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 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 part of the first paying user's job to be done or a hard dependency of it. 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 'still in progress' — real software that they can click. That cadence is what keeps a project on schedule.
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 or unverified billing flows.
Why fixed-price works
A fixed-price engagement forces the team to make architecture decisions early. That discipline prevents the vague-creep pattern that turns a 14-week MVP into a 10-month rewrite.
What clients get
Multi-tenant architecture, billing, admin and customer dashboards, analytics, and a production deployment with a repeatable deploy pipeline. One client launched a billing platform processing $40M ARR in year one after following this playbook.