Why Most Software Projects Fail And How to Avoid Burning Cash

[00:00:00] Hernan Sias Today, we’re gonna talk about why most software projects fail and how to avoid burning cash. A business can give you everything you want in life: prestige, wealth, freedom. It can also take everything away from you. This show is for those who are willing to take that risk. These are the real-life stories of entrepreneurs. But before we start, I have one small favor to ask. Please leave a comment. It could be advice, critiques, tips, feedback, or share this with someone because your engagement is the most valuable and most powerful form of social currency. So thank you, and welcome to another episode of Business Bros.

He’s helped businesses turn messy operations into scalable, sellable machines, guiding companies from stalled growth to serious valuation jumps. From rescuing failing software projects to leveraging AI for real-world results, he knows what actually works and what’s just hype. Today, we’re talking about building smarter, scaling faster, and exiting stronger. So let’s welcome to the show Mr. Ghazenfer Mansoor.

[00:01:28] Hernan Sias Welcome to the program. Before we get this thing started, I always like to ask at the very beginning, can you give me a little background about yourself? How did you get into this particular space, scaling companies and growing them to the point where people look at that valuation and they’re like, “You know what? This is something that I definitely wanna look into.”

[00:01:48] Ghazenfer Mansoor Thanks for having me. My background is computer science, and I worked with two startups as the only engineer, and then I started my own startup, which was a recruitment software SaaS startup. I learned a lot of lessons while building products for different companies as well as for my own. So when I started this business, which was helping businesses in product development with the goal of building the right product the first time. And as we started doing different projects, we started seeing some patterns, and one of the common  ones was like we get, I would say, more than 50% of the work was fixing those messed up projects. People will start the projects with a variety of different reasons, and most of these projects, people who are working on it never get finished. Could be user experience, all those different types of problems, requirement problems. So then we realized this is a big problem.

And as we started working on solving that problem, another thing we realized, as we started working with these service businesses, the bigger part comes in  why are these businesses different? What is the main differentiator between these businesses? Is it tech? Is it a better service? Is it better people? What are the different reasons? So, looking at it, how we can build software, how we can create those differentiators for these service businesses to build the processes, build a business that goes faster, have a smoother execution, have limited bottlenecks, and grow the business faster. And obviously, as you have these processes optimized, your customers increase, your margins increase, you bring more and more efficiency, you have a higher retention rate, and that results in higher valuation as well for your business.

[00:03:49] Hernan Sias Let me ask you about the service-based industry, because there are a lot of people who are getting into service-based stuff. Maybe they’re leaving a corporate job, starting their own thing. Service-based businesses are very important. The problem is you build them and then you go to try to exit, and then you realize that the valuation is really low on one of these companies cause it’s dependent on that person doing a lot of the servicing. How do I take a company from being maybe like a 1X valuation when I go to exit and turning it into like a 10X valuation?

[00:04:37] Ghazenfer Mansoor That’s a really good question, and that’s a very common challenge for many of those service businesses. You’re right, the valuations are super low. And because these are dependent on people, if the founder is gone, the business is gone, or if your key person is gone, your business is gone. The key person could be your sales, the marketing, the developer, whatever those people are. Those people are gone; your business is gone. So how do you build a business that is not dependent?

So obviously there are different strategies, whether it’s improving those processes, documenting. So those are all great. That will help you from maybe one to four X, because now your business has a lot more processes. But in order to get to even bigger, now you have to start thinking, “Well, how do we create those processes? How do I bring efficiency in my business that is different from others?” Because whatever business you are in, whether it’s lawn mowing, whether it’s any other business, hair cutting, anything, your competitor also has access to the similar tools, similar processes, they can also do it. How is it different for you?

So in order for you to create that differentiator, you have to think about adding tech in your business. And when I say tech, it doesn’t mean you build a million-dollar software and build another SaaS. You’re building something that solves your specific business problem, your bottlenecks. It could be creating some agents; it could be some kind of automation. As you gradually build those, you are gradually making it a tech-enabled company. And when your business is tech-enabled, your business is more system-powered, not people-powered. And then when you reduce that dependency on humans, your business valuations increase automatically.

[00:06:29] Hernan Sias I’ve been in the position before where I’m trying to build a software or an app or something to try to solve a problem, but it becomes a big money pit because I have a specific direction maybe in mind initially, but it goes into all kinds of different tangents that I think will be helpful and never actually get to solving the problem. So what’s one of the first systems a business owner should implement if they eventually do want to sell, they want to get to that point?

