Founders are bad at pricing one specific thing: their own attention.
Ask a founder what their time is worth and they will give you a number that sounds defensible. $200 an hour. $500. Whatever the consulting rate would be if they took clients. Then watch what they actually spend that time on. A two-hour debate about button color. A weekend rebuilding auth because the existing library felt "off." Four days researching a market they will never enter, on a product they have not committed to building.
The math does not work. If your time is worth $500 an hour, you cannot afford to spend a week on something you might throw away. But founders do this constantly. The reason is not that they are bad at math. The reason is that an unfinished idea is the most expensive thing in a founder's life, and nobody has taught them how to price it.
Here is what an unfinished idea actually costs.
It costs the obvious thing: the hours you put into it. That is the small number.
It costs the opportunity layer underneath: every other idea you did not explore because this one was occupying the slot. That is medium.
Then it costs the thing nobody talks about. It costs closure. An unfinished idea sits in your head and charges rent. It wakes you up. It hijacks the shower. It inserts itself into conversations where it does not belong. It contaminates your judgment on unrelated projects because your subconscious is still trying to solve it in the background.
The total cost of an unfinished idea is not the hours spent. It is the hours spent plus the cognitive overhead of carrying it, multiplied by however long you carry it.
Most founders carry unfinished ideas for years.
The trap is that the unfinished idea feels free, because no money has changed hands. But money is the cheapest currency a founder spends. Attention is the expensive one, and the unfinished idea is a subscription you forgot to cancel.
The fix is not to finish every idea. Most ideas should die. The fix is to either commit or kill, and to do it on a schedule. Give yourself a week. Two weeks. A month for something larger. At the end of that window, either the idea has earned a place on the roadmap, or it goes in a document called killed and you stop thinking about it.
The founders I have watched build durable things have one trait in common: they kill ideas faster than they start them. Their pipelines are short. Their commitments are concentrated. The unfinished pile is small enough to see the bottom of.
Founders who struggle have the opposite. They have forty-seven ideas in various states of half-built, and they price each one at zero because none of them have shipped yet. Then they wonder why they feel exhausted on Sunday night.
You are not exhausted from the work. You are exhausted from the carrying.
Price the carrying. Then decide what you are actually willing to afford.