How We Ship MVPs in 4 Weeks

Why Speed Matters More Than Ever

Most MVPs don’t fail because the idea is bad—they fail because the team takes too long to learn. By the time something finally ships, the market has moved on, competitors have caught up, or the team has burned too much budget to iterate.

At 9.agency, our goal is simple: get a real product into real users’ hands within four weeks. That constraint forces clarity. It keeps everyone focused on learning, not on polishing screens no one will ever see.

This is the process we use with founders and product teams to make that happen reliably.

Our 4-Week MVP Framework

Instead of thinking in terms of “features”, we think in terms of questions:

• What do we need to learn from the market in the next 30 days?
• What is the smallest product that can reliably answer those questions?

Once we have that, we structure work into four focused weeks:

1. Week 1 – Discovery & Architecture: Understand the problem, define the core user journey, and design a technical foundation that won’t collapse after launch.
2. Week 2 – Core Loop: Implement the single most important flow that proves the product’s value.
3. Week 3 – Secondary Features & Reliability: Add the essentials around the core loop and harden the system.
4. Week 4 – Launch, Instrumentation & Polish: Make it stable, measurable, and ready for real users.

Let’s break that down.

Week 1: Discovery & Architecture

The first week is about alignment and constraints, not writing heroic amounts of code.

• Day 1–2 – Deep Discovery

  • Clarify who the first 50–100 users are and what “success” looks like for them.
  • Map the primary user journey on a whiteboard—from “first touch” to “aha moment”.
  • ruthlessly cut everything that doesn’t contribute to that journey in the first month.

• Day 3–4 – Product Scope & Acceptance Criteria

  • Turn the user journey into a tiny set of high-confidence user stories.
  • Define what “done” means for each story (screens, inputs, outputs, and edge cases that actually matter).
  • Decide what will be faked, stubbed, or handled manually in v1.

• Day 5 – Technical Architecture & Setup

  • Choose a battle-tested stack (for us: Next.js / Astro, TypeScript, a managed DB, and modern auth).
  • Set up the repo, CI/CD, environments, and basic observability from day one.
  • Implement the skeleton: routing, base layout, design system tokens, and a simple “hello world” deployment.

By the end of Week 1, the team shares a single, clear picture of what we’re building and how it hangs together technically.

Week 2: Build the Core Loop

Week 2 is where the app starts to feel real—but we still keep scope brutally small.

We focus on the one core loop that proves the product’s value. For example:

• For a travel planner: search → generate trip → save itinerary.
• For a marketplace: create listing → discover listing → start transaction.
• For an AI content tool: input prompt → generate output → refine → export.

Our rules for Week 2:

• No “nice-to-haves”: if it doesn’t directly support the core loop, it goes into a parking lot.
• Vertical slices over horizontal layers: we deliver end-to-end flows (UI → API → DB) one by one, so we can demo real value early.
• Tight feedback loop: we ship to a staging environment daily and review with the client asynchronously using short Loom videos or live demos.

By the end of Week 2, a user should be able to go from zero to “aha” in a single session—even if some edges are rough.

Week 3: Secondary Features & Reliability

With the core loop working, we invest in the things that make the product usable in the real world.

Typical Week 3 work includes:

• Accounts & Access

  • Basic authentication and onboarding flows.
  • Roles or permissions if they’re absolutely necessary for the first cohort.

• Admin & Operations

  • Lightweight admin views for managing users, content, or support.
  • Tools the team needs to debug issues without calling the engineers every time.

• Resilience & Edge Cases

  • Handling the 10–20% of flows that would otherwise break in front of real users.
  • Meaningful error states, empty states, and retry strategies.

• Testing & Hardening

  • Smoke tests across all critical paths.
  • Monitoring for slow queries, failed jobs, and error spikes.

By the end of Week 3, the product stops feeling like a prototype and starts behaving like a tool people can rely on.

Week 4: Launch, Measurement & Polish

The final week is about making the MVP easy to discover, understand, and iterate on.

• Performance & UX Polish

  • Optimize critical pages for Core Web Vitals and perceived speed.
  • Compress images, remove unnecessary JS, and tighten up slow interactions.

• SEO & Discovery

  • Ensure clean URLs, meta tags, Open Graph images, and basic schema where it matters.
  • Generate a sitemap and robots configuration so search engines can do their job.

• Analytics & Product Insights

  • Instrument the core loop with product analytics and basic funnels.
  • Track key events like “signed up”, “completed core action”, and “returned within 7 days”.

• Launch Checklist & Rollout

  • Finalize environment variables, backups, and access policies.
  • Decide on a rollout: private beta, invite-only, or public launch.
  • Ship to production and get the first real users onboard.

Once the MVP is live, we don’t celebrate the code—we celebrate the first real usage data and the questions it unlocks for version two.

What Makes This Work in Practice

Shipping in four weeks is not about working 16-hour days. It’s about stacking the right advantages:

1. Opinionated Boilerplates

   • We reuse a battle-tested foundation: auth, database, design tokens, and basic components are ready on day one.
   • That leaves more time for the parts that are unique to your product.

2. Type-Safe, Modern Stack

   • End-to-end TypeScript, strict linting, and schema-driven APIs let us move quickly without creating a mess.
   • We catch entire classes of bugs before they hit production.

3. Asynchronous, Transparent Communication

   • Daily async updates, short demos, and shared dashboards keep everyone on the same page without endless meetings.
   • Scope changes are documented and trade-offs are explicit.

4. Relentless Focus on the First 30 Days

   • We intentionally design for learning, not for a hypothetical V3.
   • If a feature doesn’t help us learn in the first month, it waits.

Closing Thoughts

An MVP is not a smaller version of your “final product”. It’s a focused experiment that asks: “Is there something real here?”

With a disciplined four-week process, a modern stack, and a team that knows where to cut, you can answer that question quickly—without burning your roadmap or your budget.

If you’re sitting on an idea and want it live in front of real users in a month, this is exactly the playbook we’d run together. Learn more about our AI MVP Studio or get in touch to discuss your project.