Over-engineering is the enemy of shipping.
I’ve seen too many founders spend days picking the "perfect" waitlist provider or setting up a full Postgres instance just to collect 100 emails.
For my new SaaS, I went the "stupidly simple" route: Google Sheets + Google Apps Script.
Why?
Speed: I had the backend live in 3 minutes.
Focus: I spent my energy on the UI and the value prop, not the CRUD logic.
Zero Friction: No new accounts to manage, no "Made by" watermarks distracting my users.
If you're in the validation stage, don't let the "right way" to build software slow down your launch. Just get the emails. You can build the fancy backend once you have 1,000 people shouting for the product.
Keep it lean.
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The 'stupidly simple' route wins in validation. The check: am I solving the product's core problem, or am I building infrastructure to be able to solve it?
For tryrecoverkit.com, the user-facing 'stupidly simple' version was Stripe OAuth — click connect, done. We put the engineering effort into the backend complexity (webhooks, D+1/D+3/D+7 timing, stop conditions) precisely so founders don't have to touch it. The zero-friction setup was as deliberate a product decision as any feature.
The over-engineering trap in payment recovery specifically: founders often build the Postgres + cron job version themselves first, burn 2 days, then realize the outcome they wanted (recovery emails go out when payments fail) was available without writing a line of code. Same failure mode as your waitlist example — investing in infrastructure before validating that the workflow even needs to exist.
Well said. That’s really the whole point: keep the user experience simple, and only invest in heavier infrastructure once the demand is real.