightful smart ears

Sophia Matveeva  26:16

next week. Ciao,