[00:07:00] Ghazenfer Mansoor So every business has its own DNA, every business has its own process. So there is no one solution for everyone. What you have to do is you have to look at, evaluate your business, look at what specifically is needed for your specific business that could bring a difference.

Now, one of the bigger mistakes that I’ve seen businesses make is they look at it as a big project, and that’s where the confusion starts coming. “Oh, we need an ERP,” or “We need this kind of a big system that does everything.” The problem is once you get into those specific feature lists and you start looking at all of those things that you may not need today, you’re talking about solving a problem that is two years from now versus today. That’s where you lose focus. And then bigger projects are always difficult to execute. They do not get focus. You need a bigger investment.

So the normal process is, rather than looking at the escalator or elevator and getting to really top it quickly, you want to look at, how can I build one step at a time? And then you gradually go to the stage where you want. So in the service businesses, you look for a very small problem to automate. Like for example, it could be your inbound lead generation. That process could be automated. Or how do you change hands from the lead to your SDR to salespeople to your delivery people, or the process of how you are communicating with your customers.

And it does not mean that you always build custom from day one. You may start using different tools initially to optimize your process, and as you get time, you start investing into building these smaller agents, smaller processes. Because what you’re doing is evaluating your processes and seeing where are the bottlenecks, where are things taking time, where are we getting more complaints about our business? How can we bring efficiency into certain processes that could save time and money, improve our margins, increase the customer retention? And as you are identifying those, it could be even dealing with your vendors, it could be more visibility into your employees’ work processes. Anything. It could be your internal auditing.

So anything that helps you improve your business processes are the ones you want to focus on. So there’s no right solution. In fact, the best tools are the ones that are built slowly with a specific problem, and then you gradually enhance. And after some time you realize, now you’ve built something that is super helpful because it’s solving your business. Your business valuation is proprietary software that’s helping your business. You’re not building a SaaS to sell it to 100 different companies solving the same problem. You can, but that’s not usually your intention right off the bat.

[00:09:46] Hernan Sias Now, earlier you mentioned, especially in service-based businesses, that the competition has the same access to the tools that you have. So my question is: how does custom technology or a custom app or custom build impact your valuation compared to using off-the-shelf types of products?

[00:10:07] Ghazenfer Mansoor So if your competitor has the same access to the same CRM, same tools, same app, then there is no difference because they are achieving the same efficiency that you have. Whether it’s putting a widget on your website or making some marketing offers, whatever that is, all those are available to them as well.

What creates a difference is a workflow that is unique to your business, and that’s the one your customers cannot even copy. Your competitor may look at what you have on your website or in your processes, they can clone it. They can buy the same tool, but they cannot copy your unique workflows. So as you build those unique workflows, those are the ones that will create a differentiator for you.

[00:10:53] Hernan Sias What would you say are some of the biggest mistakes that you see founders make as they get their business ready for exit, or they’re considering exiting their business in one way or another?

[00:11:11] Ghazenfer Mansoor There are many. We focus more on the tech part of it, but the biggest one on this side is misunderstanding that having technology is going to increase their valuation. Because again, the same technology is available to the competition. You’re not really creating a differentiator. If you don’t have tech, you don’t have a differentiator. Yes, your other processes and all those tools will help, but that’s a smaller part of the bigger picture.

Having tech would suddenly make you a tech company, and I wouldn’t say it’s a bigger mistake, it’s just that now you are settling on a lower valuation. As we talked about, you can improve your other processes from one to four to five, but in order to get the real ROI, the real higher valuation, you have to build something different, and the tech  the proprietary technology, not another off-the-shelf tool  is the one that makes that difference.

[00:12:49] Hernan Sias You’ve been in positions where you’ve come in and rescued projects that were in a downward spiral or failing. Why do so many software projects fail in the first place? Like, even if they have an experienced team, even if they have a good budget, what are the things that make a project spiral downward?

[00:13:15] Ghazenfer Mansoor There are many. The bigger one is most of the time people are not clear what they want. They just start building and say, “Okay, we’ll build and then evolve.” But there’s no clear requirement of what you want. There’s no clear discovery because unless you figure it out, you build something and then it’s not the right problem that you’re solving.

And then another one we talked about earlier is the feature race. You wanna build everything on day one. “Oh, we want to have this feature, this feature, this feature because this will make a difference.” The problem is now you’re spending too much time and investment into all those features that may not be used. So if something is not being used for more than a certain percentage, there’s no point in building it. So you spend a lot of money on building something that’s not usable. Once you have those kinds of problems, then you do not have a budget to build something that is actually needed.

And lastly, as you’re building, you have to work with your customers, with your users who are gonna be using it, getting their feedback on what exactly do they want and how is it easy for them to use. Many times the tools are solving a problem, but they are so complicated that you need training. So in today’s time, if you have to train people to use the software, that’s not the right software.

