Six weeks, not six months
Where the four months goes in a normal agency engagement, and how we remove it.
The standard agency timeline for a v1 product is six months. We deliver in six weeks. The difference isn't AI. It's structure.
Here's where the six months goes in a normal agency engagement:
- Weeks 1–4: kickoff, stakeholder interviews, "discovery."
- Weeks 5–8: strategy decks, brand workshops, more discovery.
- Weeks 9–12: design. UX wireframes pass through three rounds of internal review before reaching the client.
- Weeks 13–20: engineering handoff. Engineers receive a Figma file and translate it from scratch.
- Weeks 21–24: QA, revisions, launch.
The work that actually moves the product takes maybe four weeks of that. The rest is friction: between strategy and design, between design and engineering, between agency and client. Each handoff loses context, requires a new round of explanation, introduces lag. The senior people who showed up to the pitch are not the people on the project after week two.
We removed the handoffs.
One senior designer who can read and write code. One senior engineer who can read a Figma file and has opinions about typography. They work in the same Figma file and the same Cursor workspace. The design phase and the build phase are not two phases; they are the same phase. The prototype is the design. The design is the prototype.
That structural choice is what makes six weeks possible. AI tooling (Cursor, Claude, the GitHub Copilot stack) accelerates it further. We implement at roughly twice the speed we did three years ago. But without the structural change, the best AI tooling in the world still gets you a four-month build, because the lag isn't in the typing.
The other thing six weeks requires: a senior operator on the founder side who can make decisions in days, not weeks. We don't take projects where every decision needs a steering committee. The studio works because both sides move fast.
This isn't a claim that everything should be built in six weeks. Some products genuinely need a year. Most v1 products do not. The shape of a v1 (wedge feature, narrow audience, a clear thing it does well) is exactly the kind of work that compresses cleanly when the team is small and senior. You should be deeply skeptical of any agency telling you a v1 needs six months.