How much connector setup can a solo founder or a 5-person team actually handle?
I am building an app and getting close to launching my beta soon, and little unsure about this. I, being non-technical founder, love to experiment with new tech and build stuffs. But not all founders won't be like me. I am guessing most wouldn't want anything to do past MCP servers.
For an AI assistant to be useful, it eventually needs access to your actual stuff — docs, email, issues, files. But every option has a setup cost:
- MCP servers — standardized, growing ecosystem, but you configure and auth each one
- Wrapping CLIs you already have — zero new auth if the tool's installed, but that assumes you're technical
- Just point it at a folder — no setup, no review, works for anyone
We started with 3 and are working toward 1. What I genuinely can't tell is how many non-developers would ever set up an MCP server themselves.
If you're running a small team: which of these would you actually do? And if you're building something similar — did you find MCP setup to be a real adoption barrier, or am I overestimating it?