A prospective client came to us wanting a real-time trading feature built on an architecture that couldn't support real-time anything. Fixing the foundation first would have added six weeks and cost more than the feature itself. They didn't want to hear that.
We could have built exactly what they asked for. It would have worked in the demo and failed within a month of real traffic.
We told them the truth, lost the project to an agency that said yes, and six months later got a call from the same client asking us to rebuild what the other agency shipped, because it had, predictably, fallen over.
Why this isn't really a story about being right
The point isn't that we were smarter. It's that the incentive to say yes is always stronger than the incentive to say 'not like this,' and clients rarely find out which agency told them the truth until much later, if ever. We'd rather be the one that told them early.
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