MCP Server Development: What It Takes to Put Your Product in Claude and ChatGPT
By Mohamed Lotfi SassiPublished 2 min read
You can get an MCP server talking to Claude in an afternoon. Plenty of teams do exactly that, show a nice demo, and then spend the next two months finding out why it isn't ready for real customers.
This is the list we wish every team had before starting.
Step 1: Choose the actions
The biggest mistake is exposing every endpoint. AI assistants work best with a small set of clear actions, each with a plain-language description.
Start from your customers' most common tasks. For a CRM, that might be: find a contact, log a call, update a deal, and list overdue tasks. Four good actions are more useful than forty confusing ones.
Step 2: Secure sign-in
Your connector acts on behalf of a real user, so it needs proper OAuth sign-in and per-user permissions. The assistant should never see data the user couldn't see in your app.
Step 3: Write descriptions for the model
The assistant decides which action to call by reading your descriptions. Vague descriptions lead to wrong calls. Good ones say what the action does, when to use it, and what it returns.
Step 4: Test with real prompts
Test with the way people actually talk: "what's going on with the Acme deal?", not "call get_deal with id 4471". Track how often the assistant picks the right action and fix the descriptions until it does consistently.
Step 5: Protect against prompt injection
If your connector reads emails, documents or tickets, assume some of them will contain hidden instructions. Limit what each action can do, require confirmation for anything destructive, and log every call.
Step 6: Hosting and maintenance
A connector is a live service. It needs hosting, monitoring and updates when Claude, ChatGPT or the MCP specification change. Plan for it as a product, not a one-off project.
Step 7: Directory submission
Prepare the listing: name, description, privacy policy, support contact and example prompts. Directories review submissions, so a clean, well-documented connector gets through faster.
Timeline
For a standard connector with five to eight actions and secure sign-in, plan on about three weeks from kickoff to a production-ready release.