The Gold Spike
A team that can’t ship together can’t scale together.
Whether you’re building a live service game or a SaaS product, your success depends on your ability to deliver again and again. Not just features, but updates, fixes, and improvements, all at the pace of your customers’ needs. The challenge is that teams often wait too long to test their real development pipeline. That’s where the concept of a Gold Spike comes in.
What is a Gold Spike?
A Gold Spike is the process of building one of everything you’ll eventually need in your product to establish every part of the pipeline and fix any issues in making them all work together. Think of it as a miniature version of your product that forces the team to solve every integration, pipeline, and release challenge upfront.
At Proletariat, our very first app was Hug the Sloth. It wasn’t designed to be a hit game (although everyone loves sloths). It was designed to test our ability to ship a full product. That little app included Facebook login, a push notification, in-app purchases for amazing sloth hats, and was actually released through our Apple developer account. By doing that work early, we built confidence and muscle memory across the team.
Why a Gold Spike is Useful
The Gold Spike works because it forces you to build and complete one of everything. Every product has invisible complexity: account creation, payments, deployment, app store release, and more. If you don’t pave the way early and make unknown dependencies known, they can become painful blockers later.
For teams building live service games or SaaS products, the ability to repeatedly deploy is a core competency. A Gold Spike ensures you’re not just writing code or making art, you’re building the muscles of delivery across the entire team and between teams.
How to Use a Gold Spike
Define the must-haves: Identify the critical components you’ll eventually need (login, payments, notifications, analytics, deployment). Choose the tools, open source projects, or middleware you plan to use to ensure you are giving them a test run.
Build one of each: Do the simplest possible version with the smallest amount of content. The process is the goal, not the final product.
Ship it: Actually release it. Even if it’s to a small internal audience, go through the full process. Make it as real as possible.
Analyze and iterate: Document the problems you hit and improve the pipeline so the next release is smoother. If doing this for the first time, consider what you would want to change across the entire process including tech and tools and use that information to improve your development plan for the real thing.
Beyond the First Release
The Gold Spike is not about building a single prototype to throw away. It’s about proving the full delivery loop works and building muscle over iterations. Once the loop exists, every new feature gets added into a process that’s already been tested. That compounds efficiency and resilience over time.
Building a Gold Spike when the final product doesn’t matter (no major announcement, marketing budget, etc) allows the focus to be on the process. For live service products, the actual bits that are created are often less important than the team’s ability to create and iterate on those bits. The process is the product, and this is a way to build a culture that constantly improves.
Final Thoughts
Too many teams spend weeks, months or years building in silos or wait until they have a “real” product to test their ability to deliver. By then, the stakes are higher and the blockers more frustrating. The Gold Spike flips that script. Do one of everything, force the team to solve the hard problems early, and build the muscle of shipping from day one.
If your goal is a product that evolves constantly, don’t just build features, build the pipeline that makes continuous delivery possible. The Gold Spike is how you start.