This episode documents a frustrating two-week development bottleneck where LandPricer’s core pricing summary feature remained broken despite urgent escalation and over 30 billable hours spent building an overly complex simulation system. The Pakistan-based engineering team’s approach (creating comprehensive pathway simulations to reveal the bug) proved fundamentally misdirected while time zone differences and unclear progress tracking left the project stalled. After expressing frustration about the $1K+ in wasted simulation work and threatening to recruit alternative agencies, daily meetings with all stakeholders were implemented alongside transparent hour tracking and task assignment protocols.
Key Takeaways:
- Client Attendance in Technical Meetings Prevents Misdirection: Despite lacking coding expertise, joining daily standups and walking through precise feature requirements provided critical context that enabled proper problem-solving after weeks of ineffective approaches.
- Agency Incentives Diverge from Client Urgency by Default: Development shops naturally deprioritize existing clients as they pursue new business, requiring explicit daily tracking, task-level transparency, and visible client presence to maintain focus on blocked critical features.
- Demand Hour-by-Hour Accountability When Projects Stall: Requiring engineers to log precise hours (in both local and client time zones) with dynamic task updates and daily tagging forces transparency that reveals resource misallocation and prevents vague “we’re working on it” responses.
Listen to the full episode for the complete breakdown of managing remote development teams, negotiating refunds for misdirected work, and implementing oversight systems that accelerate problem resolution.
(Podcast transcript below)
Hi, Chris Duff over at Serious Land Capital vacant land funding partner. Uh, today wanted to give an update on land price or progress here. So, um, yeah, I know I had given a pre-launch podcast update a weeks ago, probably three or four weeks ago. Um, and you know, things, things have been.
Delayed here. There’s no other way to break that news. To give you kind of a down low is the most critical feature to even begin beta testing or even more extensive internal testing was the actual pricing summary feature for the software.
in the name of the product, landPricer, you would expect the product to price land. So when it doesn’t perform that function, there’s a bug there. Everything else is effectively blocked, right? No matter if we had brought in other beta testers, yeah, you could test out the UI, UX a little bit, but most critically, the core feature everybody is going to be looking for is does this thing actually price?
land with accuracy here. Everything else is kind of a side feature. So, you know, I had put in a bug report over two weeks ago, expressed the urgency to solve this as it was blocking me. You know, there were other various UI updates. Great. You know, things were getting smoothed out. I’ve tested a lot of those. It’s actually
know, demoing with us internally pretty well there. But I just wasn’t able to get this bug fixed with the engineering team in a quicker fashion. And so, you know, I’m not particularly technical myself from a coding perspective. So, you know, there’s so much I can kind of indicate to
In engineering team when it comes to, okay, here’s how I think this issue should be addressed besides, you know, just indicating the urgency here. And so the engineering team’s perspective was they needed to build out a simulation of effectively all the various pathways that land price would go down because that was going to reveal what the issue was on the backend for.
pricing summary not properly calculating.
Well, know, time went by and I was expressing near daily requests for updates here, but just felt a bit in the dark. And, you know, I was getting responses, hey, this simulation is more difficult than we imagined. And, you know, we’re going to need more time here, more time here. And, you know, this is in the midst of when I’m
starting to make some more public proclamations saying, I’m about to give out beta invites at the end of this week. I said that like two weeks ago, then the following week after. So, you know, I’m not lining up. It’s a bit of a reputation hit from the purported completion time from the engineering team. know, frustration has naturally been growing and it’s been, you know, much harder to get a…
a firm response on what’s going on. And it’s not like I can dive into the code base and kind of look at this myself either. You know, cause that’s just not, my expertise. Plus while we do have a U S based project manager, there is a Pakistani based engineering team. So there’s a bit of a time zone difference as well in terms of getting timely responses with.
You know somewhat limited overlap So, you know, I kept ringing the alarm bells You know trying to figure out what is going on with this issue and you know, we have a whole you know task manager via click up You know, it’s just you know similar to like an Asana if you’re if you’re not familiar workflow manager But you know, I was only able to glean so much there. So
Finally, this week was able to arrange, all right, I want all these other various tasks on, paused, you know, put all hands on deck and including the more expensive project manager, US based project manager to solve this simulation issue. You know, what, is preventing this from being done, you know, within a day, right? Like it’s, kind of, you know,
something that Hermos would always point out. It’s like, okay, what, you know, what, most people think can be done or, or expect to be done in a week. What, why can’t you get it done in a day or even within a few hours? So, you know, I’m, always thinking about how, do we drive those processes further? and admittedly, you know, there’s only so much control I can have as, a client, right? They, these, this team is not, they’re, they’re not internal hires within my.
organization, so I only have a little bit more indirect control. mean, I could just stop paying, but you know, we’re so close to the end there. it’s a tightrope to walk when it comes to organizing labor within your enterprise. So we had a team meeting today.
