The challenge
A seed-stage B2B SaaS startup had a clear idea and a hard deadline. They needed a real, working product, not a prototype, in front of their first customers within two weeks, and they did not have an engineering team to build it.
Three constraints shaped the engagement:
- It had to be real software. A clickable mockup would not survive contact with those first customers. The product had to let a real user sign up, do the core job, and have it persist.
- The scope had to fit two weeks. That meant one core workflow for one user segment, with everything else explicitly deferred.
- It had to be billable from day one of launch. The founder wanted to test willingness to pay immediately, not after a separate billing phase.
How we approached it
A two-engineer pod with a QA engineer and a Hashorn PM, run as a compressed version of our standard MVP sprint. The PM owned the day-by-day cadence and kept the cut list honest; the engineers paired so nothing was single-threaded. The single most important artifact of day one was the written cut list: everything we agreed not to build, so the two weeks could go entirely to the core workflow and the few things around it that a first customer genuinely needs.
We locked the architecture on day one and did not revisit it. A mainstream stack (Next.js, Postgres, Prisma, Stripe) meant zero time lost to tooling and a codebase the client could hand to future hires without a translation layer.
What we shipped
Days 1 to 2, foundation. Scope lock, the multi-tenant data model, auth, role-based access, and a deployed staging URL. A logged-in user could reach an empty version of the core view by end of day two.
Days 3 to 7, the core workflow. The feature the product exists for, built end to end and persisted, with the edge cases handled. Demoable by day seven.
Days 8 to 9, billing and admin. Stripe subscriptions for the core plan with idempotent webhooks, and a minimal internal admin view so support was not blind on launch day.
Days 10 to 11, polish and onboarding. Error and loading states, mobile, accessibility, and a first-run experience that walked a new user to the core action.
Days 12 to 14, QA and launch. A structured bug bash, Playwright on the critical paths, and a real production deploy with monitoring. The first real users were onboarded on day fourteen.
The outcome
- A live, deployed SaaS MVP in 14 working days, on a real domain: auth, the core workflow, Stripe billing, and a minimal admin view.
- Tests on the critical paths and monitoring wired before launch, so the founder could onboard real users with confidence.
- A clean, mainstream codebase the team owns, with a prioritized v2 backlog built from the first week of real usage.
What we'd repeat
The discipline that made the deadline was the cut list. Every time scope threatened the two weeks, we cut from the bottom of the priority list rather than slipping the date, and the product was better for it. The other lesson was keeping billing minimal: one plan, wired cleanly, was enough to start testing willingness to pay without building a billing system the company did not yet need.