How long from idea to product

I have been running Micro SaaS HQ a community/ecosystem for SaaS founders. I see most founders launching from 3-12 months, and the duration for generating income can vary greatly.

Well, it took me about a month to build the first prototype for uibun.dev - then about a month more to build the product. Building the landing page took a couple of hours (thanks to the visual editor that I built)

Depends on the scope of the project and the quality you wish to achieve. I've had clients start on a new project, hire me to design it, and launch it even before I was fully done. On the other hand, there have been clients who took over a year before their alpha went live. Despite popular opinion, the clients who took more time often had more success. Which made me believe MVPs really are only meant for micro products tackling very simple problems. Otherwise, your best bet is to take some more time. Medium fast, medium pretty is my advice.

I've spent 2 months discovering the most pressing problem and validating my solution,
1 month building a prototype,
2 weeks gathering feedback and applying it,
now I'm about to get my first customer, fingers crossed.

But it depends on the product, of course. A $20/mo tool for indie hackers shouldn't take more than 2 weeks to validate and 2 weeks to launch to a private group of users. You can always buy a domain, integrate Stripe, implement password reset, and add many other boring things later after you make your solution perfect for those customers you already have.

Difficult to say, I think there are four main factors: the nature of the product, market dynamics, available resources, and the development approach.
I launched my first project, StartIndie (dotcom), after one year of development due to limited time. I am still waiting for my first customer.

There is no rule but with no-code tools you can do it in 1 or 2 weeks. No more than that!

It is a well-known advice but really there is a lot of value in shortening your time-to-market as much as possible. Successful products often pre-launched buggy beta versions several times before to meet traction.

Having this in mind, I believe that 95% of products can and should be launched in 3 weeks.

Of course, it is easy to say, hard to do.

I think every product is different. Your MVP probably will be too fat even if you think you're cutting it down. I would figure out what makes sense for your product and set that as your deadline. Then when you're 3 weeks out from that deadline cut or hide everything that isnt working yet and launch what you have.

That's your real mvp.

Because unless you're insane you built all the most critical features first anyway. The launch will take some time to get approval on a platform or set up ads or whatever you need to do.

So launch what you have.

Then while that launch process is going on, you can finish the remaining features and now you have something to talk about. And you will find that having those features on launch day wouldn't have made any difference.

The second part is where we are now. Getting people to know about the product. Building our case. Then converting to paying subscribers.

My most successful projects have been the ones where it started generating revenue almost immediately. Like a week or two.

Failed project linger and don’t even make anything.

It depends on a lot of factors. An agency can be profitable in a couple months if you have the right connections and tons of experience in that area. It depends on how good you are at marketing/sales , do you have an unmatched advantage that your competitors cannot compete with etc..

My B2B marketing gallery is making $0/m and its been 4 months, as it's some thing that is monetized based on ads from the number of active users on my site, which i'm still building up.

I am running a design subscription agency https://www.pentaclay.com

The idea came 5 months ago, however, the market research, viability, and launching of the website took almost 3.5 months.

After launching I spent some dimes in marketing and tried so many ways to market my service.

As a result, I got a couple of clients and generated income.

For SaaS/APP the graph can be different, but you need to launch the MVP asap.

"Simultaneously, I've listened to founders who took half a year to release their product." This is huge survivorship bias, because you don't hear from those who spend half a year and fail (which is 99% of them)

20 days from idea to first paid customer. https://presspulse.ai

I think it varies on the "type" of product. Meaning if it's something like an AI wrapper, I do not believe it should take too long, as long as you are constantly seeking customer feedback. Launching as fast as you can is the moral of the story.

It really depends. I started working on my last side project 4 months ago and launched one month ago. Is it working? Yes! Is it income-generating, sadly no. I think you have to be super luck to start make income in few months after launching your product.

What problem are you solving?

If I were to fall in love with an idea I know very little about, I'd spend the first weeks just talking to people and designing. Not coding, not even prototyping. What for?

If I knew the problem already (maybe because it's a pain I already have), and said problem can be solved, say, with a simple tool, I'd spend a weekend on it and see where that takes me.

Depends on many things: market, icp, idea, etc.
You might get lucky and be able to generate revenues within a few weeks, or you have something larger, or more complex, or your assumptions are wrong, and then it simply takes longer.

Depends on complexity