Estimating Time to Launch a Startup Using The 1,000 Hour Rule

There is this moment in all things creative where you stop and say “What am I doing?”. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing a novel, painting on canvas or coding a website (and some would say starting a relationship).

You start with a fiery passion, the eureka moment where everything looks illuminated, and your legs tremble just thinking that someone else could be doing what you’ve imagined.

You start getting things done, revel at the first sparks of creativity you see unfold before your eyes.  You immediately have the urge to share this excitement with your closest friends and family. You work on it some more, and finally release it to more users, only to find that they don’t understand or get your creation.

What’s next? More work.

The business thinker Malcolm Gladwell has reported that to become a real expert at something, you need to practice it for at least 10,000 hours. That’s eight hours a day for almost three and a half years.

I was thinking about this rule and how it kind of makes sense (even though some critics question Gladwell’s rules) and how it could be applicable for a startup.

I’ve been involved in many startups during my career, both personal and work projects, and going back on the times it took to get stuff from concept to release versions, I can safely state the following rule:

To get any startup project in a launch-ready state, it must have been developed for at least 1,000 hours

The 1,000 hour rule includes three main buckets (and this is considering how “Javascript-heavy” web applications have become):

• About 400 hours will be spent on backend and database development (API/Models/Controllers)
• About 250 hours will be spent on frontend code (Javascript/Ajax)
• About 150 hours will be spent on HTML code and graphic design

For those doing the math, that’s about three developers working eight hour days for forty-one business days (or 8 weeks and one day).

This is where it gets pretty hairy for a one man team (or even worse, for a person who has a 9 to 5) to try to launch something on their own. Even if you think that you’ll be able to do some rapid prototyping, use a framework and work during lunch hours, it would take you about 500 business days (or 100 weeks or 2 years) to have something ready to show the world if you were to work two hours a day per business day.

The most important things to have in mind to go through this marathon:

• Have a mantra (this one can be traced back to Guy Kawasaki). Try to describe your project in a very short sentence, write it in a post-it and stick it in your monitor. Don’t do anything that takes away the project from this mantra.
• Try to find other developers that share your vision and try to divide the work. This one is obvious.
• If you’re not good in some areas, outsource them using tools like Elance.
• Use a good project management software so you can plan what’s next and what’s been done. I use Pivotal Tracker, and it helps me tremendously to know where I’ve been and where I’m going.
• Listen to your Beta testers closely, communicate with them all the time and prepare to shift directions often.

Can it be done? Of course it can. It took me 5 years before one of my projects took off, and I’m about thirty percent done on my new project, which I’ve been passionately coding at night, on the subway and during lunch time.

But the majority of developers wildly guess that things can be done in much less time. My advice? Take it one hour at a time and don’t rush it. You only have one chance to impress the world with your creation.

It better be ready by then.

Photo by Mr.Thomas / CC BY-SA 2.0

Tagged as: 1000 hour rule, launch, Startups