Community spotlight: Roi Avidan & startup scaling with Userfront

Roi Avidan, Head of Technology at pay.com.au, considers himself more of a “head of technical leads.” Roi values collaboration. Grounded in years of experience and best practices, he also enjoys and encourages discussing solutions with his team. He continues to learn from them. So when he reached out to Userfront, it was with that spirit of collaboration: would Userfront work with Roi to build a custom solution for pay.com.au? He had a vision of migrating user management over to Userfront, so that his team could focus on pay.com.au’s core value proposition. We’re highlighting Roi’s experience and showing how Userfront supports startup teams with vision.

About Roi Avidan

Roi joined the company not long after the release of a working minimal viable product (MVP), which included an identity implementation based on AWS Cognito. Roi’s team found that managing and scaling Cognito was complex, without some basic services like native backup and restore capabilities, and with limited ability to develop custom requirements. The team needed a user management platform that would alleviate some of this burden so they could focus on their actual product features.

Roi went looking for an alternative. First, he looked into Auth0/Okta. Their pricing, however, was geared towards businesses with deep pockets. While all of the features seemed to be there, Roi knew his startup had unique needs and that he would have to build some custom functionality in-house. After checking out some other options, he searched on Google for the features he needed and found Userfront.

He liked what he saw and asked Jordan Yeo, one of his tech leads, to build a small proof-of-concept (POC) to see if it would work. Jordan was able to create a POC quickly. Roi knew it was time to contact Userfront.

In Roi’s words

Userfront’s migration expertise was a big help to Roi. But the biggest benefits to his startup were communication and the relationship that ensured Userfront delivered the features its users needed. As Roi notes:

Migration was a great example of how closely we worked together from the start…

I think the biggest benefit is the fact that we have very strong communication and a relationship with Userfront. The features we need are being considered for your roadmap and delivered relatively fast. Imagine going to Okta, and saying “I need feature X,” and they deliver it a couple of months later… Never gonna happen at our scale.

I’d say the impact for us is that we feel like we are working with a partner and not with a vendor. It’s a HUGE difference.

Why Roi chose Userfront

Initially, upon joining pay.com.au, Roi enjoyed being hands-on with the code. As pay.com.au grew, however, he had to delegate these tasks to his tech leads. Despite this shift, Roi notes, “My passion is around Architecture and DevOps. I am an old coder, but I always found architecture to be the most exciting part of the work.” Roi architected pay.com.au’s tech stack, including how they would leverage Userfront.

To get the next-stage features ready for pay.com.au, Roi needed certain capabilities to be developed on both sides of the pay.com.au-Userfront service interface. The Userfront team worked with the pay.com.au team to design and implement the required functionality. This exchange resulted in Userfront releasing features such as:

• Role and permission assignment for users
• Webhook-triggered MFA initiated by the Userfront team
• The ability to sign a JWT with a customized payload

These additions, though not initially available, demonstrate Userfront’s developer-first commitment.

From POC to scalability

pay.com.au is a TypeScript shop, so the Userfront JavaScript SDK was instrumental. Roi notes, “As time went by, more and more of the responsibility, decisions and work was handed over to Jordan and his squad. I still participated now and then, helping to prioritize and direct things, but more as a ‘consultant’—Jordan was the driver.” Jordan’s team was able to build off of their initial POC to fully reimplement the identity component. Upon successful completion of the migration to Userfront, pay.com.au leveraged Userfront's APIs and capabilities to build new features. They then decommissioned their Cognito-based identity provider.

pay.com.au needed a seamless migration of all users, ensuring logins, preferences, and transparency throughout the process, with no downtime. pay.com.au’s migration process exemplified the close collaboration between both parties from the outset. Userfront built a pass-through service, facilitating pay.com.au’s migration of Customer JIT, the just-in-time provisioning of customer accounts within identity and access management (IAM) systems. Userfront also solved the technical hurdle of non-exportable user passwords.

We are seeing constant improvements and benefits—the collaboration we have with the Userfront team is nothing short of amazing. We are constantly able to shift in-house implementations over to Userfront when new features we requested are delivered.

Insights for other developers

While scaling up, Roi thinks it may be a waste of time for a startup to build general services like a user management system in-house. He believes a startup should focus on the unique value it can provide. Even more, he considers it a waste of time to look further than Userfront for an identity solution:

Don’t bother looking elsewhere. The dev-friendly experience you’re gonna have is second to none. And at this stage, Userfront is more customisable than Okta.

Next steps

We hope this spotlight conveys how fun and productive the collaboration with Roi and his team was. Ready to build your own POC? Then don’t forget:

• Keep up to date with Userfront, including these community spotlights, by following us on Twitter & LinkedIn.
• Have you written about Userfront? Published a blog post or shared a code example lately? Let us know and we may feature you in an upcoming Community Spotlight.

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