Welcome back to startups for the rest of us. This is episode 556. I'm Rob Walling. This week,

I talk with Adam McCrea, the founder of Rails Auto Scale, about growing from zero to 300,000 in

ARR over the course of three years as a Heroku add-on. So for context, Rails Auto Scale is an add-on that

manages your dynos or your servers

for you if you run Rails. It removes the guesswork and the babysitting typically involved in scaling

a production web app. And frankly, everyone I know who uses Heroku and has rails running on it

uses Rails Auto Scale. So he's built himself a great single founder business.

And he applied to Tiny Seed for our Spring 2021 batch that just started a couple months ago.

And he's now part of the 18 companies that are in that batch.

So this is a great conversation.

And what I enjoy about it is Adam is still a single founder with no employees. And so he really is in that

bootstrapped, mostly bootstrapped mindset. You know, even though he's part of tiny seed, he's still

thinking through, you know, how do I continue to grow this app? How do I deal with the platform

risk of being on Heroku? And even launching a freemium plan that he just launched last week. So we cover

all that and more in our conversation. But before we dive into that, I got an email from someone who I'm

going to keep anonymous. And he said, hi, Rob, we haven't met, but I got turned down to your podcast

early on in my bootstrapped life. Startups for the rest of us was my go-to listen on my

morning walks with my dog. It helped encourage me when I wasn't sure we were moving fast enough.

It helped me learn about traction, growth stages, and lots of things. I love the transparency

and honesty in the interviews. I recently sold my 80K ARR SaaS company, so that's $80,000 in annual

recurring revenue for $1.6 million split between

me and my co-founder. We're also both making a great salary and the post-acquisition journey

...