Test From The Customer's Seat

I am the worst person to test my own apps. I know where everything is, because I put it there.

The builder’s seat comes furnished. My accounts have admin rights, the data is seeded and tidy, every third-party service was connected by me, once, long ago, in ways I have half forgotten. A paying subscriber arrives with none of that. They get an empty account, a pricing page and whatever patience they brought.

So before ContentForge goes near real users, I spent part of this week planning the entire test pass from their seat. Sign up fresh. Pay through the real billing flow. Connect each platform from nothing. Hit the plan limits and read what the app actually says. Every flow, walked in order, as a stranger.

Just planning it surfaced builder’s-seat assumptions. Secrets lived scattered across my machine rather than in one managed place, so they moved into a proper secrets manager. Some flows had only ever been exercised by an account that predates the current rules. Integration lists existed where the only person who had ever connected anything was me.

The plain version: I built the house, but I have never once come in through the front door. I use the garage, like every builder does. The customer only has the front door, and nobody had checked that it opened.

None of this is glamorous testing. It is a checklist and an afternoon of honesty. But the product you ship is the one the stranger meets, not the one the builder knows.