In the AI gold rush, the boring tool of a shovel won.
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The author discovered amid the AI boom that what truly makes SaaS run is not fancy AI models, but Supabase (backend infrastructure) and PostHog (product analytics). This breaks the intuition that “AI is everything”: AI is responsible for generating content, while underlying data and user behavior insights are the key to retention. It’s suitable for entrepreneurs building products with AI, reminding them not to neglect infrastructure and data layers.
- After AI generates content, stable storage/version control is needed; BaaS like Supabase...
- GA4 is distorted by AI traffic interference; PostHog can obtain real user behavior data
- Infrastructure investment yields higher returns than blindly chasing new AI models, reducing development and maintenance costs
- When building SaaS, prioritize solving foundational layers like Auth/DB/storage, then layer on A...
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During the California Gold Rush, hundreds of thousands of people showed up chasing gold. Most of them left with less money than they arrived with. The people who actually got rich weren’t panning in the river. They were named Levi Strauss and Sam Brannan, and they were selling pickaxes, tents, and durable pants to the guys who were panning in the river. Brannan bought every shovel in San Francisco before he told anyone gold had been found, then sold them at a massive markup once the rush started. Strauss just made pants that didn’t fall apart in a river. Neither of them needed to find an ounce of gold. They just needed everyone else to keep digging. I keep thinking about that story because it’s basically what’s happening right now with AI. Everyone’s Panning for Gold Every founder I know is deep in the river right now - myself included. A new AI model, new agentic framework, new AI coding tools, and AI assisted legal documents. We’re all convinced the next nugget is one prompt away. But the tools that have actually made the biggest difference in how I build over the last six months aren’t AI by themselves. They’re PostHog and Supabase. Neither one is AI by itself. They’re the shovels, tools, and the pants that were sold in the California gold rush. They’re marketing or infrastructure. And that’s exactly why they matter more than most of the AI tools I’ve tried this year. Supabase: The Backend I Stopped Thinking About Supabase is Postgres with the boring parts already solved. Auth, storage, a real relational database, an API layer, all set up in the time it used to take me to configure a single WordPress plugin. I’ve spent 20 years around WordPress, but I’ve spent just as long building web software before anyone called it SaaS. Back then we called it Web 2.0, which tells you exactly how long ago that was. I remember hand coding user sign up forms from scratch. Writing my own authentication from scratch. Building spam protection from scratch, back before reCAPTCHA existed, which meant rolling your own janky logic and still getting flooded with bot signups anyway. None of that was hard exactly. It was just tedious, and it was the same tedious every single time, on every single project. You’d rebuild the same login flow for the tenth time and think, someone should really solve this once so the rest of us stop solving it badly, over and over, forever. I know what “boring parts already solved” is worth, because I’ve spent two decades building the boring parts myself. With both PressMeGPT and InstantLadyBirdDeed, Supabase is the layer underneath everything the
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