The Bug I Couldn’t See (Because I Was Too “Special”)

Yesterday was a milestone: first day I started cold-reaching Redditors to test Indie10k — my “growth gym” for indie hackers where you get 3 small tasks a day to keep momentum.

One of the first testers replies:

“The login is on a loop. I can’t get in.”

Uh oh.

I try it myself. Everything works perfectly. Smooth dashboard, no problem. But when I'm registering another account, it hits me: I’m on the allowlist.

The Sneaky Culprit

Way back in the prototype phase, I had this flag:

USER_SYSTEM_BETA_ALLOWLIST

It let me (and a few friends) bypass login shenanigans. When I flipped the switch to open beta, I forgot to remove it.

Result for new testers:

Dashboard → 307 redirect to login

Login → dashboard

Dashboard → login again

…repeat forever

For me? Blissfully invisible. For everyone else? A hamster wheel of despair.

The Fix

Once I deleted the allowlist hack, redeploy in Vercel, everything worked. Now testers can actually reach the dashboard and see the action card system instead of getting booted around in circles.

The Spark Question

This is where I’m at: no tests at all, just hacking and shipping. I’m still in “does anyone like this?” mode, not “let’s make it bulletproof” mode.

But this incident makes me wonder: 👉 At what stage did you start adding tests? Do you wait until you know the product has legs, or do you add them early to avoid exactly this kind of silly bug?

Would love to hear how others balance speed vs. safety at the early stage.