Launch in 4 Weeks

You are doing your best trying to get your product launched

You have a list of things you want to get done with your product, you have a developer(s) working on it but it’s taking forever to get your product launched. Without strong technical leadership, it can take a long time to develop and deploy anything. Here’s what often happens:

  • Develop teams change frequently

  • Rewrites and architecture changes based on opinions from different advisors and developers

  • The founders don’t have a strong sense if the code being delivered is good quality

  • The founders don’t know if excuses from the developers are reasonable or not

  • Developers intentionally (or unintentionally) take advantage of the founder to run up the billable hours.

With the “Launch in Four Weeks” service, I will build a roadmap to figure out how to get your product out the door in as short a four weeks. How is this possible?

Why your product launch is taking so long

First, let’s look at the root issues for why development can take forever. It really only boils down to a few possibilities:

  • A massive backlog of features - Founders are excited about their product and want to include everything on their “dream list” into the first release. This list gets progressively larger. Instead it needs to be scoped into a true Minimal Viable Product (MVP) with an infrastructure to weekly release features post-launch.

  • Complex features - The features are needlessly complex and with some minor compromises that might not be obvious to someone non-technical, can be completed far faster.

  • Perfect code - Developers often want their code as a reflection on them personally. This results in wanting their code to be perfect before releasing. While noble, perfection isn’t the aim for a startup, it’s getting traction. Working with the developer to understand what is “good enough” will help them more forward with confidence.

  • Ready for scale - Every founder has high expectations that their first version will land 100k+ users. While it may happen, likely your application will need a rewrite to accommodate those users. Instead, building something to get your first 1000 users should be the focus. Almost any type of technical architecture can manage 1000 users so don’t worry about scale at this early stage.

  • Terrible developers - Maybe they aren’t good at coding, or maybe they are intentionally running up your bill or maybe they ghosted you leaving you high and dry with a half baked product.

What you get

I’ve worked through all of the above issues with different teams. Regardless of the reason, I will work with you to get things back on track to get you releasing in 4 weeks. Here’s what I will do for you:

  • Help you understand which of the above are the root causes for delay in development

  • Review your entire backlog with you to figure out what are the most critical things to get done for release and what can get pushed off until later

  • Review the work done so far to see how robust it is and if it is robust enough for launch

  • Simplify the technical design of your key features by reducing the scope or specifying using external APIs and libraries to get it done

  • Prioritize your backlog so your developers work on the most important features first

  • Whip your development team into shape to get them laser focused on the most important things

  • A security audit to be sure there are no obvious challenges

  • Look into my existing network or new network to find someone to bolster the team if needed.

How it works

  1. Call with CEO to figure out what their core problems are

  2. Survey of code, backlog, delivery history through Github, infrastructure/deployment process

  3. Architecture review including database, devops infrastructure, ability to scale

  4. Analytics review (Google Analytics and/or Mixpanel)

  5. Interview the key members of the exec team and development team to surface issues

  6. Backlog review and prioritization

  7. One page action plan on how to realistically release in 4 weeks

If the delivered plan looks good, we move forward with me acting as the Fractional CTO until the product is launched (included in this price). If the plan isn’t something you like, you get 100% of your money back.

Terms

  • Cost is $10,500 USD

  • Paid 50% up front and 50% after the plan is proposed to begin execution

  • If you don’t like the proposed 4-week plan for any reason you can ask for 100% of your money back before we start executing.

  • During execution, things change beyond everyone’s control so it may not actually be able to get released in 4 weeks but it will be best effort.

  • We need to agree on what a “launch” is up front to know when we are done. Post launch, if you still want to work together, we can work together under a new, Fractional CTO service on a monthly basis.

  • Paid 100% in advance before work starts