LidIA case study: from prototype to a platform in production, by way of the initial assessment

LidIA, the platform for over-indebtedness procedures developed by Castaldo Solutions in collaboration with Rimedia Solutions, started from a prototype that "was not exactly what we had in mind". An initial assessment and a repositioning, from consumers to insolvency professionals, redefined the product. Today it runs in production, with clients asking for demos.

The CEO of Rimedia Solutions, Tommaso Smimmo, points to the initial assessment as the place where startups go wrong: "one of the fundamental mistakes is the initial assessment".

In short

• The starting point was a prototype already built, which did not match the founders' idea.
• The work started from an initial assessment: the problem to solve, the existing prototype, who the product was really for.
• The biggest finding was not technical: LidIA was designed for consumers, today it is a B2B tool for the Organismi di Composizione della Crisi (OCCs, Italy's over-indebtedness settlement bodies), insolvency practitioners, accountants and lawyers.
• The work went in stages: first design, closed with a blueprint, then development and release to production.
• Today the platform works and, in the CEO's words, "several clients" are asking for demos.
• Pricing will be set after the alpha phase with the OCCs, and the near-term goal is a pre-seed round.

The video review is below, two and a half minutes, in Italian. The questions are asked by Gloria Mocci, Marketing Director at Castaldo Solutions.

Tommaso has told the same journey from his side, on the Rimedia Solutions blog (in Italian): How Lidia was born: from prototype to platform, starting from the initial assessment. It is the version of someone who, as he writes, "before writing a line of code, should have stopped to ask the right questions".

Why does a startup end up with a prototype that is not what it had in mind?

Because the prototype comes before the decisions. With AI-assisted development tools a demo application gets built quickly, and precisely for that reason it gets built before anyone has decided who it is for, what problem it solves and what it must do on day one. The code exists, the answer to those questions does not.

Tommaso Smimmo puts it this way:

"Gaetano and Castaldo Solutions arrived at a crucial moment, precisely because we had found ourselves with a prototype that was not exactly what we had in mind."

The underlying problem, building before deciding who it is for, sits close to one of the causes startups cite most often when they close. CB Insights analysed 431 venture-backed startups that shut down since 2023: among the 385 whose cause is known, 43% point to poor product-market fit and 70% to running out of capital (CB Insights, Startup failure statistics, March 2026). The percentages add up to more than 100% because many startups cite more than one cause, and these two read well together: the money runs out while the wrong thing is being built.

We measured the distance between a prototype and a product in From vibe coding to production: ten levels of work separate a demo that runs from software that holds up under real users. But before the ten levels there is a question no technical level answers: who is this product for?

Who Rimedia Solutions and LidIA are

Rimedia Solutions S.r.l. is a debt and business crisis consultancy based in Stintino, Sardinia. As it states on its website, it combines legal advice and artificial intelligence to help individuals, families and businesses get out of debt, with more than 500 cases handled across Italy. LidIA is a different thing: the platform for professionals who run over-indebtedness procedures, developed by Castaldo Solutions in collaboration with Rimedia Solutions. Official websites: rimediasolutions.com and lid-ia.com.

What does an initial assessment look at before any code is written?

An initial assessment looks at four things before any code is written: what already exists, what problem needs solving, who the product is for and how to split the work into stages you can check. The problem comes before the solution, and it is the part Tommaso remembers first:

"A competent person who analysed what our problem was as a startup from an IT point of view, and created his consultancy ad hoc, as if he were a tailor making our suit."

With LidIA the assessment followed these four steps, and they are the same ones you can ask of anyone who offers to build a platform for you:

1. Read what already exists. The prototype and the technical choices made, to understand what can be kept and what cannot.
2. Restate the problem. Who has it, how often it happens to them, what it costs them today to solve it by hand. Everything else follows from here.
3. Decide the positioning. Who the product is for and who pays for it. For LidIA this is the decision that changed the most, and it is told in the next section.
4. Draw the blueprint before building. The work was split into stages: first design, closed with the delivery of a blueprint, then development and release to production. Each stage ends with something the client can see and check.

"After the various consultations, after the various sessions with Gaetano, we realised that we actually had a lot of work to do," says Tommaso. It is the most useful outcome of an initial assessment: sometimes the verdict is that there is more work than expected, and knowing it up front costs far less than finding out later. Why the assessment has to come before the investment is explained in Why assessments matter before AI investments.

