I Spent 4 Hours Debugging Google OAuth… Then I Deleted the Feature (A Lesson While Building My First SaaS)

A few days ago I shared the architecture flow diagram of my SaaS project, LeadIt. After that, I also shared a post explaining the core backend components I built — things like the company search API, the analysis engine, lead scoring logic, and the AI outreach generator. Since then I’ve been slowly turning those pieces into an actual working product. Most of the backend core is now working, and I’ve also been building the landing page that explains the product and its workflow. But while trying to implement the next feature — email automation using Gmail OAuth — I ran into a problem that ended up teaching me one of the most important lessons about building MVPs. The Plan: Let Users Send Emails From the Platform Once the backend intelligence layer was working, the next step felt obvious. Users should be able to send outreach emails directly from LeadIt. The flow I imagined was simple. A user connects their Gmail account → LeadIt generates an AI outreach message → the user can send the e