PropelAuth backed by Y Combinator
Exciting news: PropelAuth is now backed by Y Combinator as part of its W22 Batch!
It’s been an incredible journey so far, and I wanted to spend some time reflecting on it and how we got here.
As a developer, one thing I learned pretty quickly is that complexity is inevitable. Some of the best developers I’ve worked with understood this, and also understood that part of their role was managing complexity - building layers of abstraction over it to shield future developers from it.
In college, I remember going to a talk about Stripe where the speaker said “It’s really simple - I want a function where the input is a credit card and dollar amount and the output is money in my bank account.” Anyone who’s ever tried to even find an API for a bank knows that it’s anything but simple.
About a year ago, I was working on a side project and I reached a similar situation. I wanted to set up authentication, but I didn’t want to spend a lot of time on it - there were so many other things I wanted to spend my time on.
I shopped around, avoiding the tools I had bad experiences with already, and realized that no auth solution really got it. They are bloated and confusing - or they leave out important features for you to add on later. The complexities of auth are pushed onto you, the customer. This was the beginning of PropelAuth.
Fast forward to today and I couldn’t be happier with where we are. We provide prebuilt, hosted UIs that customers can configure with their brand. With a few clicks, the entire auth experience for end-users is done. Features like 2FA work out of the box and there’s no confusing enrollment APIs to understand. Our libraries expose a minimal interface because our goal is to hide the complexity of auth from our customers - while still allowing them to build incredible and complex applications.
If you are building any web application, I’d love for you to try us out. One of the best ways to keep us true to our mission is through feedback.
Thanks to everyone who has helped us along the way, excited to see what 2022 brings!