Why did LidIA move from a B2C platform to a B2B one?

Because the right customer was not the person in debt, but the person running the procedure. At first LidIA was conceived as a B2C platform, aimed at people in a situation of over-indebtedness. In the positioning work the product was redefined from scratch: today it is a B2B tool for the Organismi di Composizione della Crisi (OCCs, the bodies that settle over-indebtedness cases in Italy), insolvency practitioners, accountants, lawyers and other operators in the credit sector.

The reasoning is this. A person in over-indebtedness rarely goes through a procedure, and the law itself limits repeats: a consumer cannot access debt restructuring if already discharged in the previous five years or discharged twice before (article 69 of the Crisis Code, in Italian). An insolvency practitioner or an accountant working with an OCC handles many every year, with the same deadlines, the same documents to collect and the same figures to reconcile. The recurring problem, the one worth paying a tool for, sits on their side.

Today the product says it openly. On lid-ia.com LidIA covers the over-indebtedness procedures of Italy's Business Crisis and Insolvency Code (Legislative Decree 14/2019): consumer debt restructuring, minor composition with creditors, including the liquidation variant, controlled liquidation and discharge of the insolvent debtor with no assets. It states "14 checks on every draft, before it reaches you" and "6 reconciliation checks on every proposed distribution", and it has a line that sums up the positioning better than any presentation: "Lidia prepares the drafts, the judgement stays yours". It is a product for professionals, built around their judgement and not in its place.

What changed for Rimedia Solutions?

The result is told by the client, in his own words. On camera he gave no figures, so we write none about the results: the figures in this article come from the sources cited next to each one.

"We put a lot of development into creating what is today a working platform, where several clients are now asking us for demos and also asking for detailed information."

Three changes emerge from Tommaso Smimmo's words.

From prototype to working platform. Not a demo to show investors, but a product in production.

Clients asking for demos. "Several clients", he says, are asking for demos and detailed information.

A technical reference inside the project. "Today we can boast of having a technical person like Gaetano on the inside, who follows us step by step and understands what our problems are."

And there is more: the collaboration, he says, gave him "the opportunity to take on new projects from other clients and grow them together".

How do you assess a software development quote if you are not technical?

By having it read, before you sign, by someone with no interest in selling you that quote. It is the thesis of this article, and it is mine, not Tommaso's. He reaches the same conclusion from his side:

"One of the fundamental mistakes is the initial assessment. With Gaetano and Castaldo Solutions I realised that if I had had a capable consultant like Gaetano I would have saved a lot of money, and above all I would have had the chance to save a lot of time, which is extremely important, and bring value to one's own company straight away."

It happens to startups often, and it is the point I insist on most: a founder without a technical background receives a quote for their platform and has no way to understand what they are buying. They cannot tell whether the hours are too many or too few, whether the proposed technology is the right one or just the one the supplier knows, whether the price covers the release to production or stops at the demo. The problem is not that the quote is high or low: it is that they have nothing to compare it with. And whoever cannot compare, pays. That holds with us too, since we develop software: an opinion before signing is the buyer's right, whoever is selling.

There are five questions to ask before signing a development quote:

• What do I get, and in what form? Code, documentation, access, environments. If the answer is "the application", it is not an answer.
• Who owns the code? Without a clear ownership clause, at the end of the project you may have nothing of your own. We wrote about it in Compliance in vibe coding: AI Act, Law 132 and code ownership.
• Which user is it designed for? If the quote does not name who will use the platform, nobody has decided the positioning.
• What happens after release? Hosting, backups, updates, fixes. A price that stops at release is not the price of the product.
• How do I check each stage? Payments tied to deliveries you can see (a design document, a test version, the release), not to months of work.

The same criteria apply to choosing the consultant, not just the supplier: you will find them in AI consultant in Italy: how an SME should choose one.

When should you set the prices of a new platform?

After validation, not before. The order we agreed with Rimedia Solutions for LidIA is this: first an alpha phase with the OCCs, that is with the professionals who will use it every day (on lid-ia.com it is the Pilot Programme, open to ten firms); then, based on how they use it, pricing; then a pre-seed round, which is the near-term goal. Being in production does not mean having a price list yet: the alpha phase is there to build it.

The order matters. A price decided at a desk, before anyone has used the product, is a hypothesis with a number on it. A price decided after the alpha phase rests on what the first clients actually did with the platform, and it holds up better in front of a client and in front of an investor.

