This episode chronicles a critical two-week development crisis where LandPricer’s core pricing summary feature remained broken despite escalating urgency and over 30 hours logged on an ineffective simulation approach. After the engineering team missed a promised debug deadline, a firm Slack message detailing the $50K+ investment, months of delays, and unmet urgency requirements triggered immediate restructuring (best engineer assigned full-time, daily standups, hourly tracking requirements, no charges for past two weeks including the failed simulation work). The pricing bug was resolved within 24 hours of proper resource allocation and direct client involvement in technical calls.
Key Takeaways:
- Agency Work Degrades Without Relentless Oversight: Even previously reliable teams deprioritize client projects as they take on new business, requiring explicit hour tracking, task assignment transparency, and daily tagged updates to maintain accountability.
- Demand Refunds for Misdirected Work, Not Just Poor Results: The two-week simulation approach was fundamentally wrong and billable hours should never have been charged, securing a refund required clearly articulating why the approach itself (not just the outcome) violated the engagement terms.
- Direct Client Presence in Technical Calls Accelerates Solutions: Joining daily standups and walking engineers through precise requirements (despite lacking coding expertise) provided essential context that enabled problem-solving within 24 hours after weeks of stalled progress.
Listen to the complete episode for the negotiation frameworks, communication strategies, and oversight systems that turned around a failing development project.
(Podcast transcript below)
Hi, Chris Duff over at Serious Land Capital, vacant land funding partner. Today I wanted to provide another update on land pricer here. I know I just discussed this a couple of days ago regarding some of the trouble with the engineering team sorting out a bug and
you know, not the best communication going back and forth. you know, I, try to balance out the topics on, on the pod. And I know I just discussed land price or the, the other day here, but because this was such a kind of key turning point and there’s very significant updates, even over the past couple of days, I felt it was, relevant to jump back into this, because there’s so many,
general applications across pretty much any business owners. So to recap where we’re at, again, landpricer.ai, if you haven’t signed up already, it’s the software I’ve been working on for over a year now, trying to simplify and accurately price land across the US, basically taking all of the techniques that we’ve built with
within our own internal systems in serious land capital and putting that into software form, given how difficult it can be to properly price land, especially if you’re operating in markets that you’re not familiar with. So many things can change, even county by county, let alone state to state or different areas of the country.
so the thing I discussed is that, you know, was anticipating having beta invites out, you know, over a couple of weeks ago at this point. but the key feature for land pricer is to actually provide the summary, for the price, for, you know, any piece of land that’s, that’s, being reviewed internally. that was not working.
so it just, it didn’t make sense to beta test anything until we could sort that piece out because that’s the most critical feature, more than anything else. And there was just, you know, kind of continued miscommunication and, delayed communication and lack of progress, from the side of the engineering agency that I was working with and, just kind of had growing frustration about this.
Um, to where, uh, you know, really had to escalate significantly over the last couple of days. um,
Initially, now I’m speaking a couple of days ago, we had a team call and we had an updated approach for how to tackle this pricing summary bug issue. And I was promised a result or a debug pathway.
to at least solve one particular property that had already been reviewed by US AM hours the next day. Again, I had remarked before, there can be a bit of a time zone difference here. The primary engineers working on this are based in Pakistan. And then there’s a US based project manager. So you have to account for some time zone differences. And so, okay.
took these guys at their word and you know the following morning comes I didn’t have the debug pathway and so you know I wrote a pretty firm message within Slack you know just to basically summarize mentioning hey you know this was promised to me here I’m not sure what has happened with the communication as particularly over the last
few weeks. And, you know, I try to layer in some positivity, right? If you just lay into people and start throwing insults around like that, that’s never, that’s never going to motivate people and just kind of creates even more bad blood. But, know, at the same time, you have to get the point across of, Hey, I’m very displeased with how things are going. So, you know, I resummarized to, I’m still very excited about this project. I think we’re just about there. I’ve been testing it. We’re
overall in a good direction. I have tons of land investors who keep asking me, when is this thing going to be released? And that I’m already very highly invested in this. I mentioned, hey, we’re already over budget here. Out of my personal checkbook, I’ve already invested over $50,000 USD.
into paying your agency directly for this. We’re already a couple months behind with getting bait and invites out. So like this, the level of urgency and communications that are requested and frankly required are not being met here. So, you know, if your team and agency is unable to support me as a client anymore, like just, you know, let me know. But if we do not…
address this by today. And I’m speaking from yesterday’s perspective. Then, you know, I’m going to have to go start recruiting other agencies to, you know, move forward and get this project actually out and, you know, tested publicly and then, you fully launched here. you know, it kind of summarizes, yes, it was, you know, very
firm message, uh, yeah, trying to lay out my perspective as much as possible. And again, like level urgency needed disappointment, the frustration, what is going on here? Um, and, and, and that message was, was received there. Um, so, you know, they took that seriously. Project manager and the head of the engineering part of the agency, they got together, they put, um, uh, their, their best engineer.
