NEO is live.
After 8 days of downtime, deployment issues, failed experts, and a near-complete rebuild, it's working again.
I woke up the next morning and saw NEO was deployed.
From now on I’ll refer to him as The Veteran.
(Thanks again, Veteran)
So I connected the domain to meetneo.app.
Within the next hour two users immediately sent me screenshots showing an ugly Supabase authentication URL in their login screen.
I asked the AI coding agent how to fix it.
The agent told me I needed to upgrade to a higher Supabase tier and set up custom domain authentication.
I did exactly that, then everything broke.
Authentication stopped working completely.
The AI agent started generating wild theories about coding malfunctions, database misconfigurations, and deployment conflicts.
None of them were right.
That subscriber earlier (now a friend) who fixed deployment found the actual problem in minutes:
I had pasted the wrong Google OAuth client ID and client secret.
🙄
After all that, it was something as stupid as me pasting the wrong detail.
But yesterday I learned an important lesson about building a SaaS business.
See, while all this was happening I was still working on the rebuild.
I had convinced myself that the current version was too broken, that starting from scratch with Replit-native tools was the permanent solution.
I was adding polish to the new interface, planning the migration strategy, building it properly this time.
Then that Veteran questioned me.
“Why do you think rebuilding will solve this? What makes you think it won't have the same problems?”
We went back and forth quite a bit.
But ultimately, the insight I gained was that speed issues, bugs, and maintenance problems are all part of being a SaaS founder.
Even if I rebuild everything on that platform, it doesn't guarantee those problems go away.
It might just open a new set of problems.
And so I reflected.
I had knowledge.
I had tools.
I had an AI agent that could write code faster than any human developer.
But none of that solved the problem.
The fix came from someone with experience who could step back and see what I couldn't.
It was experience developed from years being in the front line.
Which allows him to step back and see things from a different perspective.
Good information and good tools are good.
But when you want to accomplish something great, sometimes you just need to have someone experienced by your side.
NEO is live now.
Try it here: https://meetneo.app
Let me know how you feel about it.
FELIX