From idea to incorporated venture in 30 days
The Vinyatan calendar: how an idea becomes a company with a product, a brand, paying customers, and a cap table in one month.
Vinyatan is the part of Entatan that starts companies. Not products for partners. Companies we own, staff, and run. The question we get most is how long it takes to go from an idea to a real business. The answer is thirty days for the parts that can be scheduled, and much longer for the parts that cannot.
This playbook is the thirty scheduled days. It is the same calendar for every venture, whether the product is a compliance document tool for contractors or a broadcast system for a live campaign. The idea changes. The calendar does not, and that is what lets us say no quickly and yes with a company behind it.
The bar to start
- A specific buyer we can name by job title and reach this week.
- A painful, repeated task they do today, badly, with a tool that was not built for it.
- A reason the product is possible now and was not two years ago. Usually that reason is a model.
- A path to first revenue that does not depend on a platform's approval or a partnership.
- Someone at Entatan who wants to run it. Ideas without an owner wait.
Five conditions, all required. Most ideas fail the first one. A buyer described as small businesses or operators is not a buyer. A buyer described as the person at a contractor who approves the equipment lease is.
Week one: prove the demand
Week one is conversations and a fake door. We talk to ten people with the job title. Not surveys; calls. We ask what they did last Tuesday and where it hurt. Then we put up a one-page site with a price on it and drive a small amount of paid traffic. If nobody clicks the price, the idea goes back on the shelf with notes. If people click, we call them the same day.
Week one ends with a demand memo: who wants it, what they said in their own words, what they will pay, and the two objections we heard most. The memo is one page. If it takes more than a page, the demand is not clear enough to build against.
Week two: build the thing
Week two is a Build sprint compressed. One outcome: the buyer completes the painful task end to end in our product and gets an artifact they can use today. A document, a report, a page, a file. Everything else is out of scope. Agents do most of the typing. The venture owner does most of the deciding, and the deciding is mostly saying no.
We ship to the week-one callers on day fourteen. Not a beta. The product, with a price, with billing wired up. A beta invites feedback about what is missing. A priced product invites the only feedback that matters, which is whether they pay.
Week three: brand, site, first customers
Week three runs the 72-hour brand system and builds the real site on days fifteen through seventeen. Days eighteen through twenty-one are sales. The venture owner sells personally, on calls, to the people from week one and the people they referred. Agents draft the outreach and the follow-ups. A person closes.
The target is paying customers, plural, before day twenty-one. Sometimes it is three. Sometimes it is one and a signed intent. Fewer than that and week four changes shape: instead of incorporating, we go back to the calls and find out what we misread.
Week four: incorporate and operate
Only now do we incorporate. Forming the entity, opening the accounts, setting the cap table, and putting the first customers on real contracts takes a few days when the questions are already answered. Doing it in week one would have meant paying to form a company for an idea that failed its fake door, and we have watched other people do exactly that.
The rest of week four is operations: a support inbox, billing that reconciles, the first weekly growth review, and the first agent doing something boring like chasing an invoice. By day thirty the venture has a product, a brand, a site, customers, a company, and a cadence. It does not have a roadmap. It has a next sprint.
The venture memo
Every venture has one memo, written on day zero and updated on day thirty. It is the document the day-thirty decision is made against, and the kill criteria are written before anyone is attached to the outcome.
What kills ventures in month one
- Building before calling. Week one exists so week two builds the right thing.
- A buyer nobody can reach. If the ten calls take three weeks to book, the buyer is wrong.
- Free pilots. A price on the page from day three is the whole test.
- Scope. The wedge is one artifact. Two artifacts is two ventures.
- Nobody selling. Agents draft outreach. A person closes, and it has to be the owner.
Day 30
On day thirty we write a one-page review against the kill criteria in the memo. Continue, change, or stop. Ventures that continue get a standing team and a slot in the weekly growth review. Ventures that stop get a short post-mortem, and their code goes into the Forge for parts. Both outcomes were defined on day one. Day thirty is when we read the answer.
If you have the idea
Vinyatan takes pitches from outside Entatan. If you are the buyer, or you have been the buyer, we want to hear it. The pitch form asks the same questions as the memo.
This calendar is how we started our own ventures this year. It is not the only way to start a company. It is the one that lets a small team run several at once without any of them drifting for a quarter before someone notices.