Ship your first SaaS MVP
A live MVP with real users, payments wired up, and your first paying customer — shipped in about 6 weeks.
One-time payment — yours to keep forever
Included with every copy
- Your own copy — keep it forever
- Gets better over time — free updates included
- Run it on web and mobile
- Invite a partner to go through it with you — you share the same progress
- The playbook's community — ask questions, get additions, and see how other buyers improve it, right on the step
Who it's for
Developers sitting on an idea they keep not shipping and want a forcing function to launch.
Who it's NOT for
Non-technical founders needing to hire a team, or anyone wanting a fully polished, scalable product on day one.
About this playbook
Scope ruthlessly, build only what validates the idea, and get to your first paying customer. Written for technical founders who over-engineer and keep not shipping.
What you'll do, step by step
4 phases · 13 steps
Free preview — these steps are open to read in full before you buy.
The MVP that ships is the one you cut down to almost nothing. Your job here is to delete features, not add them.
- 1Write the one-sentence promiseFree preview15 min
One sentence: who your product helps and what result it delivers.
If you can't write it, you don't understand the product well enough to build it yet, and no amount of code fixes that.
You're done when
A single sentence: 'X helps [specific user] achieve [specific result] by [core mechanism].'
Tip
Say it out loud to a friend in your target audience. If they get it instantly and ask how to try it, you're onto something.
Watch out
If your sentence needs an 'and' to list two audiences or two outcomes, you're describing two products. Pick one.
- 2Cut the feature list to the single core loopFree preview1 hour 15 min
Dump every feature you're imagining onto one page, then start deleting. Everything that isn't required for a user to reach the core value once goes in a 'later' pile.
What survives is your loop: the shortest path from sign-up to the moment they get it.
- Brain-dump every feature you can imagine
- Mark the single path from sign-up to first value
- Move everything else to a 'later' list you don't touch
You're done when
A one-page spec of the single core loop, plus a clearly labeled 'later' pile of everything you cut.
Tip
For each feature, ask whether a user can get value on day one without it. If yes, it isn't day-one work.
Watch out
Settings pages, admin dashboards, and multi-step onboarding are almost never MVP. I once watched a founder spend two weeks on a settings screen nobody ever clicked. Cut them first.
Details
What you need first
The ability to build a basic web app, an idea aimed at a reachable audience, and 6 weeks of focused part-time work.
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What people who used it say
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Common questions
About the creator
Freelancer & indie maker. I write the playbooks I wish I'd had when I started earning online.