[00:14:34] Hernan Sias That feedback is actually vitally important because you could be spending all kinds of money blowing through a budget trying to figure out and build something that you think is phenomenal, only to bring it to the office or bring it to market and find there are a lot of problems to go back and fix. You might have the greatest team and the greatest budget, but you definitely gotta make sure you have some sort of testing and implementation in place. What would you say are some of the early signs that a project is maybe about to go off track? I feel like there are companies building that way, maybe they aren’t testing or something like that  but they’re also very committed. They’ve spent a lot of money and time into this project, and maybe they’re not seeing it fall off track because they’re involved inside. But from an outside perspective, what are a couple things that’ll give them warning signs?

[00:15:10] Ghazenfer Mansoor The main litmus test that I use is: are people using it? You have to make your users use it. We recommend building just one feature. Put it in front of the customer, in front of your users right away. In today’s time, you don’t want to be spending six months, a year to build something and not have it be usable. You want to put it out in a two weeks, three weeks, four weeks timeframe, just even a small feature. Put it out and then gradually enhance.

Because that gives a different confidence to your customers as well, because they see, okay, now every week there are new features coming. They’re more excited. They’re using it. They’re giving feedback, and they’re helping you build a product, and you are implementing. Because once they start seeing new features coming, they keep giving you feedback.

Now, if you build something perfect for a year or two years and then give it to them, then you go silent for another six months because you’re gonna build the next version, they have no idea what’s gonna come. So if you are giving more frequent updates, that means their feedback is being listened to, and you can prioritize, you can adjust those priorities. So that’s a good way of building and scaling any product.

[00:16:52] Hernan Sias What if the business is already in the middle of a failing project and they find themselves off track  going in the wrong direction, about to blow through their budget? What’s the smartest way that they can recover?

[00:17:17] Ghazenfer Mansoor Again, it depends on many different reasons. If the foundation is weak or some of those other core problems exist, then the solutions are different depending on the specific problems. But where we look at it is, even if you have already built a lot, let’s look at one workflow, one process at a time. Let’s take one use case and start to solve that one from end to end. So maybe turn off some of the other features, comment the code, hide it. Yes, keep it, you already built it, but let’s go with one feature at a time.

For example, you log in, you don’t have to log in with social and all of those. You say, “Okay, just log in with Gmail to start with or just log in with email.” And then we’ll go through the whole flow. The user gave input, got some feedback, got the notification, did one thing, two things, three things. Maybe build a freemium version first. Once you have the whole flow, then go to the paid version. So again, every product is different, every feature you have to productize, you have to prioritize those features. But starting with one workflow, one process would give that confidence that this product is usable. And when I say one feature, meaning it has to be something meaningful so that users use it.

[00:18:56] Hernan Sias You’re an expert that can come in and definitely help people solve this problem. If people don’t know about who you are and how you can help them, how can a non-technical founder evaluate a developer or an agency like yours so that they know they’re hiring the right person and the right fit? What are some of those key qualifications they should probably know about the technical person they’re hiring if they’re not a technical founder?

[00:19:17] Ghazenfer Mansoor The bigger one is looking at what they have built and talking to some of those customers and looking at how that problem was solved. Once you start doing that discovery, you can identify. People can always say, “Oh, we have done all of those projects,” but what exactly was done? Go through the process of how they solved that one problem for that customer, how they took them out of that situation. Going deeper into that would definitely give a lot more confidence.

And as you talk about it, you look at the process  not the generic process, but about a specific process that was used for one or two projects, and walk the customers through that. That way they will get more confidence. Walk me through a couple of projects that you’ve done, how you make sure those projects are delivered on time, what is your process of verification, validating, testing? Not just the generic stuff, but actually looking at how, in your specific projects, you identified some of those challenges.

Like in our case, we have a very specific process. As a business owner, I want to make sure my team delivers quality work, so I cannot be looking over every person’s shoulder or looking at every person’s code. We have our own processes, we have our own AI agents that help us  looking at the code quality, doing the code auditing, looking at all those processes so that we identify the problem before it actually gets into production. Having those processes makes a huge difference.

[00:20:55] Hernan Sias You mentioned AI, so where do you actually see AI driving an actual measurable ROI? Especially since it’s still early on, we’re using AI in its infancy and scraping the surface of its capability. But how can you actually drive measurable ROI when implementing it in mobile apps or software?

