Exactly. While I'm sure there are apps that cost > 6 million (How much has Path spend sofar?), the "several orders of magnitude" seems highly overstated for an MVP.

It all depends on how honest of a person you are, and if you're willing to take advantage of someone who might not know or perhaps not care how much they are spending. If you have a bigger budget, sure you can do a lot more experimentation - pay others to do experimentation and thinking for you, that is - but if you are good at building relationships to feel out honest people, have some direction yourself and are good at communicating it, then you can come out on the lower end of costs.

He could mean base 2. So 60,000*2^2=240,000

Base -2 would get us cleanly to the $15,000 project mentioned in the article. A sort of "Lose £30 in 30 days," approach.

However, I am not a mathematician. I don't know that base -2 complies with the laws of mathematics.

-2 2 == 2 2. I think you mean base 0.5.

How base works: In base n, you have a number that looks like a list of digits ex. abc. Let's notate that c = number[0], b = number[1], a = number[2]. Then the value of the number is the sum

  value = 0;
  for(i = 0; i < numberOfDigits; i++)
    value += n^i + number[i];

Or, it looks like a(n^2) + b(n^1) + c*(n^0).

So, if you have a base less than 1, you get smaller as you go to the left.

Also, if you have a negative base, you change from adding to subtracting every digit. In a sort of "That'll take 2 years, minus 4 months, plus 2 weeks, minus 3 days" sort of way.

It's a good thing I don't claim to be a mathematician.

Improvements for negative exponent version 2.0 - any loss can now be called exponential growth by selecting the appropriate exponent.