Your Customer's Workaround Is Expensive. Can You Put a Number on It?

Most founders can tell you their customer's workaround is expensive. Almost none can tell you how expensive.

They describe it in adjectives. It is inefficient. It is frustrating. It takes forever. Every one of those is probably true, and not one of them is a number. That gap is the difference between thin validation and the real thing. Knowing the workaround exists is where validation starts. It is not where it ends.

The number is the part that does the work later. It is what makes your claim credible when a customer pushes back on price, when an investor asks how you arrived at your number, and when you are deciding, honestly, whether this problem is worth building against at all. A feeling says the problem is expensive. A number proves it.

TL;DR: "It's Inefficient" Is a Feeling. A Number Is Evidence.

You have probably already found the workaround. The next move is to quantify what it actually costs one specific customer, across the dimensions where cost accumulates, honestly enough that the customer would recognize the figure.

• Anchor to one customer and one workaround, not an average across many

• Quantify the dimensions: time, direct money, errors, opportunity, fragility, with stress documented as evidence

• Tag every figure as observed, estimated, or confirmed by the customer

• Total it conservatively, monthly and annual, without double counting

• Write the cost statement: the number and the evidence in one or two sentences

Four signals your validation is still thin:

• You describe the workaround in adjectives but cannot state a number

• Your pricing is set by feel, and you cannot say how you arrived at it

• You have never asked a customer what the workaround costs them in time or money

• If you showed a customer your cost figure, you are not sure they would recognize it

If any of those describe you, this article shows you how to turn a vivid description into a defensible number, and a number into a sentence you can use.

If You Found This Article by Searching for Something Else

Most founders who need this are not searching for "workaround cost." They are searching for something more immediate.

• How to price my product.

• How to prove ROI to customers.

• How to quantify a customer's pain.

• How to validate willingness to pay.

• What to put in my pitch about the problem.

All of those point at the same underlying question. Can you state, in numbers a customer would recognize, what this problem is already costing them? This article shows you how to build that number.

Knowing the Workaround Exists Is Not Validation

Finding the workaround feels like the finish line. The customer showed you the spreadsheet, the manual process, the duct-taped tools, and you walked away certain the problem was real. It is real. But a workaround you can describe is only the first half of the evidence, and founders routinely stop there because the description is so vivid it feels like proof.

It is not proof of cost. "They spend ages on this" is a sentence you generated. "They spend twelve hours a month on this" is a measurement. The first one supports any conclusion you want it to. The second one can be checked, defended, and priced against. Thin validation is the state of having the first kind and believing it is the second.

The reason this matters is that everything downstream runs on the number you do not have yet. Your price is a guess until you know what the customer is already losing. Your pitch is an assertion until you can say what the problem costs. Even your decision to build is a gamble until you can compare the cost of the workaround to the cost of replacing it. Without the number, every one of those choices is a guess you have no way to defend.

Anchor to One Customer

The instinct is to reach for the market. The problem affects thousands of companies, so the total cost must be enormous. Resist that move. A market-sized number is built on assumptions stacked on assumptions, and a customer can feel the air in it immediately.

Build the number from one real customer and one real workaround instead. A specific person, a specific process, a specific cost you observed or they described. A number anchored to one true situation is more useful and more credible than an average built on guesses about many, because you can defend every line of it, and because the one customer can look at it and tell you whether it is right. Generalize later, after the specific number holds.

So name it precisely. Who is the customer. What exactly do they do, step by step. How long have they been doing it. And where does your knowledge come from, observation, a conversation, or your own inference. That last question matters, because the strength of the number depends entirely on the strength of its source.

Quantify the Dimensions

Workaround cost accumulates in more places than founders count. Walk through each dimension, skip the ones that do not apply, and for every figure you keep, mark whether it is observed, estimated, or confirmed by the customer. Most advice tells you to calculate the cost. Almost none tells you to grade your own evidence while you do it. That tag is the honesty of the number, and it is what keeps the total from becoming a figure you cannot defend later.

Take a marketing agency whose analyst rebuilds the same client reports by hand every month, pulling figures from five dashboards into slides. Here is where the cost hides.

Time. How long it takes per occurrence, including the redo when it goes wrong and the back-and-forth with others. The analyst spends about twelve hours a month on it. At her loaded rate, that is a real monthly figure, not a vague "a lot of time."

Direct money. What the customer spends because of the workaround: tools, contractors, rework, penalties. The agency pays two hundred dollars a month for a screenshot tool that exists only because the dashboards will not export cleanly.

Errors and quality. How often the workaround produces a mistake and what it costs to catch and fix. A transposed number reaches a client roughly once a quarter, and each one costs an apology, a correction, and a dent in trust.

Opportunity. What the customer cannot do because the workaround eats the capacity. Be especially skeptical here, because opportunity cost is the easiest dimension to inflate. "They could spend that time growing the business" is not evidence. "They turned down two projects last quarter because they lacked the capacity" is evidence. The analyst is clearly formatting slides instead of analyzing, but unless the agency can point to a real deal it lost or a renewal it missed, leave it out rather than guess. A number you cannot tie to a named outcome weakens every honest number sitting next to it.

Fragility. Whether the workaround is brittle and what a failure costs at the worst moment. Only the analyst knows the process. When she is out, reports go late, and a late report during a client renewal is expensive in a way the monthly average hides.

