We used to sell three-month engagements. They were more profitable on paper and easier to staff. They also produced our only two genuinely unhappy clients, and both times the trouble started in exactly the same place: week six.
Not because anything broke. Because nothing did. Week six is where a long project stops feeling urgent to everyone involved.
What actually goes wrong
Long projects fail in slow motion, and always through the same three doors.
- The scope gets amended, politely. Nobody asks for a redesign. They ask for "just one more state" eleven times.
- The decision-maker drifts away. The founder who was in every call in week one is now forwarding screenshots to someone who was not.
- The team stops feeling the deadline. A date twelve weeks out is not a deadline, it is a weather forecast.
Six weeks, and the scope bends
The fix was not working faster. It was fixing the date and letting the scope move instead. We now sell six-week blocks with a hard end and a ranked list of what goes in. When something new arrives mid-flight, it does not extend the date — it pushes the lowest-ranked item out.
A fixed date with a flexible scope ships. A fixed scope with a flexible date negotiates.
Clients push back on this exactly once, usually in the first week. Then something gets cut, the site launches on the promised day, and the cut item turns out to have been optional all along. That conversation has happened often enough that we now have it up front.
What six weeks buys you
Discovery in week one. Design through weeks two to four, with a live link from the first Friday. Build and hardening in five and six. Everything the client sees is real and clickable by the second week, which means the arguments happen while they are still cheap.
Bigger products obviously take longer than six weeks. They just do not take one six-week block — they take three of them, each with its own end date and its own shippable result. The rhythm is the point, not the total.