---
title: Before spending $250k building software, spend a week trying to kill the idea
author: Giacomo Balli
published: 2026-07-29
url: https://BigBalli.com/blog/before-spending-250k-building-software-spend-a-week-trying-to-kill-the-idea
tags: Engineering, Product, Leadership, Reading, Finance
---

# Before spending $250k building software, spend a week trying to kill the idea

*By Giacomo Balli* | *Published: July 29, 2026*

Before spending $250k building software, spend a week trying to kill the idea.

Not a week of planning. A week where the only job is to find the reason it should not exist.

Try to do the job with what you already own. A spreadsheet, a shared inbox, the reporting module nobody turned on. If a clerk can do it badly for a month, you learn what the software has to do well, and you sometimes learn the clerk is enough.

Find the three companies most like yours that already run this way and ask them what they would not build again.

Put the demo in front of the person who will actually use it every day, not the manager who asked for it, and count how many steps of their real work it does not cover.

Ask finance which number is supposed to move after go-live and by how much. If nobody can name it, the project cannot fail, which also means it cannot succeed.

Write down every system it has to talk to and get a yes or no from each owner on whether that integration exists today.

Most ideas survive the week. Those ones start with a scope that is smaller, a budget that is real, and a team that already knows where the surprises are.

The ones that do not survive just saved you the $250k and the nine months it would have taken to find out the slow way.

[Discuss on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7502747516686237697)

---

**Tags:** Engineering, Product, Leadership, Reading, Finance

---

*View the [HTML version](https://BigBalli.com/blog/before-spending-250k-building-software-spend-a-week-trying-to-kill-the-idea) of this post.*