The 14-day kickoff: what actually happens
We promise a 14-day kickoff. Here's the day-by-day breakdown of what happens between signing the contract and your first working sprint.
Zelvante Team
Engineering
Most software firms quote 4-8 weeks to 'ramp up' a team. We promise 14 days from signed contract to first working sprint. Prospects regularly ask if that's real. It is. Here's exactly what happens.
Day 1-2: Squad selection
We maintain a bench of senior engineers, designers, and growth marketers specifically so we don't have to recruit from scratch when you're ready. On day 1, your Account Director reviews your project requirements and selects 3-5 candidates from the bench. You interview them on day 2. No 'we'll get back to you in a week' — you meet your actual team before the contract is finalized.
Every engineer on our bench has 7+ years of production experience. We don't staff juniors to pad headcount.
Day 3-5: Environment setup
While you're signing the final paperwork, the squad is setting up: repository access, CI/CD pipelines, staging environments, design files, project management tools. By day 5, the entire squad has access to everything they need and has run a 'hello world' deployment to your infrastructure.
- Day 3: GitHub/GitLab access, branch protection rules, CI/CD pipeline
- Day 4: Staging environment, database, third-party API keys
- Day 5: Design files (Figma), project board (Linear/Jira), Slack channel
Day 6-10: Discovery and architecture
The squad runs a structured discovery: technical audit of your existing codebase, architecture design for the new work, and a sprint plan for the first 4 weeks. This isn't a sales discovery — it's engineers looking at your actual code and making actual architectural decisions.
“We came in expecting a 6-week discovery phase. Zelvante had our architecture designed and the first feature shipped in 14 days.”
Day 11-13: First sprint planning
The squad plans the first sprint: what gets built, who builds what, definition of done. You get a written sprint plan with specific deliverables and dates. No vague 'we'll work on the MVP' — you see exactly which features ship in week 1, week 2, week 3.
Day 14: First sprint starts
Sprint 1 begins. Daily standups, weekly demos, biweekly reviews. You see working code in your staging environment by end of week 1. Not slides. Not wireframes. Working code.
14 days is the standard. If you need faster, ask — we sometimes have same-week capacity for urgent projects.
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