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SaaS MVP scoping guide
Almost every MVP we are asked to quote is about twice the size it needs to be, and missing two things it cannot ship without. This is how we cut one down.
01
Start from one user doing one job
- Write the single sentence: “a [role] uses this to [job] so that [outcome]”. If you need two sentences, you have two products.
- Pick the one role that pays. Build for them; the other roles can wait or use a spreadsheet for now.
- Describe the before and after of their week. v1 only needs to change that one week.
- Anything that does not serve that sentence goes on a v2 list — a written one, so it stops being argued about.
02
The boring features that are not optional
- Auth, roles and permissions — retrofitting these is a rewrite, not a feature.
- An admin back office. You will need to fix customer data by hand in month one, and doing it in the database is how accidents happen.
- Audit logging on anything involving money, access or a customer record.
- Exports. Every B2B customer eventually asks for their data in a spreadsheet.
- An error-tracking and logging setup, from the first deploy.
03
What to defer with a clear conscience
- Self-serve billing, until you have customers who would use it. Invoicing a handful of early customers by hand is fine and tells you more.
- SSO, until an enterprise asks. Then charge for it.
- A mobile app, unless the job genuinely happens away from a desk.
- Granular permissions beyond the two or three roles that exist today.
- Anything described as “so it scales later” when you have no users yet.
04
Decide the architecture questions that are expensive to change
- Multi-tenant or single-tenant — decide now; converting later is a migration.
- Where the data lives, and in which region, before a customer's procurement asks.
- Whether you need an API on day one, or whether that is a v2 with a real consumer behind it.
- What happens to an account when a customer leaves: deletion, retention, export.
05
Own what you pay for
- Source in your repository from the first commit, not delivered at the end.
- Infrastructure in your cloud account, billed to you.
- A written architecture note and a runbook, so the next engineer is not an archaeologist.
- A fixed price against a written scope, with a named change process for everything else.
If you want a second pair of eyes
We will walk through this with you, free, for thirty minutes.
No deck. Bring the specifics and we will tell you where the risk actually is — including when the answer is that you should not start this project yet.
- GSTIN 09CPBPD9064H1ZS
- Lucknow, India
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