A big part of my week is spent talking to early-stage founders about how they handle login, access, and identity, and there is a pattern I keep noticing that I want to understand better.
Almost everyone puts auth off at the start, which honestly makes sense when you are still trying to prove the product matters at all.
For me, I feel like the hardest part isn't choosing between tools like React, Firebase, Railway, etc, it's really deciding which parts of the stack I should commit most of my time and tokens early and which ones may become painful to replace later.
Do you stick with a familiar stack and avoid overthinking it, design around expected scale from day one, let your coding agent influence the architecture, or start with the cheapest setup and migrate later? Also, curious which early technical choice has saved you the most time, and which one you wish you probably shouldn't have overthinked on.
When you're a first-time founder/maker, and you're the only person using your own product, you probably overlook important things. That's why you need to test the product with as many people as possible.
The problem is that time is limited. You have to decide not only how many people will test it, but also who those people should be.
