Most agencies go quiet for a month after the deposit clears, then emerge with a plan. We don't. Here is what our first fourteen days actually look like, day by day, so a prospective client knows exactly what they are paying for.
Day 1: Kickoff, and a live staging URL
A 90-minute call. Scope walkthrough. Access handed over: repos, design tools, analytics, domain. By the end of the call the seeded repo is deployed to a staging URL the client can bookmark.
This is not ceremonial. Day one ships a URL because what cannot be shipped on day one cannot be shipped at all.
Day 2: A Loom for every stakeholder
Naman records a ten-minute walkthrough of the scope, the risks, and the stack choice. Abhiraj records one on the positioning, the user, and the key narrative. Both go to every stakeholder the founder wants looped in. No meetings for them. The Loom is the meeting.
Day 3: The kill call
We kill something the founder is attached to. Always. A feature, a flow, a nice-to-have that quietly threatens the timeline. The founder gets to push back, and sometimes wins, but the conversation forces the scope to be honest by end of week one rather than end of month two.
The rule: week one must include one uncomfortable conversation about scope, and it is our job to start it.
Days 4 to 7: The skeleton
By the end of week one the staging URL has the routes, the auth, the data model, and one end-to-end flow that works. Everything else is placeholder. The founder can click through and see the shape of the product.
Day 8: Friday demo
We demo on Fridays, every week, for the whole engagement. Fifteen minutes. What shipped, what's next, what's blocked. Recorded. The founder can share it with investors or a co-founder without scheduling.
Days 9 to 13: Momentum
This is where the habit locks. By Friday of week two, the skeleton has flesh: the first real feature works, not a stub. The design system is live in the product. One non-trivial decision has been escalated and resolved in writing.
Day 14: The retrospective
A 30-minute call. What worked, what didn't, what we'll do differently in week three. The founder's feedback shapes how we run the rest of the engagement. We've changed our rituals mid-engagement more than once based on this call.
Heuristics
- Every week ends on a Friday demo. Every week starts with a written plan. Every day one uncomfortable truth. That rhythm, held, is the whole thing.
- A Loom beats a meeting for any conversation that doesn't require real-time back-and-forth. Async respects the client's calendar.
- The first kill decision happens in week one, not week four. Late scope pruning is the single biggest reason builds slip.
If our cadence and theirs are incompatible, week two is when both sides find out, early enough to do something about it.
Written 2024-10-08 by Abhiraj Sakargaye.