$14K for One Good Idea? The Shocking Real Cost of Building Features

Imagine You Have a Product—and This Is Your Team

• Developer
• Designer
• Project Manager

Every day, you try to develop and release a “feature” that you believe your users desperately need.

But just think about the word “release.” It suggests that the product (the “system”) resists anything new. You have to spend energy, time, and money to overcome that resistance and wedge in your idea. Developers, in particular, know this feeling all too well: bloated code, never-ending quick fixes (“crutches”), and the constant struggle to keep a project afloat.

How Much Does It Cost to Validate One Idea?

To make this concrete, let’s say each person on your team earns $1,000 per month:

• Average feature development takes two weeks of coding.
• Plus one week of design work.
• Plus around one week of project management.

In other words, you’re likely spending a solid month of everyone’s combined effort. That’s about $1,000 for a single idea.

In reality, the employer’s true cost is roughly double when you factor in taxes, office rent, and hardware costs. That brings us to $2,000 as the approximate price tag to test whether one new feature is actually viable.

It’s Really About Testing an Idea

Why “test” an idea? Because any development ultimately answers just one question:

Does this idea work in the real world with real users?

So, you design your feature, code it, launch it, and maybe even run an A/B test. The (often sobering) truth is that only about 14% of ideas end up helping your business. If your brilliant new feature doesn’t pan out, you’ve spent a month building it, waiting for data, and then—back to the drawing board.

The Math of Ideas per Year

With a team of one developer, one designer, and one project manager, you’ll manage about 10 tested ideas per year. (Remember: weekends, vacations, and maintenance on past features eat up a lot of time.)

So, you test 10 ideas, and on average, only 1 or 2 of them will show any positive impact for your business. And each attempt costs around $2,000 to validate.

The Price of One Successful Idea

We know:

• $2,000 is the cost of developing/testing one idea.
• 14% of ideas succeed in an A/B test (that’s 1 out of 7).

Multiply $2,000 by 7 to account for all the failed ideas plus the single success, and you get about $14,000 per successful idea.

Startups Don’t Have Endless Time or Money

On average, a startup survives less than three years before folding. That’s roughly 30 fully tested ideas—of which 4might succeed. After that, you may run out of funds, lose motivation, or simply age out of the grind.

Recommended Reading: The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. It covers the concept of “how many pivots a startup has left,” which is basically how many times you can afford to keep trying new ideas before the money (or energy) runs out.

Key Takeaway

Every feature you build is a bet. The faster and cheaper you can test each idea—and the sooner you learn whether it’s a winner or a dud—the more likely you are to beat the odds before the clock (and your budget) runs out.