The Real Timeline for Building a SaaS Product (Not the Twitter Version)

Open Twitter on any given day and you'll see someone claim they built a profitable SaaS in 4 weeks. Side project. No code experience. £10k MRR. Life-changing.

I've been building software professionally for 16 years. I've built SaaS products, marketplace platforms, and enterprise tools. And I'm going to tell you what the timeline actually looks like. Not to discourage you — to help you plan so you don't run out of money six months in and wonder what went wrong.

Phase 1: Idea to MVP (3-4 Months)

This is the phase Twitter compresses into "I built it in a weekend." Let me break down what actually happens.

Month 1: Discovery and design

Before any code gets written, you need clarity. What problem are you solving? For whom? How do they currently solve it? What's the core workflow? What's the pricing model?

Then: what's the absolute minimum feature set that lets you test whether anyone wants this? Not "version 1 of the full product." The minimum. For a marketplace, that might be: signup, profiles, search, and booking. No messaging, no reviews, no admin panel.

I spend the first two weeks of any project just talking to the client. When I built DevTrends with Emma Quigley, we spent days mapping out what "developer intelligence" actually meant before I opened an editor. That conversation shaped everything that followed.

Month 2-3: Core build

This is the actual development. For a competent senior developer working full-time, you can build a surprising amount in two months. But "surprising amount" means the core loop working end-to-end, not every feature on your wish list.

TidyLinker took four months from concept to live marketplace. That's a full two-sided marketplace with payments, verification, messaging, and an admin panel. DevTrends — an intelligence platform with 100+ data sources and AI analysis — took 10 days for the initial build, but that was two experienced developers working intensively and it was a different kind of product (data aggregation rather than user-facing workflows).

Most MVPs fall in the 2-4 month range with a single experienced developer. If someone tells you 4 weeks, they're either lying, building something trivially simple, or cutting corners that will cost you later.

Month 4: Polish, testing, and launch prep

The last month is the unglamorous stuff: fixing bugs from testing, setting up monitoring, configuring email delivery, writing error pages, handling edge cases in the payment flow, setting up analytics, creating the marketing site, writing help documentation.

None of this is exciting. All of it is necessary. I've seen founders try to skip this phase and launch a product that crashes on the first day because nobody set up error handling. That's not a good first impression.

Phase 2: Launch to Product-Market Fit (6-12 Months)

This is where Twitter goes quiet. Because this phase isn't photogenic.

Months 4-6: The silence

You launch. You tell everyone you know. You get some signups. And then... not much happens. Traffic trickles. Some people sign up and never come back. Some people try it and hit bugs. Your conversion rate is lower than you expected.

This is completely normal. It does not mean your product is bad. It means you've built v1 and v1 is always wrong in ways you couldn't predict.

The work in this phase is: talk to every user you can. Watch them use the product. Ask why they signed up. Ask why they stopped using it. Ask what they expected that wasn't there. This feedback is worth more than any feature you could build.

Months 6-9: Iteration

Based on what you've learned, you start changing things. The pricing page that confused people gets redesigned. The onboarding flow that lost users at step 3 gets simplified. The feature nobody uses gets removed. The feature everyone asks about gets built.

This is the most important phase of the entire journey and it's the one most founders underbudget for. You need development capacity during this period — someone who can ship changes quickly based on user feedback.

I always tell my clients: budget at least half your development cost for post-launch iteration. If the build costs £30k, plan for another £15k minimum in the 6 months after launch.

Months 9-12: Finding the groove

If you've been listening to users and iterating, somewhere around month 9-12 you start to see patterns. A particular type of user gets real value from the product. A specific use case generates the most engagement. Your messaging starts to resonate with a defined audience rather than a vague "everyone."

Product-market fit isn't a binary moment. It's a gradual dawning. You notice that some users are genuinely upset when things break — that means they rely on your product. You notice word-of-mouth referrals starting. You notice retention improving without you doing anything specific.

Phase 3: Product-Market Fit to Profitability (12-18+ Months)

You've got users who love the product. Now you need enough of them to cover your costs and ideally make money.

Months 12-15: Growth infrastructure

Now the things you skipped in the MVP matter. Proper analytics so you know where users come from. Better onboarding to improve conversion. Content marketing for organic traffic. Maybe integrations with other tools your users already use.

You also start hitting scaling concerns. Not usually technical scaling (your Laravel app on a decent server handles way more traffic than you think) — but operational scaling. Customer support takes more time. Bug reports increase with user count. Feature requests pile up faster than you can evaluate them.

Months 15-18+: The grind

This is where most SaaS products either break through or die. Growth is happening but it's slower than you'd like. Costs are real and ongoing. You're making revenue but maybe not enough to be comfortable.

The founders who succeed in this phase are the ones who planned for it. They knew the timeline. They budgeted accordingly. They didn't bet everything on being profitable in month 3.

Why The Twitter Timeline Is Bullshit

Let me address the "I built a SaaS in 4 weeks" posts directly.

They're survivorship bias. You see the one person who got lucky. You don't see the thousands who tried the same thing and failed.

They're often misleading about what "built" means. A landing page with a Stripe integration isn't a SaaS product. A tool that works for the founder but hasn't been tested by real users isn't validated.

They don't count the full picture. "Built in 4 weeks" doesn't include the 6 months of prior experience in the domain, the existing audience that provides initial users, or the ongoing work after the initial build.

Some are just lies. Revenue screenshots are easy to fake. MRR claims are unverifiable. Take everything on Twitter with a massive grain of salt.

The Real Budget

Here's what the actual timeline looks like in money terms, roughly:

That's a minimum of £30-75k in development and 12-18 months before you're likely to be profitable. If that number makes you uncomfortable, you need to either adjust your expectations or find a way to validate the concept more cheaply before committing.

How To Actually Plan For This

1. Build in phases, not waterfalls. Don't plan the whole product upfront. Plan the MVP, launch it, learn, then plan the next phase based on what you learned.

2. Keep your developer. The worst time to find a new developer is 6 months after launch when you need to iterate quickly. Maintain the relationship with whoever built the MVP.

3. Set milestone-based budgets. Don't allocate all your money to the build. Allocate in chunks: £X for MVP, £Y for first 3 months post-launch, £Z for months 3-6. Each milestone is a decision point where you evaluate whether to continue.

4. Have a day job. The vast majority of successful SaaS founders kept their income source while building. Quitting your job to build a SaaS full-time before you have product-market fit is a massive financial risk.

5. Define your kill criteria. Before you start, decide what would make you stop. "If we haven't got 50 paying users after 12 months, we shut it down." Having this conversation upfront prevents the sunk cost fallacy from draining your bank account.

The real timeline is longer than you want and shorter than you fear. Plan for 18 months. Budget accordingly. And ignore the Twitter posts.

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If any of this resonates, I work with founders directly — from early MVP planning through to scaling. No fluff, just practical engineering.