Tommaso Smimmo's testimonial

"It went really well for me. My feedback is positive because with Gaetano we clicked from the start: a competent person who analysed what our problem was as a startup from an IT point of view, and created his consultancy ad hoc, as if he were a tailor making our suit. Today we can boast of having a technical person like Gaetano on the inside, who follows us step by step and understands what our problems are. So in Castaldo Solutions I found a true IT consultant."

"Gaetano and Castaldo Solutions arrived at a crucial moment, precisely because we had found ourselves with a prototype that was not exactly what we had in mind. After the various consultations, after the various sessions with Gaetano, we realised that we actually had a lot of work to do. We put a lot of development into creating what is today a working platform, where several clients are now asking us for demos and also asking for detailed information. I am very happy also because the chance to work with Castaldo Solutions has also given me expansion in the market on the IT side, so the opportunity to take on new projects from other clients and grow them together. So a great collaboration, I am really happy."

Asked whether he would choose us again or recommend us:

"Absolutely, especially for startups, because one of the fundamental mistakes is the initial assessment. With Gaetano and Castaldo Solutions I realised that if I had had a capable consultant like Gaetano I would have saved a lot of money, and above all I would have had the chance to save a lot of time, which is extremely important, and bring value to one's own company straight away. So I recommend it."

Tommaso Smimmo, CEO of Rimedia Solutions

What your startup, or your SME, can learn from the LidIA case

You do not need to work on insolvency law to use the order of the moves.

• Assess before you build, not after. An assessment costs a conversation before you build. A product built for the wrong customer costs the product.
• Treat the prototype as information, not as an asset. What you have already spent is not a reason to keep going in the same direction.
• Decide who the product is for before deciding what it does. Moving from B2C to B2B changed LidIA more than any feature.
• Work in stages you can check. Design closed with a blueprint, then development, then production: each stage tells you whether to carry on.
• Have the quote read by someone who is not selling it to you. An opinion before signing costs little compared with a project to redo.
• Set prices after your first real users. That is what the alpha phase is for: finding out what the product is worth to the people who use it, not to the people who built it.

Frequently asked questions

What should a startup do before having its platform developed?

An initial assessment: understand what problem the product solves, for whom, and what it really has to do on day one, before asking for quotes and writing code. In the case of LidIA, developed by Castaldo Solutions in collaboration with Rimedia Solutions, the assessment showed that the existing prototype did not match the founders' idea and that the product had to be repositioned from consumers to insolvency professionals. CEO Tommaso Smimmo points to the initial assessment as the place where startups go wrong: "one of the fundamental mistakes is the initial assessment".

How can I tell whether a software development quote is right?

By testing it against precise questions, not against another price. Ask what you get and in what form, who owns the code, which user the platform is designed for, what happens after release and how you check each stage. If you have no technical background, have it read before signing by someone with no interest in selling you that project: the cost of an opinion is small compared with a product you have to rebuild.

Is it better to launch a B2C or a B2B platform?

Choose the side of the market where the problem repeats. LidIA started as a platform for over-indebted people, who rarely go through a procedure and face legal limits on repeating it; today it is a B2B tool for OCCs, insolvency practitioners, accountants and lawyers, who handle many every year. When the problem repeats for a professional, B2B gives you a customer who uses the tool every day and has a concrete reason to pay for it.

What is LidIA and who is it for?

LidIA is a platform for the over-indebtedness procedures set out in Italy's Business Crisis and Insolvency Code (Legislative Decree 14/2019), developed by Castaldo Solutions in collaboration with Rimedia Solutions. It serves OCCs, insolvency practitioners, accountants and lawyers: it analyses documents, proposes data together with its source and prepares draft filings, leaving the decision to the professional. It is in production, and the details are on lid-ia.com.

In summary

Our view after this case: the biggest saving in a digital project is made before the first line of code is written: by deciding what to build and for whom. Prototype, development and production come after, and they come out better.

It is the work we do in our AI consulting: first understand the problem and the market, then design, then build in stages you can check.

About to have a platform developed, or holding a quote you cannot read? The first step is a free Pre-Assessment: an hour on your project, no strings attached.

The other cases we have told in the client's own voice: Planex, an engineering firm, Sicurcond, a construction company, and Appkeep. They all sit in the ROI and investments hub, alongside the articles on what an AI project actually returns.