5 Things We Learned Building Production MVPs
Every MVP teaches us something new. After building dozens of products for startups, here are the patterns we've noticed — and the lessons that apply to almost every project.
Lesson #1: Authentication Is Never “Just Auth”
❌ What We Thought
"Auth is straightforward. We'll knock it out in a day or two."
Reality: Authentication is never simple. There's email verification, password resets, session management, OAuth providers, role-based permissions, and a dozen edge cases we didn't anticipate.
We learned this the hard way on our third project when we tried to build custom auth from scratch. Two weeks later, we were still fixing edge cases while the rest of the MVP sat incomplete.
✓ What We Do Now
For MVPs: Use Supabase Auth or Auth0. Get email/password and OAuth working in hours, not weeks. Focus your time on features that actually differentiate your product.
For complex needs: Still use a service, but invest time in understanding how to extend it properly. Custom auth is a last resort, not a starting point.
Lesson #2: The Database Schema Matters More Than You Think
❌ What We Thought
"We'll figure out the database as we go. No need to plan it all upfront."
Reality: A poorly designed database haunts you for the entire project. Common problems:
- Slow queries that tank performance as you get more users
- Missing foreign keys that lead to orphaned data
- Denormalized tables that become impossible to maintain
- Migrations that break production because you didn't plan for growth
- Trying to add features months later and realizing the schema can't support them
On one project, we had to do a massive migration three months in because we stored relationships as JSON arrays instead of proper foreign keys. The migration took a week and almost lost data.
✓ What We Do Now
Spend 1-2 days upfront designing the database schema. Draw out relationships, think about queries you'll need to run, and plan for obvious future features.
Use indexes intelligently, add proper constraints, and write migration scripts from day one. Future you will thank present you.
Lesson #3: Users Will Break Things You Never Imagined
❌ What We Thought
"We tested everything locally. If it works for us, it'll work for users."
Reality: Users do things you never anticipated. They'll paste emoji into fields that expect numbers, upload 50MB images to avatar uploads, and somehow trigger race conditions you swore were impossible.
On one launch, users crashed the entire app within 30 minutes by using special characters in their profile names. We never tested that because "who would do that?"
✓ What We Do Now
Always validate and sanitize user input. Always. Then add these safeguards:
- • File upload limits and type validation
- • Rate limiting on all public endpoints
- • Error boundaries that catch unexpected failures
- • Logging to quickly identify what went wrong
- • A staging environment to test before production deploy
Lesson #4: Premature Optimization Kills Momentum
❌ What We Thought
"Let's build this to scale from day one. What if we get a million users?"
Reality: Most MVPs never see 1,000 users, let alone a million. Spending weeks architecting for massive scale is time you could spend validating product-market fit.
We once spent three weeks setting up Redis caching, load balancers, and microservices for an app that ended up with 200 total users. Those three weeks could have been spent on features users actually wanted.
✓ What We Do Now
Start simple: Build a monolith. Use serverless functions. Host on Oracle Cloud. Any modern stack handles 10K users without breaking a sweat.
Optimize when it hurts: Wait until you have actual performance problems before solving them. Real data beats theoretical scaling concerns.
Ship features first: Users care about what your app does, not how elegantly it scales to traffic you don't have yet.
Lesson #5: Communication Gaps Cause More Bugs Than Code
❌ What We Thought
"The requirements are clear. Just start coding and check in when it's done."
Reality: Miscommunication kills projects. We've built entire features that got scrapped because we misunderstood what the client actually wanted. Common issues:
- Assuming we know what the client means without asking clarifying questions
- Going silent for days while heads-down coding, only to surface with the wrong thing
- Not showing work-in-progress because “it's not ready yet”
- Technical jargon that confuses non-technical stakeholders
We once spent a week building a complex filtering system, only to discover the client wanted something far simpler. We could have saved that week with a 15-minute call.
✓ What We Do Now
Overcommunicate: Daily updates on Slack. Quick Loom videos showing progress. Demos every 2-3 days, even if things are rough.
Ask dumb questions: Better to clarify upfront than rebuild later. There are no stupid questions, only expensive assumptions.
Show early and often: Get feedback on direction before you're 80% done and committed to an approach. Course-correct when it's cheap.
Bonus Lesson: Ship Ugly and Iterate
We used to spend weeks perfecting UI animations, tweaking colors, and polishing every pixel before launch. Know what happened? Users didn't care about the animations — they cared about whether the core feature worked.
The truth: Version 1 can be ugly. It can have rough edges. What matters is that it solves the problem you set out to solve. Everything else is iteration.
💡 Our New Rule
If we're not slightly embarrassed by v1, we waited too long to ship. Get it working, get it in front of users, then make it beautiful based on what they actually use.
What These Lessons Mean for Your Project
If you're building an MVP, here's what matters:
- Start with the boring stuff (use proven tools, not the latest framework)
- Plan your database (spend a day upfront to save weeks later)
- Build for today's scale (don't optimize for traffic you don't have)
- Validate assumptions early (show rough work, get feedback, adjust)
- Protect against user chaos (validate inputs, handle errors gracefully)
- Ship fast, polish later (working and ugly > perfect and unfinished)
Bottom Line
These lessons came from actual projects where we messed up, learned, and adapted. Every mistake taught us something that made the next project better.
Building software is messy. Requirements change, users behave unexpectedly, and perfect code on day one is a myth. The teams that succeed are the ones that ship fast, learn fast, and aren't afraid to iterate.
If you're building your first MVP, embrace the chaos. Make mistakes, but make them quickly so you can fix them before they become expensive.
Building Your Own MVP?
We've helped startups avoid these pitfalls and ship production-ready MVPs in weeks, not months. If you're starting a new project and want to talk through your technical approach, we're happy to help.
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