Sam Altman has a betting pool for the first one-person billion-dollar company. I'm not chasing billions. I'm chasing something better: profitable companies built by tiny teams that actually ship.

That's why I started Ruby Growth Labs.

After two decades of building software—from iOS apps to ad tech platforms to Rails monoliths—I kept seeing the same pattern. Companies hire too many people too fast. They burn cash on coordination instead of creation. They optimize for headcount when they should optimize for output.

The best products I've shipped came from small teams. Two or three people who knew the domain, had strong opinions, and could move without waiting for approval. AI just made that approach 10x more powerful.

Jeffrey Bussgang at Harvard calls it "botscaling"—scaling without growing headcount. There's a Tiny Teams Hall of Fame listing companies with handful of employees generating hundreds of millions in revenue. Cursor hit $100M ARR with 20 people. Midjourney did $200M with 10. Lovable reached $10M ARR in two months with 15 employees.

The playbook is simple: Do what you do best. Let AI handle the rest.

But here's what the AI optimists miss: you still need someone who knows how to build. Someone who's shipped production systems. Someone who can tell when Claude is hallucinating versus when it's giving you a shortcut that actually works.

That's the gap Ruby Growth Labs fills.

Ruby Growth Labs is a hybrid: part fractional CTO, part product studio, part incubator. We build two types of companies:

SaaS Platforms. Subscription businesses with recurring revenue. We handle architecture, development, and deployment. You focus on customers and domain expertise. We get to revenue fast—usually within 90 days of starting.

Publishing Platforms. Content businesses monetized through advertising, subscriptions, or both. We've built systems that generate hundreds of niche apps and sites from a single codebase. Programmatic revenue at scale without programmatic headcount.

The tech stack is consistent: Ruby on Rails, Hotwire, native iOS and Android when mobile matters. Boring technology that works. AI-assisted development that accelerates everything without replacing judgment.

Rails is a 20-year-old framework that powers Shopify, GitHub, Basecamp, and thousands of profitable businesses. It's battle-tested at scale and optimized for developer productivity.

Here's why Rails wins for tiny teams:

Speed to market. Rails conventions mean less decision fatigue. You're not debating folder structure or state management. You're shipping features.

Full-stack simplicity. One language, one framework, one deploy. No microservices complexity until you actually need it (you probably don't).

AI-native development. LLMs are exceptionally good at Ruby. The syntax is readable. The patterns are well-documented. Claude can write a Rails controller faster than most junior developers—and I can review it faster than I can explain the requirements.

Mature ecosystem. Authentication, payments, background jobs, admin panels—gems exist for everything. We're not reinventing wheels.

Ruby 4.0 just shipped with ZJIT and improved concurrency. Rails 8 brought Solid Queue and Solid Cache. The framework keeps getting better while staying simple.

You've seen the demos. Type a prompt, watch an app materialize. Lovable, Bolt, Replit—they make it look like anyone can ship software now.

Here's what the demos don't show:

Getting to 90% is easy. Getting to 100% is brutal. Vibe coding tools excel at scaffolding. They'll give you a working prototype fast. But production software isn't a prototype. It's the last 10%—edge cases, error handling, performance under load, security hardening—that separates a demo from a business. Without a developer who understands what's actually happening, you'll hit walls you can't prompt your way around.

You don't own your code or infrastructure. When you build on these platforms, you're a tenant. Your app runs on their servers, depends on their tooling, lives inside their ecosystem. They control uptime. They control pricing. They control whether your business stays online tomorrow.

And they will charge a premium. For hosting. For compute. For the privilege of using their platform. Margins that could be yours become margins that are theirs.

I've seen founders get locked into platforms that tripled pricing after they'd built their entire business on top. No migration path. No leverage. Just pay or die.

Ruby Growth Labs builds on open infrastructure. Rails apps deploy anywhere—your own servers, any cloud provider, bare metal if you want it. You own the code. You control the costs. You can walk away from any vendor without rewriting your product.

That's not ideology. That's risk management.

My ideal engagement looks like this:

You: The domain expert. You know the market, the customers, the problem. You're the CEO, founder, or product visionary.

Me: The technical co-founder you rent instead of recruit. I architect the system, make technology decisions, and ensure we're building something that scales without imploding.

One developer: A senior Rails engineer (often from my network) who executes the build. AI-assisted but human-directed.

That's it. Three people. Clear ownership. No standups with twelve attendees debating story points.

We move fast because there's no coordination overhead. We make decisions in Slack threads, not steering committees. We deploy daily instead of quarterly.

The blitzscaling era trained founders to chase growth metrics that would impress VCs. Users. Engagement. TAM. Anything but profit.

I optimize for revenue per employee. Can this business sustain itself? Can it pay the people who build it? Can it grow without burning cash?

That means charging early. Validating willingness to pay before building elaborate features. Launching MVPs that make money on day one.

It also means saying no to ideas that require massive scale to work. If your business model needs a million users to break even, we're probably not a fit. If you can get to $10K MRR with a hundred customers, let's talk.

Twenty years of shipping software. I've built iOS apps that hit the App Store charts. Ad tech systems processing billions of bid requests. Rails applications serving millions of users.

I've also failed at plenty. Hired too fast. Built features nobody wanted. Burned runway on premature optimization. Those lessons cost real money. Now they're part of the service.

The fractional model means you get senior judgment without senior salary. I'm typically engaged 10-20 hours a week—enough to make real architectural decisions and unblock your team, not so much that I become a bottleneck.

For the right ideas, I go deeper. Ruby Growth Labs incubates companies where I'm a technical co-founder with equity, not just a consultant with invoices.

These are businesses I believe in enough to bet my time on. Usually in spaces I know: ad tech, mobile apps, developer tools, content platforms.

The structure varies—sometimes sweat equity, sometimes revenue share, sometimes traditional equity splits. What stays constant is alignment: I only win if the company wins.

You might be a good fit if:

You have domain expertise and a clear problem to solve, but no technical co-founder.

You want to move fast without building a big team.

You're comfortable with AI-assisted development but want human judgment on architecture.

You're optimizing for revenue, not valuation theater.

You can make decisions quickly and don't need consensus from a board.

The tiny teams era is here. AI made it possible. But technology alone doesn't build companies—people do. People who know what to build, how to build it, and when to ship.

That's what Ruby Growth Labs offers. Two decades of experience compressed into a fractional engagement. Rails and AI as force multipliers. Small teams that punch above their weight.

If you're building something and need a technical partner who's done this before, reach out. Let's see if we're a fit.

The billion-dollar one-person company is a fun thought experiment. I'm more interested in the million-dollar three-person company. Those are real, they're happening now, and I'm helping build them.