The gap between a working demo and a paying customer is larger than most founders expect. Here's a practical checklist.
Before you charge money
- Automated backups with tested restore
- Error monitoring and alerting
- Terms of service and privacy policy
- Payment provider webhooks with idempotency
- Rate limiting on public endpoints
- Database migrations in CI
- Staging environment mirroring prod
- Logging with correlation IDs
- Health check endpoint for load balancer
- Secrets rotation plan
- On-call runbook (even if on-call is you)
- Data export for user offboarding
A paying user expects reliability. A demo user expects novelty.
Cross off items before you send the first invoice.