Stress and relationships. This one rarely converts cleanly to dollars, so document it as evidence instead of forcing a figure. What did the customer say or do that shows the weight of it? "I dread the last week of every month" is worth recording exactly, even though it does not go in the total.

Total It Honestly

Add up the dimensions that apply, and add them up conservatively. The temptation is to let the number climb, because a bigger number feels like a stronger case. A number you cannot defend is weaker than a smaller one you can.

Two disciplines keep it honest. Do not double count: if the time cost already includes fixing errors, do not also add the errors as a separate line. And favor the low estimate wherever you are unsure. Then carry it to both a monthly and an annual figure, because the annual number is often the one that lands, and run a sanity check against what the customer is visibly paying or losing today. If your total dwarfs anything they would recognize, you have drifted into invention.

Run the agency through it. Twelve hours a month at a loaded rate near fifty dollars an hour is about six hundred dollars. The screenshot tool adds two hundred. A client-facing error roughly once a quarter, costing a few hundred dollars each time in rework beyond the routine hours, averages near a hundred a month. That totals around nine hundred dollars a month, close to eleven thousand a year. Notice what stays out. The lost analysis time, because the agency never named a deal it cost them. The fragility risk, because the report has not actually been late yet. The conservative number is the one that survives contact with the customer.

Finish with the question that separates a real number from a hopeful one. How much of this total rests on observed or confirmed evidence, and how much on estimation? If most of it is estimate, the number is a hypothesis, and your next job is to firm it up before you put it in a deck.

The Recognition Test

Here is the single check that tells you whether your number is worth anything. If you showed it to the customer, would they recognize it?

A number the customer recognizes is validation. A number they have never thought about, that you arrived at through a chain of your own assumptions, is founder math. Founder math is the thing that collapses the first time a real customer looks at it, usually in the middle of a sales call or a pitch, exactly when you can least afford it. The test is not whether your spreadsheet is internally consistent. It is whether the person living the problem would look at your figure and say, yes, that is about what it costs me.

If they have described the cost in terms that match your calculation, you have something solid. If your number is a surprise to the person it describes, you have arithmetic, not evidence.

Write the Cost Statement

The output of all this is not a spreadsheet. It is one or two sentences that carry the number and the evidence together, in terms a customer or investor understands immediately.

It looks like this. "This team spends roughly twenty hours a month maintaining a process that fails at least twice a week and has already delayed one client delivery." Or "this founder pays eight hundred dollars a month across two tools that do not talk to each other, and rebuilds the output by hand every time something changes." The agency version: "this agency loses roughly nine hundred dollars a month rebuilding the same client reports by hand, counting labor, tools, and recurring corrections, and a transposition error reached a client last quarter."

That sentence is what belongs in your sales conversation, your pitch, and your problem description. Read it aloud. If it does not sound credible coming out of your mouth, the numbers underneath it need more evidence, and that is the next piece of work, not a wording fix.

The One Sentence That Tells You Where You Stand

A founder who has done this work can finish one sentence with specifics: the documented cost of the workaround for this customer is about this number per month, based on this kind of evidence, and the dimension I trust least is this one, which I will firm up by this action.

A founder who has not done it will reach back for the adjectives. "It costs them a ton." "It's hugely inefficient." Those are the feelings this exercise exists to convert. They are where you started, not where you should end.

If you can state a defensible number and the customer would recognize it, your problem is validated in the one currency that travels: cost. If you cannot, you have found the exact gap to close, go get the figure from the person who actually pays it. Either outcome moves you forward.

One honest caveat. A quantified workaround cost is not a validated business model. It is evidence that the problem is real enough to cost something, which is the foundation the rest is built on. It sits alongside the other validation work: confirming the workaround is real, checking that the pain clears the threshold to act, and now pricing what it costs. Together they tell you whether there is something here worth building.

Workaround Cost and Your Problem Clarity

In the Startup Readiness Framework, Problem Clarity evaluates whether a founder can back the problem with evidence a customer would recognize, not feeling dressed as fact. Thin validation is one of the most common flags in early assessments, because finding the workaround feels conclusive and the missing number rarely announces itself.

A founder who can describe the workaround has demonstrated awareness. A founder who can state what it costs, in a figure the customer confirms, has demonstrated validation.

If your Problem Clarity flagged thin validation, start here. Name one customer and one workaround. Quantify the dimensions and tag the evidence behind each. Total it conservatively, then test whether the customer would recognize the number. Turn it into one cost statement you can say out loud.

Problem Clarity is one of the six pillars in the Startup Readiness Framework. If your problem carries a documented cost, the next question is whether the rest of your startup is as ready as your problem.

The Startup Readiness Assessment gives you a full-system diagnostic across all six pillars in under twenty minutes.

Take your Startup Readiness Score free today at startupreadinessscore.com →

Published

By Dr. Shaun P. Digan

Originally published on the Startup.Ready. Blog at startupreadinessscore.com/startup-readiness

Original Publication Date: June 13, 2026

Last Updated: June 13, 2026

About the Author

Dr. Shaun P. Digan is the founder of Startup.Ready and the creator of the Startup Readiness Framework, a research-based system for evaluating and validating early-stage startups before launch and early growth. He holds a PhD in Entrepreneurship from the University of Louisville and has spent over 15 years teaching, advising, and consulting with founders on startup strategy, validation, and growth.

In his writing, including The Foundations of Innovation, he focuses on how founders can make better decisions by improving clarity, alignment, and readiness before scaling.