How do you separate staging vs production in your early builds?
We’re building SmartDial for outbound sales teams and shipping fast. Right now using Firebase, and it’s getting tricky balancing speed with stability.
Curious—how do you manage staging vs prod environments when you’re still validating and iterating weekly?
Do you set both up properly from day one, or fake it until things stabilize?
Replies
@rolambuilds, I can only speak from my own experience.
Our product flow always has the customer in mind. First, we speak to customers to understand the problem we are trying to solve and who is most impacted by it.
Then we return to those users with a prototype that can be hosted on Figma, gaining additional buy-in.
Then we'll proceed to development, where we'll test things internally. We just moved from Firebase to Supabase.
Then we'll go into production for those users and after we have feature validation we roll it out for all users.
This should be a 2 week process. When you blend both the dev and prod environment it's really difficult to find massive bugs that build.
My opinion only.
@brandonshtein Appreciate you sharing that—super helpful.
We just set up proper staging and separated the environments. Up until now, we were faking it with Firebase, feature flags, and test accounts, but it started getting messy as we shipped more. This setup already feels like a big step forward in balancing speed with stability.
LetMeCheck.ai
Just wondering, why would you fake anything?
@new_user___1542025a3013bd22f1e340b Good point and to clarify, it’s not really “faking.” It’s more about being scrappy early on. We used the same environment with guardrails (like feature flags and test accounts) to move fast and iterate. Clean separation came once things started to stabilize.