What building a $6 start-up tool taught me about systems thinking in projects

One evening, while staring at my laptop, I had a familiar feeling many of us know well: I want to build something—but what? At the time, I was preparing for job interviews, laying the foundation for my consulting practice and speaking to early-stage founders and small business owners.

The more conversations I had, the more a pattern emerged. These founders had strong ideas, but most struggled with the basics of being “funding ready.” They weren’t always clear on their financials, didn’t have investment documentation in order and often focused on traction without the groundwork that accelerators or incubators look for.

A friend of mine was building a SaaS product for subject matter experts. His energy went almost entirely into sales. What was missing was clarity around investor expectations, financial discipline, and organisational readiness. Watching that gap in real time got me thinking: what does it actually mean to be ready for funding

That question turned back on me:

If I needed to raise funds tomorrow, would I be ready?
What documentation would I need?
Where would I even look for grants or loans?
What might cause my application to be ignored or delayed?

That became the spark. What if I could build a simple tool—a Founder Readiness Scorecard—that helped answer those questions?

Starting from zero

I didn’t have a product team. No designers. No engineers. Just me.

But I had two things:

A project manager’s mindset
A total spend of $6

The system I sketched out looked simple on paper:

User fills out a form
Logic scores their inputs
GPT analyses the details
A personalised report gets emailed back instantly

The trick was making all those moving parts integrate like a real product.

Systems thinking in action

I approached the MVP the same way I’d approach a financial services project: break the problem into systems, design the flow end-to-end and automate as much as possible.

End-to-end journey
I mapped every step a user would take, from landing on the site to receiving their report. Nothing was left as a loose end.

Subsystem integration
I pieced it together with Carrd for the front end, Tally Forms for data capture, Google Sheets for scoring, GPT for report generation and Zoho Mail for sending responses. Each tool was a small service, stitched together like a modular system.

Automation first
I didn’t want to check forms or manually email reports. Once a founder submitted, the system scored, analysed and delivered feedback without me touching it.

API thinking
Even with a scrappy backend, I designed it to be expandable—ready to connect with dashboards or external platforms in the future.

Feedback loop
When I launched it, I tracked drop-offs, refined questions and learned what messaging worked. Even with small numbers, the feedback shaped the next iteration.

Where I misjudged the audience

Here’s where the project took an unexpected turn. My first assumption was that founders would be the users. After all, it was called a “Founder Readiness Scorecard.” But the reality was different.

Founders, especially at the earliest stages, are consumed by building their product and chasing traction. They worry about whether their app works, whether anyone will buy it, whether they’re moving fast enough. Diagnostic tools feel secondary when survival is the priority.

The real audience was never the individual founder. It was the accelerators and incubators guiding those founders. They are the ones who need a way to assess whether startups are truly ready for funding conversations. In hindsight, it’s obvious. At the time, I chased the wrong persona.

The part I haven’t said out loud

Even when I realised accelerators were the right audience, I never tested it with them. Somewhere deep down, I wasn’t ready. Maybe it was self-doubt. Maybe I didn’t know how to present it. Maybe what I built felt too small to be taken seriously.

That hesitation meant the tool never reached the people it was best suited for. A handful of founders tried it. Traction was minimal. And eventually, I stopped working on it.

Stopping carried its own sting. It felt like quitting. Part of me wanted to apologise for not pushing harder. But over time, I started to see it differently: ending the project was also a decision. It was a signal that what I learned was enough, and the best use of my energy was to carry those lessons forward, not to keep polishing a tool that wasn’t finding its place.

More than just a $6 tool

Looking back, what I built wasn’t just a tool. It was a live case study in project thinking.

Like the regulatory reporting programs I’ve led in capital markets, this MVP required scope definition, risk awareness, delivery phases and iteration. Each tool I used became a “function” in the system. Each tweak became a mini project phase. Even the decision to stop was part of the project lifecycle—closing the loop with lessons learned.

The experience taught me three things:

Audience clarity is everything. Build for the wrong persona, and even the most polished tool won’t resonate.

Small builds have value. A $6 experiment can teach as much as a large project if you treat it seriously.

Knowing when to stop is a skill. Quitting isn’t failure when it comes with insight. It’s closing one path so you can move with more confidence on the next.

Takeaway

Project managers are more than coordinators. We’re systems thinkers, builders, translators of vision into delivery. You don’t need a big team or a big budget to prove a concept. And you don’t need to apologise for stopping if the outcome was learning.

The Founder Readiness Scorecard may never reach accelerators or live as a scaled product, but the act of building it sharpened my perspective on product-market fit, experimentation and clarity of audience. For $6, that’s a return I’ll take.

Whether you work in banking, infrastructure, or SaaS—the mindset applies everywhere.