Fourteen weeks isn't a marketing number. It's the median for our last nine SaaS MVPs, and it's only possible because we spend the first two weeks aggressively cutting scope and locking architecture before a single feature is built.
Weeks 1–2: brutal scoping
We list every feature the founder wants, then we cut everything that isn't either (a) part of the first paying user's job to be done, or (b) a hard dependency of (a). Nothing else gets built in v1.
By the end of week two we have a signed scope doc, a Figma flow for every screen, and a fixed price. Everyone knows what they're getting.
Weeks 3–12: weekly demos
Every Friday we demo working software to the founder. No slides, no mockups, no 'this part is still in progress' — real software that they can click. That cadence is what keeps a 14-week project from drifting.
Weeks 13–14: hardening
The last two weeks are reserved for QA, performance, and the things that always come up. We don't ship to production with leftover bugs.