Every founder asks the same question: can you ship my MVP in 6 weeks? At Xenotix Labs (https://www.xenotixlabs.com) we've shipped 30+ products across D2C, edtech, fintech, healthtech, SaaS, and marketplaces. This is the playbook we actually use when the answer is yes.
Week 0: the pre-work you can't skip
Ninety percent of MVPs that slip do so because week 0 was compressed. We block a hard 3-day pre-sprint before we touch code. Three outputs: a clickable Figma prototype of the happy path (not every screen—just the demo flow a founder would show an investor), a data model sketch on paper or Miro, and a one-page "what this MVP does not do" list. The last one is the most important. Founders change their minds three times in week 2; we show them the don't-do list and ask "still?"
Weeks 1–2: the vertical slice
We do a thin vertical slice first: one flow from UI to DB and back. For a Flutter app that's usually "sign up, see home, tap one card, see detail, go back." For a Next.js web product it's the login plus dashboard shell. Why: this forces every infrastructure decision up front. Auth. State management. API contract. DB migrations. Deployment pipeline. If any of these wobble, we'd rather find out in week 1 than week 5.
Our default stack for this slice: Flutter with Riverpod for mobile, Next.js with App Router for web, Node.js with Fastify on the backend, PostgreSQL with Prisma for data, Clerk or custom JWT for auth, and a single GitHub Actions workflow deploying to AWS (ECS Fargate for backend, S3+CloudFront for web, app stores for Flutter). This stack has gotten us to production in under 3 weeks when everything breaks right.
Weeks 3–4: horizontal fill-in
With the slice proven, we add screens and endpoints in parallel. This is the part that looks most like a sprint. Two rules: every PR merges behind a feature flag, and every endpoint ships with one happy-path Playwright test. Feature flags mean we can demo the product weekly without waiting for everything to be perfect. Tests mean we don't regress fundamentals while velocity is high.
Design handoff: we don't wait for final pixel-perfect designs. We build to a working palette and spacing system (Tailwind on web, custom ThemeData on Flutter) and swap in final assets in week 5 when Figma is locked. Founders worry about this but it saves 10-15 days.
Week 5: the ugly week
Bugs. Payment integration. Email templates. Edge cases you forgot existed. OAuth flows with Apple that break because of a subdomain typo. This week exists in every MVP we ship. Plan for it.
Our trick: we hold a 48-hour "bug bash" where one engineer dogfoods the app as a non-technical user for two straight days and files every annoyance. We fix the top-voted ones. The bottom half get deferred to post-launch.
Week 6: ship
We hard-lock scope on Monday of week 6. Tuesday is the release candidate. Wednesday is stakeholder demo. Thursday is prod deployment. Friday is monitoring. We've never missed a launch when the founder let us hold the scope lock.
What breaks the 6-week timeline
Three things, in order of frequency. (1) Scope creep disguised as "just one more screen." (2) Founder co-builds with us in week 4 instead of decision-making; this doubles every step. (3) Third-party integrations that we didn't identify in week 0 (payment gateways in emerging markets, KYC APIs with async approvals, WhatsApp Business API onboarding queues).
Products we've shipped this way
Veda Milk: D2C dairy subscription platform (Country Delight clone) on Flutter + Next.js + Node.js + RabbitMQ. Cricket Winner: real-time cricket scoring plus opinion trading on Kafka + WebSockets. Legal Owl: LegalTech super-app with 7 user personas and live lawyer video calls. Growara: AI WhatsApp automation on Meta Business API plus LLM. 7S Samiti: offline-first AI tutor for rural India. ClaimsMitra: insurance survey platform with 114+ REST APIs.
Hiring us
If you're a founder with an MVP to ship, we'd love to talk. We're a team of full-stack engineers from NITs and IITs building end-to-end from Figma to production. Flutter, Next.js, Node.js on AWS. Visit https://www.xenotixlabs.com or email leadgeneration@xenotix.co.in.
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