The $1B Rails Startup: Scaling from 0 to Unicorn in Four Years

Introduction

Jack Sharkey's talk at Rails World 2025 details the journey of scaling a startup to unicorn status using Ruby on Rails as the primary framework, defying prevalent beliefs that Rails is outdated and incapable of scaling for modern, high-traffic applications.

Main Topic

The central theme is the capability and competitive edge provided by Ruby on Rails in building and scaling successful startups rapidly, as demonstrated by the company's journey from inception to processing over $1B in transactions within four years.

Key Points

Challenging Rails Stereotypes:
- Initial skepticism around Rails: Many believed Rails was too old, slow, and unscalable.
- Jack initially resisted using Rails but found it to be a key driver for rapid product development.
The Power of Iteration:
- Rails enabled Jack's team to quickly build and iterate on products, leading to multiple failed startups but ultimately to success.
- Iterative development and direct user feedback were crucial; the team built and discarded over 100 features before finding the right direction.
Startup Formation and Growth:
- Grew from a niche product selling software licenses in a Discord community to a full consumer platform with chat, real-time notifications, payments, and an app store.
- Quickly achieved major milestones—such as processing $25K in the first month and scaling to 12 million users.
Technical and Scaling Challenges:
- Early growing pains included handling flash drops, website outages, and frequent database troubles.
- Relied on rapid hiring and resourcefulness (famously sending an Uber to a developer’s house to resolve outages).
- Scaled infrastructure from Heroku Postgres to self-hosted solutions, AWS Aurora, and eventually to PlanetScale MySQL with zero downtime.
Rails as a "One-Person Framework":
- Demonstrated how even novice programmers (e.g., a former support agent turned lead engineer) could quickly become productive with Rails.
- The company operates a large-scale, feature-rich platform with just 15 engineers, of whom only 3-4 manage the Rails codebase.
Ecosystem and Real Impact:
- Rails development enabled rapid experimentation and daily survival, directly impacting thousands of entrepreneurs who rely on the platform to earn a living.
- Emphasized tangible, second-order effects: helping users launch businesses and change lives.

Notable Examples and Anecdotes

Building a Rails app to appeal a college rejection and succeeding.
House "hacking" era: living in shared spaces, shipping code rapidly.
The Uber-to-the-dev anecdote: resourcefulness in crisis.
The career progression of a novice developer (Jackson) to backend lead.

Conclusions and Takeaways

Rails excels not by avoiding scaling problems, but by enabling startups to move fast enough to reach them.
Scaling issues are universal across frameworks; Rails simply gets teams earning and learning faster.
Community call: more startups should adopt Rails, share their journeys, and help rejuvenate the ecosystem by targeting Gen Z developers and promoting accessible, iterative building.
Final challenge: The speaker offers direct support to new Rails startups to encourage active building in the community.

Final Thought

Rails remains a powerful framework for quickly bringing startup ideas to life, fostering innovation, and directly impacting real users' lives through code.

The $1B Rails Startup: Scaling from 0 to Unicorn in Four Years
Jack Sharkey • Amsterdam, Netherlands • Talk

Date: September 04, 2025
Published: Mon, 15 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000
Announced: Tue, 20 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We started when Rails was "dead." Everyone said it wouldn't scale, wasn't fast enough, and that no one used it anymore. Four years later, we've processed $1B+, handle 150k RPM, and run a feature-complete marketplace with real-time chat, notifications, payments, and live streaming - all on a Rails monolith with just 15 engineers.

This talk breaks down how Rails gave us a competitive edge, the technical and hiring challenges we faced, and what Rails needs to improve to stay the best framework for startups.

Rails World 2025