[00:21:19] Ghazenfer Mansoor AI is obviously everywhere, including in software development as a whole. The bigger challenge is how do you use AI in the right way? Providing the right context, articulating the problem right, those things do make a difference. A lot of people are still using AI just like they’re using it for search purposes or just as a generic use case. But that doesn’t solve in some cases, it even creates more complexity.

So to have a right ROI, you want to again go back to the same process we talked about. You want to have one use case and solve that. So for example, in our case, there’s a code audit use case. Here’s a repository, and I would run that process. It should give me a report of all the issues it identifies, any violations of our coding standards or anything that we’re not doing the way we recommend our teams are doing the work. If it violates, it identifies. There’s a code agent for the DevOps process, the code agent for the requirements, the agent for the sales processes. So we have those agents that are helping us do things faster and monitoring those processes that we are implementing.

[00:23:04] Hernan Sias It’s a big world out there, especially when it comes to AI, and I know there are a lot of business owners who are so focused on the skill set they already have to run their businesses. They might feel like they’re falling behind on AI. What are probably the first couple of practical steps they should take right now so that they can get a little further ahead and help push their business in the right direction?

[00:23:21] Ghazenfer Mansoor The best buddy for that is also AI. It can help you and give you the plan to learn AI. So when we have a new person in our company who is not much familiar with it, we use Claude to get that plan and then go through the training process. Because the most important part is knowing the depth of AI. If you don’t know what it is and just using it  just knowing prompt engineering and some of that stuff is not AI. That’s just giving you the surface. You have to go deeper into that, like building GPTs, the projects, the skills, and all those different tools that are available that can solve problems. Once you know, then you know enough that, okay, now I know how to use all of these tools and how I can put them to use for my business.

[00:24:33] Hernan Sias Customizing GPTs is such a scary-looking thing, and then so useful when you actually figure out that it’s not as difficult as you might think, and can save you so much time on the little mediocre things you do on a day-to-day basis. Ghazenfer.com and technologyrivers.com are scrolling across the bottom. These are places where people can find information about what you do. Give me a little bit about that. What are people gonna find there? How can you help people? What do you do specifically?

[00:24:50] Ghazenfer Mansoor Ghazenfer.com is my personal website. You can find about my book that I wrote, Beyond the Download: How to Build Mobile Apps that People Love, Use and Share Every Day. You can find information about it, download it, and buy it from Amazon. I also have a podcast, Lessons from the Leap, where I interview business leaders and talk about the leaps that they have taken. And you can also find about my business, Technology Rivers, which is helping businesses improve operations through AI technology and building software products, primarily for the healthcare space. That’s where technologyrivers.com comes in. The problem that we talked about today is the different ways software projects fail and how to fix them. There’s an e-book you can download. And there’s an e-book for building HIPAA-compliant apps. So you can download that and contact us through the website, and someone from our team can help you out.

[00:25:57] Hernan Sias How did you like writing a book compared to running a podcast? We live in a day and age where you have to have media and content out there to grow your business. How are you finding the experience of doing those things?

[00:26:01] Ghazenfer Mansoor Those are two different experiences. The book was a much bigger and longer undertaking. It took me a while to write that book. But it’s all about the experiences that I had over the years. The podcast is more proactive, more current, because things are changing. This is more about sharing your current experiences as we are learning on these different projects, different learnings that we are having. They’re both different and both interesting.

[00:26:43] Hernan Sias Well, Ghazenfer, you did a great job today sharing a lot of information about where people can go, especially when they feel stuck. And as technology moves faster than the speed of light sometimes, having people that we can go to and having that knowledge base is definitely a good thing to have in your back pocket. Whether it’s downloading the book or just learning from experts like yourself on a podcast, those are very useful tools. Any final thoughts before we head out? If people wanna reach out to you specifically, what’s the best way they can do that?

[00:27:00] Ghazenfer Mansoor You can reach out to me through my website or my LinkedIn. My name is easily accessible. You can also check out my Instagram.

[00:27:26] Hernan Sias. Well, Ghazenfer, thank you very much for being on the program. Ladies and gentlemen, I know tech can be scary. I know it’s something that you have to implement, and you don’t have to do it alone. There are people out there who can definitely help you out. So make sure you check out his website, ghazenfer.com. Go ahead and check it out. There’s a book there. You can learn all about the different apps that you can build that people actually love and use. And just go out and start doing a little bit. I promise you, it’s not as complicated as you think. There are so many things that you can implement if you just start doing a little bit at a time. You’ll learn so much. And just using the tools is not the lesson  the tools can actually teach you how to make the tools even better. That’s the era that we’re living in. Thank you very much for being on the program, ladies and gentlemen. We’ll catch you guys on the next one.

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