PropelAuth
Authentication for B2B startups
One feature request we've gotten from users is the ability to receive messages on different user actions.
When we talked to our users about this, there was basically two use cases:
1 - Webhooks where a customer can sync their user data to their DB
2 - Slack notifications on user signup
We ended up building both, one for the robust webhook case and one for the simpler notification case.
We just launched on Product Hunt! This is the first time I've ever launched on product hunt and it's been pretty great. My favorite part so far honestly was the ability to write my story - most of the time you focus on keeping things as succinct as possible, but the ability to write things out in long form was really fun and hopefully useful.
When talking to folks about their auth needs, something that came up pretty frequently is wanting to collect additional information on signup. Often this was just name, sometimes it was a username/display name.
Since we fully manage the auth UI, I realized the simplest version of this feature is just a toggle. If you want to collect name, you toggle that option in your dashboard and all the UIs update. New users are prompted to enter their name when signing up. Old users are prompted to update their name when logging back in. The account pages let your users update their name.
The power feature here, in my opinion, is we can also manage your user's profile pictures. This lets our customers' users upload their own photos, and our customers can embed these photos in their applications.
I wrote more about it here: https://www.propelauth.com/post/propelauth-supports-custom-user-schemas-profile-pictures
Our landing page is now a lot slicker than before. The last one was ok, but was a little rough around the edges.
We ended up switching to webflow as it's been pretty easy to iterate on copy/designs. The first class support for things like lottie animations also was a nice selling point.
One of the most powerful things about PropelAuth is our customer's UIs are fully hosted.
That means we can support new features like 2FA for everyone without requiring our users to add new UIs like: onboarding with a QR code, a verify step after login, displaying backup codes.
It's all taken care of for you, out of the box. Your users can manage their accounts security while you focus on building your application.
Next.js is a React framework that provides a lot of useful features out of the box. We recently added support for both Next.js on the frontend and Next.js API routes on the backend.
Testing Next.js was a lot of fun, as it involved just building a lot of simple apps. Next.js API routes are pretty nice to work with and the experience of adding auth to them with just a few lines of code is really nice.
After testing with a few initial friends and family users, I decided it was time to start telling the world about PropelAuth.
Before launching, I spent awhile working on my marketing page and some initial blog posts.
I'm still getting the hang of doing marketing, but I'm excited to see where this goes.
After exploring a few different ideas, I realized that there was a need for a tool that made it easier for people to add authentication to their side projects and startups.
I did initial user interviews to validate this and received a lot of feedback that existing tools were complex and difficult to use.
This matched my own experience so I decided to start building.
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