The weekend system is still running. Three years later.
Got a call from a CEO I knew. End-of-month commission calculations had become a nightmare. The whole office ground to a halt for days. Manual work. Spreadsheets. Mistakes. Stress.
The salespeople were flying blind. Every update was manual, with no single place to see the numbers.
Growth built the bottleneck. The better business got, the worse it got.
I did not have the time to build it back then – but I said it could be done in a weekend. The CEO called 3 other companies. They all laughed at the “weekend estimate”.
So I had to prove it: transaction sync from the webshop, automated commission math, and a portal where every salesperson sees their numbers daily.
That’s it. Core problem solved. Nothing fancy.
Did I cut corners? Absolutely. Some things I’d do differently now.
But the 80% that mattered was live Monday morning.
That’s when it got interesting.
Once the pain was gone, we could actually ask the real question: what do they need?
Turns out: advanced calculations that mimic bookkeeping, team rankings, CRM integration, financial analysis, and more. Features that would have been guesses on day one became obvious over time.
Today the system does far more than that first weekend version. But it grew from real needs, not assumptions. It was even copied and adapted at another branch of the company. Again, with success.
Solve the core problem first. Ship the 80% or less, as long as it hits the nail. The bells and whistles can wait, and when they come, you’ll know exactly which ones actually matter.
Most wasted project budget? Features nobody asked for yet.
