Why I Built Authava

I started programming in 2002. Back when everything was simple, server-rendered, and PHP was king. I learned to code from a book by Larry Ullman and launched my first apps with no frameworks, no CI/CD, just FTP and pure HTML muscle.

Then life happened. I joined the U.S. Marine Corps in 2008. In 2011, I deployed to Afghanistan—Lashkar Gah, to be exact—where I met my wife, another Marine. We’re now a family of five with three amazing daughters. And somehow in between late-night diaper shifts and keyboard sessions, I’ve kept coding.

I’m a surfer at heart. A Colorado native who fell in love with Florida. I play Sea of Thieves, grill keto Mongolian dinners, and lose hours tweaking infrastructure that no one sees. And yeah, I’m still building apps—now faster than ever.

The First Real Shot: Pexa Coin

The first product I ever truly shipped was Pexa Coin. It was a platform designed to democratize crypto mining. Think YiiMP, but multi-tenant and hosted — just add your coins and launch your own mining pool.

It was technically impressive, but ultimately it failed. The market didn’t want it, the product was expensive to run, and I couldn’t sell it. I had value, but no viable customers. I lost a lot of money chasing it, and I learned a painful truth: even solid tech dies without a market.

But it taught me everything about building complex systems. And it gave me scars I still use to navigate.

The Pain of Identity

After Pexa Coin came PexaProject, SpyderVPN, and dozens more products I built or helped shape. And every time — auth sucked.

Auth always felt like an alien that didn’t belong. I was tired of gluing together login flows, permissions, role logic, and session handling on a per-app basis. It made no sense. I just wanted my apps to reason about user.id and user.scopes. The rest should be abstracted away by something solid.

That pain followed me across hundreds of builds. And it finally snapped.

The Starbucks Moment

It was a few years ago. I was working on PexaProject at a Starbucks, juggling Auth0 docs and various IdPs, and I muttered to myself out loud: "This shouldn't suck." All I wanted was to build the app — not fight my way through login logic again.

Later, while prototyping SpyderDNS, I had the same icky feeling. I caught myself writing another user model from scratch and thought: Why the hell am I doing this per app? Why isn't this just something I plug in per domain?

And that’s when Authava started forming in my mind.

Why Not Just Use Auth0?

Auth0 felt like a fortress I had to beg to enter. It’s bloated, expensive, and way too enterprise for most real builders. I didn’t want a dashboard that made me feel like a tenant.

I wanted to be the landlord — own my auth stack, extend it, embed it, theme it, and reason about it with modern tools.

I wanted a plug-and-play React component. I wanted TypeScript middleware for Deno and Laravel. I wanted the flexibility to be creative — not locked into a flowchart of pre-approved patterns.

So I built it.

Building Authava Wasn’t Easy

The hardest part wasn’t the code — it was the modeling.

Authava needed to be multi-tenant from day one. It had to avoid hardcoded assumptions like “admin” or “team leader.” I wanted scopes to mean whatever the client wanted them to mean. That’s why, in the @authava/client SDK, the hasScopes('*') logic is up to you. You define what the * means — not us.

That level of flexibility took deep thinking. And don’t get me started on theming. Injecting hex codes for branding, supporting custom logos, dynamic OAuth provider configs — all from a Rust service — was wild. But now? It works beautifully.

From Marine to Maker

As a Marine, you learn to adapt fast. You don’t get to say “this is someone else’s problem.” Same as a parent. Same as a solo founder. Authava came from that energy — I needed a solution, I didn’t want to wait, and I wasn’t going to ask permission. That mindset is baked into everything: ship fast, take ownership, solve the damn problem.

The military taught me resourcefulness. Precision. And grit. I don’t need a team of 20 to ship something meaningful. I need focus and a clear objective. In the Corps, you trust your training. In tech, I trust the system I’ve built and iterate like hell. The military also taught me how to separate emotion from urgency — to be calm even when it’s on fire.

Balancing Family and a Startup

Some days I don’t. It’s chaos.

But I try to code when the kids sleep and make the mornings count. I’m not building this in a vacuum — I’m building it for them. I want my daughters to grow up knowing their dad didn’t just talk about building something real — he actually did it.

That’s the legacy I’m chasing. Not just code, but conviction.

What Comes Next

Authava now powers my projects — SpyderVPN, internal tools, bots, APIs, client-facing platforms. It’s lean, modern, secure, and flexible enough to support anything I throw at it.

And I’m not done.

If you’re building SaaS, tools, bots, or APIs — and you’re tired of wrestling identity into every app — give Authava a look.

💬 Contact me
📬 [email protected]

Let’s build something real.

— Ryan Hein
Founder, Authava