And it just felt like the wrong person was working on the simulation. I was seeing hours logged, like 30 plus hours on this, which would cost me over a thousand US dollars when it seemed like we were basically still at square one that it hadn’t been approached in the right way. Now it seems we have the right person on it and I should have an answer in regard to debugging that pricing summary.
but they’re also taking a different approach to manage that. And naturally as I was listening to all this, I was just, my frustration was just kind of growing there. like, the money is one thing, the time is more important. Like, I’ve been pointing out the urgency of this for over two weeks and why…
why are we in this position today where it only now seems like things are clicking to head in the right direction and that urgency is being addressed. So that message seems to have been made more clear across the team. Yeah, now there’s…
You know, definitely kind of cracks in, in, the armor here with, with a team I’ve been working with for months and has largely been a positive experience. So, you know, I hate kind of, uh, Yeah, just going into complaint mode or, know, looking at a, is why didn’t this happen fast enough and all like that. That doesn’t actually help things, you know, correct the underlying problem. You know, time got wasted. Okay. We’re, well behind schedule. We’re over budget.
But what’s the process to move forward here in a more efficient and effective manner?
uh, without getting into this situation again. So that, was the approach I was really trying to take. Um, and you know, just also having to massage, you know, personalities, um, you know, and re real people involved. It’s not like, we’re just talking to AI here, at least not, not yet. Um, so, you know, just coming in as, know, overbearing and, uh, uh, neg, uh,
having a negative attitude is just, it’s not, in my experience, it’s not the most conducive to getting quality work done, and, encouraging people to be excited about the project that we’re working on. So, you know, I always try to really take that step back. Okay. Here’s like a clear issue. I’m not happy about this. here’s all these points on, on where there was, you know, various failures along the way. what are we going to do?
to ensure this isn’t going to happen again and how can we solve this key blocker ASAP? And I think the US based project manager took a lot more ownership of that. And I was monitoring his management skills in relation to the engineering team, which I found pretty effective, but at the same time, I was just wondering what happened these past two weeks. This seems like something that could have happened day one when I first pointed out this issue.
so that, that to me was, was the disconnect there, but, know, ultimately we settled on, Hey, and, and, and there were various other tasks where they were just falling by the wayside too. even though I was tracking them on the task manager, like the, if, if only one person was working on the simulation, there were other backlog of tasks. And, and, you know, that, that’s always the risk, right? When you work with agencies, you’re, you’re not always going to be.
You know, the number one priority. In fact, you certainly aren’t going to be the number one priority, in relation to just, you know, the agency managing its, its own business. So you have to kind of keep that in mind, but you know, how can you still encourage the work that needs to get done, in regard to, to my own business? So that was. Yeah.
kind of all the various thoughts that were going on in my mind here and also understanding, okay, that this is part of what I signed up for in terms of the dynamic at play. But still was overall pretty negative couple of weeks that have pushed us back significantly. So now we’re having full on daily meetings where I’m
Uh, going to be attending all of them as well. mean, these, are key timings for me. Like it’s, you know, it’s a bit distracting, but, know, I feel like at the moment. Need to be paying even more attention. Um, even if a lot of these discussions are quite technical and a bit above my head from a expertise perspective, uh, uh, in regard to skillset. Um, but it at least kind of shows, Hey, there there’s even more presence.
involved from the client side to make sure that progress is being made and that key blocker in place is supposed to be on my desk. Worst case, 7 a.m. tomorrow. That seemed to have been made clear by the project manager. So I will update accordingly. But yeah, I just wanted to share.
both in an overall update where we’re at with land price, or you know, obviously displaying and been pretty frustrating from, from my side, but also just sharing, okay, how, how I approached it, some of the considerations at hand, and what the path is forward to find a solution and, you know, figure out how to close out this problem.
smooth things out going forward so we can get this testing underway here ASAP. and, get this product out to you. Cause I know so many people keep asking me about it and I keep having to say it’s the latest, latest, latest. It’s not a good feeling. not the best from a reputation side. so wanted to at least give you all an update from my end there more to come. Hopefully much better news. The remainder of this week.
Thanks for tuning in subscribe and share Send over any deals to serious land capital and check out my zero cost due diligence on land daily diligence Facebook group Mondays and Thursdays and obviously I just mentioned land Pricer Which you can check out land Pricer dot AI with that. Take care. Bye
