MVP → Launch playbook
3 phases
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Case Study
Startup Under Key: MVP → Launch → Support
End-to-end product delivery. One team from first commit to post-launch support.
0Critical bugs at launch
100%On-time delivery
0
Critical bugs at launch
100%
On-time delivery
Year: 2025Industry: SaaS / StartupTimeline: 5 months
Problem
Founder had a clear vision but no technical co-founder. Needed a single partner to take the product from MVP to launch and then support for 3 months — no handoff to another team, no knowledge loss.
Constraints
- •Fixed scope per phase (MVP → Launch → Support)
- •Weekly demos and async updates
- •Full IP transfer at final milestone
- •3 months post-launch support with SLA
Solution
Ran three phases with clear deliverables and sign-off. Phase 1: MVP (core flows, admin, staging). Phase 2: Launch (prod infra, monitoring, docs, handover). Phase 3: Support (bugfix SLA, small improvements, knowledge base). Same team throughout; no re-onboarding.
Deliverables
- MVP: product + admin + staging deploy
- Launch: production, monitoring, runbooks, IP transfer
- Support: 3-month SLA, incident process, KB
- Weekly demo recordings and progress updates
- Technical documentation and handover session
Artifacts
Documents and deliverables from the project
Support SLA doc
3 months
IP transfer checklist
Full ownership
Verification / Quality gates
6-phase checklist before release
01MVP acceptance
02Staging deployment
03Production deployment
04Monitoring setup
05Documentation handover
06IP transfer complete
All gates passed
6/6
Tech stack
Next.jsNode.jsPostgreSQLRedisVercelAWS
Outcome
Launched on time. Zero critical bugs in first 6 weeks. Founder now runs the product with our docs and 3-month support buffer; extended support contract signed.
Hard parts we solved
MVP Feature Triage: Shipping the Right 20% First
The client's initial feature list had 47 items — enough for 6 months of development. We needed to launch in 6 weeks. We ran a weighted scoring exercise: each feature scored on (1) user impact (validated via 12 user interviews), (2) revenue criticality (would users pay without it?), (3) technical risk (unknowns that could block launch). The result: 9 features made the MVP cut, 14 went to 'Phase 2 backlog,' and 24 were deprioritized as 'nice-to-have.' Three features the client considered essential (social sharing, referral system, advanced analytics) were cut from MVP — and post-launch data confirmed they wouldn't have moved the needle. The MVP launched on time with the features that actually drove first 200 sign-ups.
Zero-Downtime Handover: Codebase Transfer Without Knowledge Loss
After the support phase, the client wanted to bring development in-house. We've seen this go wrong — new team spends 2-3 months just understanding the codebase. We built a handover package: (1) Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) documenting every non-obvious choice and its rationale; (2) a 'developer onboarding guide' that gets a new engineer to first commit in under 4 hours (verified by having a junior developer from the client's team follow it); (3) recorded video walkthroughs of the 5 most complex modules; (4) a 'runbook' for every operational scenario (deploy, rollback, DB migration, incident response); (5) 2-week pair programming overlap where the client's team worked alongside ours on real tickets. The client's in-house team shipped their first independent feature 8 days after handover — without a single question to us.
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