I see this moment in almost every founder conversation.

The MVP works. Users are signing up. Things are moving. And then one night you're lying in bed thinking: what happens when this thing breaks and I'm not watching?

That feeling isn't imposter syndrome. It's pattern recognition. You know your app is held together with duct tape and good intentions. You know there are edge cases you haven't tested. You know that one database query is going to fall over when you hit 500 concurrent users.

The instinct is to rewrite everything. Don't do that. The instinct after that is to ignore it and hope for the best. Don't do that either.

There's a middle path. It takes about a weekend, and it's the difference between "working MVP" and "product I'd actually trust with paying customers."

The production readiness gap

Here's what most MVPs are missing. Not all of them. But enough of them to make you nervous.

You don't know when things break. No error tracking. No alerts. If your payment webhook fails at 3am, you find out when a customer emails you two days later.

You can't roll back. You deploy by pushing to main and praying. If something goes wrong, you're doing emergency surgery on a live patient.

There's no monitoring. You don't know your response times, your error rates, or how close your database is to falling over. You're flying blind.

Your data isn't backed up. Or it is, but you've never tested a restore. Which is the same as not being backed up.

Secrets are in your code. API keys in environment files that got committed to git six months ago. Or worse, hardcoded in the source.

Sound familiar? Good. That means you're normal. Every MVP looks like this. The ones that survive are the ones that address it before the first real crisis.

The weekend production readiness checklist

I'm going to give you the exact list I walk through with founders. It's ordered by impact. Do the first three this weekend. Do the rest over the next two weeks.

1. Error tracking (2 hours)

Install Sentry. Free tier is fine. This is the single highest-ROI thing you can do.

Before Sentry: something breaks, you don't know. A customer might tell you. Eventually. Maybe.

After Sentry: something breaks, you get a Slack notification with the exact error, the exact line of code, and the exact user who hit it.

The setup is usually about 20 lines of code. For Next.js, it's even simpler with their wizard. For Rails, it's a gem and an initializer.

Don't configure every option. Don't set up custom contexts. Just install it and move on. You'll tune it later.

2. Uptime monitoring (30 minutes)

Pick one: Betterstack, UptimeRobot, or Checkly. All have free tiers.

Set up three checks:

Your main app URL (is the site up?)
Your API health endpoint (is the backend responding?)
Your most critical user flow (can someone actually log in and do the thing?)

Set the alert to go to your phone. Not email. Phone. If your app is down at 2am, email doesn't wake you up.

This isn't about being on-call 24/7. It's about knowing within 5 minutes instead of 5 hours.

3. The one critical alert (1 hour)

What's the one thing that, if it breaks, costs you money or trust immediately?

For most SaaS products, it's payments. Stripe webhook fails, subscription doesn't activate, customer thinks they paid but can't access anything. That's a trust-destroying moment.

Set up an alert for that specific flow. Monitor that your webhook endpoint returns 200. Log every payment event. If a payment succeeds in Stripe but your app doesn't process it within 5 minutes, you need to know.

This single alert will save you more grief than any amount of testing.

4. Automated backups with tested restores (half day)

If you're on a managed database (RDS, PlanetScale, Supabase, Neon), you probably have backups already. Good.

Now test the restore.

I'm serious. Spin up a test instance, restore from backup, verify the data is there. If you've never done this, you don't have backups. You have a backup configuration that might work.

Schedule this as a quarterly reminder. 30 minutes every 3 months. The one time you need it, you'll be glad you practiced.

5. Deploy pipeline that doesn't terrify you (half day)

The goal: deploy with one command (or one merge), and roll back with one command.

If you're on Vercel or Railway, you mostly have this. Vercel gives you instant rollbacks from the dashboard. Use them.

If you're deploying manually via SSH, stop. Set up a basic CI/CD pipeline. GitHub Actions is free for public repos and cheap for private ones. A basic pipeline is:

Run tests
Build
Deploy
Smoke test the live URL

The rollback plan matters more than the deploy plan. Can you get back to the previous version in under 5 minutes? If not, fix that first.

6. Secrets audit (1 hour)

Run this right now:

git log --all --full-history -p | grep -i "api_key\|secret\|password\|token" | head -20

If you see actual secrets in your git history, they're compromised. Rotate them. All of them. Even if the repo is private. Leaked secrets in git history is one of the most common attack vectors for SaaS products.

Move everything to environment variables. Use your hosting platform's secrets management. Don't store production secrets in .env files that live on your laptop.

7. Basic load testing (2 hours)

You don't need a fancy load testing setup. You need to answer one question: at what point does my app start falling over?

Use hey or k6 to hit your main endpoints with increasing load. Start at 10 concurrent users, then 50, then 100, then 500.

Watch for:

Response times going from milliseconds to seconds
Error rates climbing above 1%
Your database CPU spiking

The number where things get bad is your current ceiling. You don't need to fix it today. You just need to know what it is so you're not surprised.

What you can skip (for now)

Founders love to over-engineer production readiness. Here's what you don't need yet:

Kubernetes. You're at MVP stage. A single server or serverless platform is fine until you're past $50K MRR.

Multi-region failover. Your users can handle 30 seconds of downtime. They can't handle a buggy product because you spent two months on infrastructure instead of features.

99.99% uptime SLAs. You're bootstrapped. Aim for 99.5% and focus on recovery speed, not prevention of every possible failure.

Comprehensive test coverage. Write tests for your critical paths (signup, payment, core feature). Skip tests for your admin dashboard and settings page. Coverage percentage is a vanity metric at this stage.

SOC 2 compliance. Unless your customers are explicitly asking for it, this can wait. Focus on the basics: encrypted data, secure auth, rotated secrets.

The trust threshold

Here's what I've learned from working with dozens of founders at this stage.

Production readiness isn't about perfection. It's about crossing a trust threshold. You need to trust your app enough to focus on growth instead of worrying about what might break.

The checklist above gets you there. Error tracking means you know when things break. Monitoring means you know before your customers do. Backups mean a bad day isn't a fatal day. A deploy pipeline means you can fix things fast.

That's it. That's the bar.

You don't need to boil the ocean. You need to sleep at night knowing that if something goes wrong, you'll know about it and you can fix it.

When to bring in help

If this checklist feels overwhelming, or if you've tried some of it and you're not sure you did it right, that's a normal place to be. Non-technical founders especially struggle here because the docs assume you know things you don't.

This is exactly the kind of work I do with founders at Continuum. Not a six-month engagement. Usually a focused sprint to get your product from "it works" to "I trust it." We go through the checklist together, fix the gaps, and set up the monitoring so you're not flying blind.

If that sounds useful, grab a time on my calendar. No pitch, just a conversation about where your product is and what it needs.

Your MVP Works. Now Make It Production Ready.