Last month I shipped an MCP server for Drumbeats. The code for the first working version took one day. The three weeks around that day are where everything useful happened — and that's what this post is about.
This is not a feature announcement. The repo is public if you want the details. This is the part I wish someone had written before I started: what to do before you write MCP code, how to design tools that agents can actually use, what your OAuth setup is almost certainly missing, and why a registry quality score jumped from 87 to 98 for reasons that had nothing to do with adding features.
If you run a SaaS and you're thinking about an MCP server, this is the playbook I'd hand you.
Start with the verb, not the transport
The first note in our design doc says:
