Your MVP Works. Here's Why You Still Can't Sleep at Night.

Your MVP is live. It works. Users can sign up, click through the flow, maybe even pay you. And yet every time you close your laptop, there's this low-grade anxiety sitting in your chest.

What if something breaks tonight?

What if a payment fails and nobody notices?

What if a user hits an edge case and the whole thing crashes?

You're not being paranoid. You're being realistic. Because there's a massive gap between "it works when I'm watching" and "it works when I'm not." That gap is what separates a prototype from a product. And most founders have no idea how to close it.

The gap nobody talks about

Every blog post about MVPs focuses on the same thing: ship fast, validate the idea, don't over-engineer. That's good advice. It's also incomplete.

Because shipping fast means you skipped things. You know you skipped them. You probably have a mental list of corners you cut. And now those corners are where your anxiety lives.

Here's what the "ship fast" crowd never mentions: there's a second phase after launch that's just as important as the first. It's not glamorous. It doesn't involve new features. It's the boring work of making your MVP production-ready.

I've worked with dozens of founders who hit this exact wall. The product works. Revenue is trickling in. But they're terrified of growth because they know the foundation is shaky. They're one bad deploy or one spike in traffic away from a very bad day.

What "production ready" actually means

Production readiness isn't about perfection. It's about knowing what's happening inside your app without having to stare at it 24/7.

It comes down to five things.

1. You know when something breaks

This is the bare minimum and most MVPs don't have it. If a user hits an error, you should know about it before they email you. If they email you at all.

Set up error tracking. Sentry has a free tier that covers most early-stage apps. It takes about 30 minutes to integrate. Once it's in, every unhandled exception gets logged with the full context: what the user was doing, what browser they were on, what data caused the failure.

Without this, you're flying blind. You think your app is working because nobody complained. In reality, users just left.

2. You know when something is down

Error tracking catches bugs. Uptime monitoring catches outages. They're different problems.

Your app could be returning a blank white page and Sentry wouldn't fire because there's no JavaScript error. There's no JavaScript at all. The server is just gone.

Tools like BetterStack, UptimeRobot, or even a free Pingdom account will check your URL every minute and text you when it goes dark. Set it up for your main app URL and your API endpoint. That's it.

3. You can roll back a bad deploy

At some point you're going to push an update that breaks something. It's not a question of if. It's a question of how fast you can fix it.

If your deploy process is "push to main and pray," you need a rollback plan. For most modern hosting (Vercel, Railway, Fly.io), this means keeping the previous deployment around so you can switch back in one click. For traditional setups, it means tagging your releases so you can redeploy the last working version.

The worst scenario is when you deploy, something breaks, and you spend two hours debugging in production while users are affected. A rollback takes 30 seconds. Debug later, in peace.

4. You know what your critical path is

Not every feature in your app matters equally. There's a critical path: the series of actions that, if broken, means your business stops working.

For most SaaS apps, the critical path is: sign up, activate, use the core feature, pay. If any of those four steps break, you're losing money.

Focus your monitoring and testing on that path first. Write automated tests for it if you can. Set up alerts specifically for failures in those flows. Everything else is secondary.

I tell founders to write down their critical path on a sticky note and put it on their monitor. It helps you prioritize what to fix, what to monitor, and what to test. Everything else can wait.

5. You have a "3 AM plan"

Here's a thought experiment. It's 3 AM. Your phone buzzes. Your app is down. What do you do?

If your answer is "panic," you need a plan. It doesn't have to be complicated. A simple document that covers:

• How to check if it's your app or your hosting provider
• How to restart your services
• How to roll back the last deploy
• Who to contact if you're stuck (a technical partner, a DevOps friend, someone)
• What to tell users while you fix it

This document takes 20 minutes to write and saves you hours of panic-driven debugging at 3 AM. Write it before you need it.

The features trap

Here's what I see most founders do instead of production readiness work: they build more features.

It makes sense psychologically. New features feel productive. New features attract users. New features are fun. Setting up error tracking is not fun.

But every new feature you ship on a shaky foundation makes the problem worse. You're adding complexity to a system you already don't trust. You're increasing the surface area for things to go wrong while having zero visibility into what's already going wrong.

The founders who scale successfully are the ones who pause after their MVP launches, spend a week or two on production readiness, and then go back to features with confidence.

That week of boring work buys you months of peace.

The real cost of skipping this

I worked with a founder last year who had a great product. Paying users. Growing word of mouth. Then one Saturday, their payment webhook stopped firing. Stripe was sending events but the app wasn't processing them. New users were signing up, using the product, and never getting charged.

They didn't notice for 11 days.

By the time they caught it, they'd given away over $4,000 in free access and had to have awkward conversations with users about retroactive billing. Some users churned. The founder spent a full week cleaning up the mess.

A $0 webhook monitoring alert would have caught this in 60 seconds.

That's the real cost. It's not theoretical. It's revenue lost, users churned, and weeks of your time spent on fires instead of growth.

The production readiness checklist

Here's what to do this week. Block off one afternoon and work through this list:

Hour 1: Error tracking

• Sign up for Sentry (free tier)
• Install the SDK for your framework
• Trigger a test error and verify it shows up
• Set up email or Slack notifications

Hour 2: Uptime monitoring

• Sign up for BetterStack or UptimeRobot (free tier)
• Add your main URL and API endpoint
• Set up SMS alerts for downtime
• Test by temporarily breaking your app

Hour 3: Deploy safety

• Document your current deploy process
• Test a rollback (deploy, then revert)
• Make sure you can go back to the previous version in under 2 minutes

Hour 4: Critical path and 3 AM plan

• Write down your critical path (sign up, activate, core feature, pay)
• Write your 3 AM runbook
• Store it somewhere you can access from your phone

That's it. Four hours. Most of it is free. And you'll sleep better tonight than you have in weeks.

When to get help

If reading this list feels overwhelming, or if you're not sure how to implement half of it, that's normal. Most non-technical founders hit a point where the product works but the infrastructure knowledge gap starts costing them.

This is exactly the kind of thing a technical partner helps with. Not building new features. Making what you've already built reliable enough to grow on.

If you're at that point, let's talk. I help bootstrapped SaaS founders close the gap between "working MVP" and "production-ready product" so they can focus on growth instead of firefighting.