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MVP in 6 weeks: a Founder's playbook

7 min read · January 22, 2026

The Purpledot playbook for shipping a paid-user-ready MVP in 6 weeks — scope, team shape, weekly milestones and pitfalls.

Six weeks is the right window for an MVP. Less, and you ship a prototype. More, and you're already past product-market fit risk and building on assumptions.

Week 1 — Scope & spine: strip to one job-to-be-done, one user role, one happy path. Wireframe in Figma, validate with 5 target customers before a single line of code.

Weeks 2–3 — Build the core: auth, payments, the JTBD flow, and a basic admin. Hard cap on features.

Week 4 — Integrate: analytics, error reporting, transactional email, App Store assets.

Week 5 — Polish: copy pass, empty states, edge cases, accessibility sweep, performance budget.

Week 6 — Launch: TestFlight + Play Console internal track, 20 beta users, daily fixes, public launch on Friday.

Team shape: 1 PM, 1 designer, 2 engineers, 0.5 QA. Anything bigger slows you down in 6 weeks.

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