universalabs.

I talked a client out of paying me

A real estate startup asked me for a product review. The idea was good. Listings sell you nice photos, then you move in and find a dumpster fire on the street and no café for 2 km. Their app would show you the neighborhood first, so you'd know if you fit in before you sign anything.

The product was 80% done. It had been 80% done for half a year. A complex skeleton, lots of screens, nothing that actually worked. A dev agency was building it. A marketing agency was getting ready to sell it. Both were invoicing every month.

So I looked past the app. No real advantage over the competition. No team to run it after launch. No plan beyond "it'll sell itself." A vibe-coded business plan, on top of a product that didn't work.

My job was to say it, so I did: this has no real chance, and your agencies are eating your money without changing anything.

They stopped. And they were relieved. No more money spent on a hallucination. The dev agency was upset. Of course it was. It had a client who paid every month for a product that never had to ship.

Here's the uncomfortable part. Everyone you pay to build your product makes more money if you keep going. Almost nobody is paid to tell you to stop.

Bigger companies do the same thing, just slower. An initiative open for a year, a team still on it, and nobody allowed to ask whether it should exist. Stuck isn't always "not finished yet". Sometimes it's "should never have started".

That's why the review comes first, and why "stop" is a real possible answer. Two weeks and a few thousand euros is a cheap way to find out. Six months of invoices is not.

How that works today: the roadmap and delivery review.

More writing, or see how it plays out in previous work.