How we ship a SaaS MVP in six weeks without cutting corners

Every founder we meet wants the same two things: launch fast, and don't build junk we'll have to throw away. These goals aren't in conflict, but only if you're ruthless about scope in week one.

Week 0: kill features before they're born

Our discovery sprint produces one artifact that matters: a one-page spec where every feature is labeled 'launch', 'later', or 'never'. The MVP that ships in six weeks is the one where 'launch' fits on half a page. Auth, billing, and one core loop done extremely well beats nine half-features every time.

Weeks 1–2: walking skeleton

We stand up the entire pipeline first (repo, CI/CD, staging, production, auth, payments in test mode) before building features. From day ten onward, every merge is deployable. There is no 'integration phase' at the end, because integration happens every day.

Weeks 3–5: the core loop, demoed weekly

You see the product every Friday. Not screenshots. A URL. Weekly demos surface wrong assumptions while they're still cheap to fix. Most of our best product decisions came from a client saying 'huh, that's not what I imagined' in week three instead of month three.

Week 6: launch is a checklist, not a ceremony

• Error monitoring and alerting wired to a channel someone actually reads
• Analytics on the three actions that define activation
• Backups tested by restoring, not by hoping
• A rollback path that takes minutes, not meetings

Six weeks later you have less software than you imagined and more product than you expected. That's the point.