70 Days to Launch: A Startup's Guide to a Minimum Viable Product

Published on: June 17, 2024

The 70-day (10-week) cycle is the sweet spot for startup agility. It's long enough to build something meaningful yet short enough to maintain momentum and focus. This structured approach forces you to concentrate on what truly matters for your MVP, eliminating feature creep and unnecessary complexity.

Why 70 Days Works

Research shows that 70 days is the optimal timeframe for maintaining team focus and delivering tangible results. It's long enough to achieve significant milestones but short enough to prevent analysis paralysis. This timeframe creates a sense of urgency that drives productivity while allowing for meaningful progress.

Phase 1: Discovery & Planning (Days 1-14)

Begin with intensive market research and problem validation. Identify your target audience's pain points through interviews and surveys. Define your unique value proposition and create detailed user personas. By day 7, you should have a clear problem-solution fit. The remaining week is for creating user stories and a prioritized feature list focusing on must-have features only.

Phase 2: Design & Development (Days 15-56)

Split this phase into three 2-week sprints. The first sprint focuses on creating clickable prototypes and validating them with potential users. The next two sprints are for development, with each sprint ending with a functional increment. Adopt a test-driven development approach and implement continuous integration to catch issues early.

Phase 3: Testing & Launch (Days 57-70)

Allocate the first week for rigorous testing, including usability testing with real users. Gather feedback and make critical adjustments. The final week is for preparing your go-to-market strategy, setting up analytics, and soft launching to a small group of early adopters.

Key to Success: The core principle of an MVP is to maximize validated learning with minimal effort. A 70-day constraint forces you to focus on the essentials. Your goal isn't perfection; it's about creating the fastest path to user feedback. Define the single most important problem your product solves and build only the features necessary to address it.