Launch a SaaS in two weeks.
From one sentence to first paying customer, on a single canvas. No tab sprawl, no planning theater.
This guide is what I actually do when I ship a new product. It assumes the idea exists and the wallet is open. It does not assume an existing codebase. Two weeks is the upper bound — most of the steps below collapse to hours, not days, once you stop switching tools.
Day 1 — Plan in one sentence.
Open a new Hilla board. Type the product idea as a single sentence in the AI prompt. Be specific about the customer ("freelance interior designers") and the action you want to charge for ("send branded mood boards to clients").
Hilla returns a starting board: hero positioning, the first three product surfaces, a billing model, and a 14-day shipping plan. Drag and edit. Delete what you don't believe.
Day 2 — Cut the scope in half.
Re-read every card. For each one, ask whether the first ten customers care about it. If you can't say yes out loud, move it to a 'Later' frame.
What's left is the v1 you ship. Anything ambitious that survived the cut becomes a milestone card — not a launch blocker.
Day 3 — Wire the surface.
Use the Build column to claim the first surface: landing page, app shell, auth. Use the CLI (`hilla card complete <id>`) if you live in the terminal; otherwise drag the cards across the canvas.
Plug a Vercel widget into the board. Now your deploy state is on the same canvas as the cards. You're not switching tabs to know if the build is green.
Days 4–8 — Build and connect.
Work through the Build column in order. Add a Stripe widget the moment you have the first checkout surface. Add a PostHog widget the moment the app loads in a browser.
When a card is done, mark it shipped. Hilla rolls those into a daily shipped digest you can read at the end of the day or copy-paste into a build-in-public thread.
Day 9 — Pricing + checkout.
Pick a single plan. One number. No tiers yet.
Wire Stripe via the integrations page. Confirm an end-to-end purchase from your own card. Refund yourself. Note both events on the board.
Days 10–12 — Launch week prep.
Create a launch-week frame: landing-page copy, demo recording, post draft, email sequence, deliverability check, Hacker News title test, Product Hunt slot.
Each card has a deadline against the launch date. Hilla nudges anything that slips.
Day 13 — Soft-ship.
Open the door to ten people in your network. Watch them sign up live. Fix anything that confuses them inside the first 24 hours.
Update the cards as they break. The plan is allowed to change — it's a live board, not a frozen doc.
Day 14 — Public launch.
Post. Reply for the entire day. Watch the Stripe widget on the canvas. Watch the PostHog signups widget on the canvas. Track issues on the same surface.
When the dust clears, archive the launch frame. Open a new one called Week 1: retention. Keep the loop running.
Two weeks is a target. The point isn't the calendar — it's that the entire company exists on one canvas while you ship. The day you stop opening Hilla is the day the plan starts dying.
Run this on your own canvas. 25 free credits, no card.
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