Nut Tree started as an internal product within founder Allen Hartwig’s previous startup, Gated, as a way to connect and amplify the voices of brand advocates. He passed around the POC with advisors and investors, seeing good outcomes in connecting with engaged users at Gated. He considered that this may be a more generally useful tool, so he worked on spinning it out.
Allen was able to create a version of Nut Tree with most of the functionality he had in mind in a week. This involved creating all the data structures, feature prototypes, and iterating on the project specs quickly. He noted that being able to quickly create and apply Convex schemas in the dashboard was particularly useful in getting going quickly.
The next step was integrating Stripe, authentication, and making the whole experience more productized. Allen has a preference toward event-driven architectures, which made the Convex scheduler a great fit for the project, which saved him the hassle of not needing to roll his own Pub/Sub or dead letter queues.
After the core backend was complete, it came down to mounting the Convex functions to the application and polishing the UI. Convex limited the context switching he needed to do, avoiding codebase, language, or repository switches. No additional time was taken up thinking about data stores, the persistence layer, call deduplication, loading states, or pagination.
