Rescuing a Founder Who Got Scammed Out of ₩6.6M on a Dev Project

On the evening of the 15th, a founder reached out. He was in an urgent situation, he said, and wanted to talk a few things through. He'd been scammed out of ₩6.6M (~$4.8K) on a dev outsourcing project.

Here's the Situation in Summary

1. Three months earlier, he'd hired a shop ("Shop A") to build an app for managing his store.
2. As is so often the case, three months passed with zero progress.
3. Shop A's owner dodged his calls, telling him to "ask the account manager."
4. He needed the app to launch alongside his store opening on December 3rd.
5. Worse, even the spec contained an element that would never pass app-store review.
6. Build progress was at 0% — all he had was a rough Figma mockup.
7. He'd paid 100% upfront.
8. Shop A claimed a refund was impossible per the contract — but graciously offered to refund about 10%.

He asked me what options a client has in this situation (lawsuit, etc.). I told him, painfully, that the best he could realistically do was cajole Shop A into giving back whatever he could. The amount was small (₩6.6M), and the mental stress of fighting it would clearly cost him more. And the most serious issue was that he had to launch by December 3rd with absolutely nothing built.

Why We Said No at First

He then asked whether we could take the project on. I declined, for these reasons.

I call projects like this "cleanup projects." A cleanup project is one a dev shop failed to finish and ran from, or one a shop subcontracted out because it wasn't capable enough. These come with absurdly short deadlines and carry a lot of risk, so we generally don't take them — and when we quote, we ask for two to three times our usual price.

As a cleanup project, the quote had to be high, but his budget couldn't support it. He'd already burned money once with Shop A, so I understood his position completely. Paying twice — what he lost to Shop A plus the cost of a new project — has to sting.

The Meeting Where I Caved

I told him repeatedly that we simply couldn't do it within that budget. Market logic says higher risk means higher cost, but this project carried high risk at the same old price. Still, he pleaded earnestly, and I'm weak to an emotional appeal, so I softened. I agreed to at least take a meeting.

At the meeting, seeing a founder around my dad's age who clearly knew nothing about IT services, I softened even more. It turned out he'd come from my hometown, which got to me further. After listening to him vent for about two hours, I told him I'd confer with my team and get back to him. Back home, I called and told him we'd take it — on one condition.

Hand planning, design, and scheduling entirely over to us, and trust us with it.

The bottleneck in most dev outsourcing is the client meetings and back-and-forth. Since this project was on a tight deadline, I asked him to delegate full authority. I also committed that if the product didn't turn out the way he wanted, we'd own it. Thankfully he said yes, and we got started.

Charging Ahead Overnight

The safe move is to wait for a signed contract and a deposit, but there was no time for that. I told him the signature and deposit could come later — we'd start the work first. My teammates were fast asleep at that hour, so I decided to charge ahead myself. Fortunately, because our modules team had pre-built a lot of the features we'd need, I could develop at incredible speed.

Since he'd been burned by a dev shop once already, I over-communicated to keep him at ease. The previous shop had lied, passing off Figma images as if they were actually built — so we communicated through a live link instead.

A Product in 24 Hours

And the next day, 24 hours later, we had a product. It wasn't a high-margin project — but this is exactly the kind of thing that makes the job worth doing.

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Money gone, deadline looming, nothing built — that's precisely the situation we're best at. Potential is a development partner that helps Korean and Asian founders expand westward. If you need an urgent rescue, reach out anytime.