The MVP Event Horizon: When Your Prototype Goes Critical

## The Big Idea Your startup is never in just one mode. Right now, some of what you've built is a throwaway experiment, and some of it is holding up the business. The hard part isn't building either kind. It's knowing which is which - because nobody will tell you when something crosses the line. ## The prototype in the subheader When we scope a project at [Craftwork](https://craftwork.com), one question is always the same: how many people, for how many days? It sounds like a calendar question. It's really a money question. A job that needs 12 shifts of work could be 2 people for 6 days, or 4 people for 3. Both fill the calendar. They don't cost us the same, and every project needs to make money. So a while back, I built a small tool to help. It took a project, split it into people-and-days options, and showed what each one would cost us. Nothing fancy. I tucked it into a subheader, mostly to see if anyone would bother using it. They did. Then they kept using it. The team took it under…