Onwards Labs
It was $500, then $1,000, then a bigger piece, then someone new. Two years on there is still no product, and every one of those decisions looked sensible on the day you made it. This is the book about the ten percent that decides whether a build ever finishes.
WHAT THE LAST TWO YEARS PROBABLY COST, FOR THE PRICE OF A COFFEE.
Here is the trade, on the first page: I show you the entire method, in full. No held-back chapter, no locked module, no the-real-stuff-is-in-the-programme. In return, you read it knowing that some of you, by the end, will want to build something with me.
Ninety-nine readers in a hundred will run it themselves, hand it to a developer and finally know what to ask for, or realise the product in their head isn't the one worth building — and save a year. Every one of those is a win. And one in a hundred gets to the last page and decides not to run it alone. Both numbers are the point.
You know your idea works — you've watched the problem up close for years. Maybe you hired a developer, paid for a design, watched a prototype reach eighty percent and just… stop. And a quiet story started running: that you're not technical enough. That story is wrong, it is expensive, and it is the most common reason a good idea dies quietly in a folder.
Almost all of any product already exists. The genuinely new part — the part that is uniquely yours — is about ten percent. The other ninety is proven machinery you should refuse to pay to build again. The game is choosing the right ten percent, spending everything on that, and refusing the ninety.
The failures sit beside the wins on purpose. The wins prove I can build. The losses prove I'll tell you the truth about what to build — and when not to.
The kind of thing a team of a dozen would normally spend three or four years and $2–3M building.
Two years, ~$30k, never once a point where anyone could name what was broken. We kept her thinking and rebuilt from the ground up.
I productised a chunk of my own consulting, ran ads, got nothing. Unique tech, tiny market, nobody driving it — including me.
The technology could not get accurate enough exactly where it needed to be. So I said no to the money instead of a two-year mess.
Give a technical team the choice and they pick the 99% every time. People wildly underestimate the 95.
My consultancy got good enough to do the five-minute fix clients actually needed. Happy clients, no money. I walked toward products on purpose.
Why a product beats everything else an expert could build, the real reason you're stuck, and the six-lever method for getting it built without becoming an engineer.
The blunt questions enterprise leaders and stuck founders actually ask, with the honest answer to each. The part readers go back to most.
Where AI actually works today versus where it generates expensive noise. It didn't break the pattern — it made it pay for the people who already had this right.
The prompts, audits and worked examples built into the back of the book — finish reading with the thing half-done, not just understood.
Ryan Richardson has built seven businesses and delivered over a hundred technical projects, from funded startups to tier-one enterprises. He started in data science, and has done technical work that touched global banks, large technology firms and government.
Email me inside 60 days. No form, no hoop, no "are you sure". I'd rather you keep the book and lose the five dollars than feel like you got sold.
289 PAGES + 3 BONUSES · INSTANT DELIVERY
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The 10% Rule in this book is the exact discipline Ryan uses to build for enterprises and rescue stalled products every week — from a two-day save to a multi-million-dollar platform. Same method, whether you paid $5 or $150k.
A few real builds — where the founder was stuck, what shipped, and what it did. Names under NDA lose their names; the facts don't change.
An ex-COO, off a university venture that failed chasing 99% custom accuracy for two years. We ran the opposite discipline: the 95% that ships in days, not the 99% that never arrives. A data-science trap, called out by a data scientist.
Genuinely clever tech — auto-analyse a swimmer's stroke from video. But the make-or-break happens exactly where footage and models fail worst. So we paused it, and said so. We'll tell you when something isn't ready before we'll take your money to fake it.
Ryan has spent a decade sitting between mining executives and engineering teams — at KPMG, BHP and South32, and across ventures of his own. His job has always been the same: turn what the business needs into what engineers build, and catch the expensive mistakes before they're made.
Seven businesses, 100+ technical projects, from a two-day rescue to an enterprise platform that did over $3M in its first year. This book hands you that whole method — holding nothing back.
"I do this work actively — to support my kids, pay my mortgage, and make sure I'm at home."
289 pages, three bonuses, and the exact method behind every build above — for the price of a coffee. Read it tonight, see the whole path by morning.
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