Why I build products in 30 days

Every product I ship, mine or a client's, gets the same deadline: 30 days. People assume this is about speed. It is about honesty.

Deadlines are design tools

Give a first version six months and it will find six months of work. Give it 30 days and every feature has to fight for its place. The deadline does the prioritising that meetings pretend to do.

What 30 days does to scope

It forces the question I ask on every Launch CTO call: what is the one thing this product does? The second feature does not get built on faith. It gets built when real users ask for it, which is a much better reason.

The doubt window

Motivation has a half-life. A founder who is excited in January and still unlaunched in June is not the same founder. Ship inside the excitement and the product gets your best energy. Wait, and the doubt starts doing the product decisions.

Where this comes from

I learned this on my own products before I ever sold it as a service. The first version of everything I have built embarrassed me a little, and shipping it anyway was the right call every single time. I wrote about that in Ship it ugly.

30 days is not a stunt. It is the deadline that keeps a product about its users instead of its builder.