How long does MVP scoping take?

10 days from intro call to signed slices: days 1–2 extraction, days 3–5 slice planning, days 6–8 fixed proposal, days 9–10 review and sign-off. No hourly billing at any stage.

What do you need from founders to start scoping?

A 30-minute call and whatever exists — notes, decks, Figma, spreadsheets. We turn that into user stories, architecture, and priced slices. No PRD required.

What happens when scope changes mid-build?

New asks go to the backlog, not into the active slice. Each Friday demo is a kill-or-continue checkpoint, so changes get priced as new slices instead of silently inflating the current one.

Fixed-price — what if a slice takes longer than estimated?

That's our risk, not yours. Slices are small enough (3–10 days) that a miss is contained, and riskiest-first ordering means surprises surface in week one, not week six.

The 10-Day MVP Scoping Playbook

Most MVPs don’t fail in engineering. They fail in scoping — too many workflows, premature infrastructure, features without evidence. This is the exact 10-day process we run before writing production code.

Days 1–2: Extraction call

One 30-minute call. Goal: a single must-win workflow and 3–5 user stories that serve it. Everything else goes to a written non-goals list on the spot. If the founder can’t name the one workflow that matters, that’s day 1’s work — not day 30’s regret.

Output: must-win workflow, story list, non-goals list.

Days 3–5: Slice planning

Each story becomes 1–2 vertical slices (UI + API + data + AI, priced as a unit). Slices are ordered by risk, not convenience — auth, AI quality, third-party integrations first. A typical MVP is 3–5 slices across 4–8 weeks.

Output: ordered slice list with owners and rough sizes.

Days 6–8: Fixed proposal

Every slice gets a fixed price and ship date. The founder approves slice one to start; the rest when confident. No hourly billing, no open-ended estimates.

Output: proposal with per-slice price, date, and acceptance criteria.

Days 9–10: Review and freeze

Walk through the proposal together, adjust once, then freeze. Post-freeze changes become new slices — priced, not smuggled in.

Output: signed scope, kickoff date, staging access.

The artifacts

MVP Scope Worksheet — the template: user, problem, must-win workflow, non-goals, risks, acceptance, launch metric.
Slice acceptance criteria — each slice lists what “demoable” means before work starts.
Backlog — every deferred idea, visible, so “no” feels safe.

Why this works

Small slices make failure cheap, demos make progress visible, and non-goals make “no” a decision instead of a fight. Founders never wonder what they’re paying for — they approved it slice by slice.

See it applied: Build vs Buy: Internal Tools used this process, and the CRM case study shows slices shipping to a 95% workflow reduction.