full time on this project. Now we’re having daily stand up calls. And also I had indicated, I forgot to mention within that summary is I said, you know, always solution focus, right? you, no one just wants to hear complaints or even kind of feelings that you have to propose something that’s gonna help solve the problem. Otherwise it’s just, it’s not ever gonna be that helpful. So I’d also-
supposed to, you know, going forward here, like on today’s call, you know, I’m going to be requesting and requiring every engineer who’s working on this project, I need to know their precise hours that they have allocated to this project, both in local Pakistan hours and US hours. And
direct assignable tasks within the task management software we’re using ClickUp in this case, that, I can follow and are being checked off routinely. So it’s not like a static checkoff. It’s, dynamic daily updates, me being tagged on each, each task on a daily basis and knowing who is assigned to do that. So I can more rigorously track what is being done.
and where hours are being spent on this project. So that was accounted for as well by their team. So we had a follow-up call about that. So yeah, kind of the key things was, put their best engineer on this full-time daily updates and then making a promise, okay, all remaining bugs and tasks that are currently
In, in ClickUp are going to be addressed by the end of next week. No ifs, ands or buts. and on the call itself, the project manager, you know, was, fortunately very apologetic, took full responsibility, for, for this issue and also said that he wasn’t going to be, charging any more, of his hours worked on the project. Plus they were going to be.
Refunding me or at least, you know, not because I, you know, the, the hours were in arrears, but not charging me for the whole past two weeks of work. especially, you know, like 30 plus hours that were allocated to, this simulation project that was supposed to uncover the pricing bug that I mentioned at the top of this call, but I felt it was going to be an inappropriate approach and it ended up
being the case there. So, you know, they totally erased those hours said, yeah, that’s, that’s our bad here. And pretty much immediately on that subsequent Paul call, we started getting to the bottom of the pricing bug error. I was working hand in hand with the team to solve that. And then had a, another subsequent call with the project manager today, have another call and a few minutes after this podcast.
again, to continue working on it. the, ongoing progress actually seems to be nailing the problem. that, needs to be addressed. And this is the thing to like, you know, ultimately I appreciate, you know, the agency, they, took responsibility and, it would have been a huge hassle if I had to recruit another agency, especially right at the end of the MVP progress.
the MVP release have to transfer, know, or, you know, get them to review the whole code base and understand everything that’s been done so far like that. That’s a big hurdle to do. So, you know, I was really hoping I wasn’t going to have to pull that trigger, but I was prepared to do so if needed. And…
Ultimately, like this is something I should have been doing, um, months ago. So, you know, I, and this has been a learning process for myself as well, just having even more oversight from a managerial perspective. And I think I separated myself a little bit because, you know, I’m, not a, uh, software engineer myself. So it was a little harder for me to follow everything that was going on behind the scenes, but, um, because I’m the visionary for.
the project and, like the Hormozis always mentioned, you know, the person with the most context within a company makes the best decisions. And so me being on these calls and continue to walk through, here is precisely what needs to happen is key for every, all the other stakeholders to understand. So, you know, I could have been communicating even better and been a bit more forceful with my involvement.
from the start to ensure that people were managing their duties appropriately. And I think this is especially important when you’re working with agencies because like your project is never gonna be solely what they’re focused on. You have no idea how many other clients they’re taking on, how many hours are actually allocated to your project. oftentimes like you might get really good service right off the bat. And then as the project becomes more mature,
take on other clients and start putting a good foot forward for others. Like this is fairly common when you work with agencies. So, you know, that level of oversight and laying down the stakes and not just being willing to roll over is really key here. So overall, I’m feeling better than I was two days ago. It’s definitely taking a lot of time to sort these issues out. So
been kind of scrambling in between meetings. It’s more of a manager schedule versus a maker schedule at the moment. But you know, that is what is required right now. So just wanted to share that with you all. I think there are some key lessons here to summarize. You know, don’t just accept what is given to you. mean, you know, be a squeaky wheel. I was able to negotiate. kept saying, hey, I don’t think I should have to pay for this.
you know, I don’t think this was the right approach here. Like, you know, if you’re the vision here for the project, like fight for what, you know, should, should be fair. And if, if something, it hasn’t gone the way that, you know, was effectively promised, you know, bring that up and, and, know, every day counts, when it comes to getting progress done here. So, the earlier, the better of addressing things I should have taken.
Even earlier action here, it kind of came to a head in a major way over the last couple days, but I think we’re starting to smooth it out a lot more. So wanted to provide an update for you all here. And hopefully that helps on your journeys as business owners as well. If you’re looking for funding, serious land dot capital, land, daily diligence, zero cost review of your land deals on Facebook, about to do another one in about half an hour.
from now and obviously lambpricer.ai, which I just discussed over the course of this podcast. See you next time. Bye.
