SaaS MVP in 2 Weeks: What You Actually Need to Launch

Most SaaS MVPs Take Too Long Because They Build Too Much

The average first-time SaaS founder spends three to six months building their MVP. They set up authentication from scratch, wire up subscription billing, build an admin panel, design a marketing site, implement email notifications, and handle edge cases for features nobody has asked for yet. By the time they launch, they have burned through their runway and their motivation.

Here is the uncomfortable truth: most of that work is commodity infrastructure. Authentication, billing, user settings, team management — these are not what make your SaaS unique. They are table stakes. Every SaaS needs them, and they all work roughly the same way. Spending months building them from zero is like hand-building a car engine before you have figured out where you want to drive.

A focused MVP can launch in two weeks. Here is exactly what you need — and what you do not.

The Non-Negotiable Features

Your SaaS MVP needs five things on day one. Everything else is a distraction.

1. Authentication

Users need to sign up, log in, and stay logged in. That is it. You need email and password auth at minimum. OAuth (Google, GitHub) is a nice addition that reduces friction, but it is not required for launch.

What you do not need yet: multi-factor authentication, passwordless magic links, SAML SSO, or enterprise single sign-on. These are features you add when enterprise customers ask for them — not before you have your first ten users.

2. Subscription Billing

You need to charge money. If you are not charging from day one, you are not validating whether people will actually pay — and that is the entire point of an MVP.

Integrate Stripe. Offer two or three pricing tiers. Handle upgrades, downgrades, and cancellations. Make sure failed payments do not silently break access. Stripe's documentation and libraries make this manageable in a few days, but wiring it cleanly into your auth system and database is where the complexity lives.

3. The Core Feature

This is the one thing your SaaS does that no one else does — or does better. It is the reason someone would pay you. Every SaaS MVP should have exactly one core feature, executed well. Not three half-baked features. Not a "platform." One thing.

If you are building a project management tool, your core feature might be a task board. If you are building an analytics dashboard, it might be a single chart that answers a specific question better than existing tools. Define it, build it, and resist the urge to add "just one more thing."

4. A Dashboard

After logging in, users need somewhere to land. A dashboard gives them an overview of their account — their data, their usage, their subscription status. It does not need to be fancy. A clean layout with a sidebar, a main content area, and a settings page covers 90 percent of SaaS use cases.

5. A Landing Page

You need a public-facing page that explains what your product does, who it is for, and how much it costs. A hero section, a feature list, a pricing table, and a call-to-action. That is it. Do not build a blog, a changelog, a documentation site, or an about page before you have paying customers.

What You Should Skip (For Now)

Here is a list of features that are important eventually but will sink your two-week timeline if you try to include them:

Team management and roles: Start with single-user accounts. Add teams when someone asks for it.
Email notification system: Send transactional emails (welcome, password reset, payment receipts) and nothing else. Marketing emails, digests, and in-app notification centers come later.
Mobile responsiveness: Make sure it does not look broken on a phone, but do not spend days perfecting the mobile experience. Most B2B SaaS usage happens on desktop.
Analytics and reporting: Use a third-party tool like PostHog or Plausible for your own analytics. Do not build a reporting module for your users until you know what metrics they care about.
API and integrations: Build the product first. Add the API when developers ask for it.
Custom domains, white-labeling, and branding options: These are enterprise features. You are not selling to enterprises yet.

The Two-Week Timeline

Here is a realistic breakdown for a solo developer or a two-person team:

Days 1 to 2: Set up the project. Choose your stack, initialize the repo, configure the database, and deploy a blank app to production. Yes, deploy on day one. Continuous deployment from the start eliminates the "it works on my machine" phase.
Days 3 to 4: Build authentication. Sign up, log in, log out, password reset. Connect it to your database. Protect your app routes.
Days 5 to 6: Integrate Stripe. Create products, set up checkout, handle webhooks, sync subscription status to your database.
Days 7 to 10: Build your core feature. This gets the most time because it is the most important. Four days of focused development should produce a functional, if minimal, version of your key value proposition.
Days 11 to 12: Build the dashboard and settings pages. Wire up the navigation. Make sure everything connects.
Days 13 to 14: Build the landing page, test the full user flow end to end, fix the critical bugs, and launch.

The Shortcut: Start With a Boilerplate

The timeline above assumes you are building everything from scratch. But here is the thing — authentication, billing, dashboards, and landing pages are solved problems. Every SaaS needs them, and they all look roughly the same.

Starting with a SaaS starter kit or boilerplate can compress those first six days into a single afternoon. You get a working app with auth, Stripe, a dashboard layout, and a landing page template out of the box. Your two weeks become two weeks of focused work on your core feature instead of infrastructure.

This is exactly what we offer at Refitted. Our SaaS Starter Kit ships with authentication, Stripe subscription billing, a user dashboard, and an admin panel — all wired together with Next.js, TypeScript, and Supabase. You get a production-ready foundation and start building your actual product on day one.

Launch Ugly, Learn Fast

Your MVP does not need to be beautiful. It needs to be functional enough that real users can experience your core value proposition and decide whether it is worth paying for. Every day you spend polishing pixels before launch is a day you are not learning from customers.

Two weeks is not a lot of time. But it is enough to put something real in front of real people — and that is worth more than six months of building in isolation.