Why Rails Changed the Life of Whop's CTO: An Experience from a $140M-per-Month Startup.

During Rails World 2025 in Amsterdam, Jack Sharkey, CTO and co-founder of Whop, shared his fascinating journey as a startup founder and his relationship with Ruby on Rails. His testimony is particularly interesting because he tested several technologies before finding the one that would propel his company to success.

From Skepticism to Conviction: Jack's Technological Journey

The Years Before Rails

Jack started programming at 13, but he didn't discover Rails until he was 20. During those seven years, he mainly worked with Node.js and Express. And guess what? He had never used a relational database. Yes, you read that right! (We all have our blind spots, rest assured.)

With Express, every new application was a bit of a grind. Jack had to parse JSON manually and perform all sorts of manipulations just to access the parameters of his requests. Imagine having to reinvent the wheel every time...

The Rails Revelation

When Jack discovered Rails and its ability to simply access the params, it was a revelation. But the real transformation came with two key elements:

1. The Simplicity of API Endpoints

Creating API endpoints with Rails is astonishingly simple compared to other frameworks. Where you had to manually configure parsing, route handling, and data validation, Rails offers all of that 'batteries included' (as the jargon goes).

2. Active Record and Data Modeling

For Jack, Active Record was the real game-changer. It was his first experience with PostgreSQL and a powerful ORM (Object-Relational Mapping). Active Record lets you model data in a way that naturally aligns with how we think about the relationships between concepts.

For example, instead of writing complex SQL queries, you can simply do:

This intuitive approach makes building features and projects much more logical and fast.

Whop Today: The Numbers That Speak

Impressive Growth

After four years in existence, Whop shows remarkable statistics:

1. $140 million in transactions processed last month
2. A team of 15 engineers only
3. Only 3 to 4 back-end engineers to manage all that volume

These figures are even more impressive when you realize that Rails allows such a small team to handle such a load. Jack himself still codes 70 to 80% of his time, which shows the productivity enabled by the framework.

Stability as a Priority

For a platform where creators depend on Whop to generate their revenue, availability is crucial. Jack can now say with 90% certainty that the platform will not go down during this interview. (Okay, we won't tempt fate either!)

This stability wasn't achieved overnight. The team has:

1. Changed data stores 3 or 4 times
2. Migrated the infrastructure twice
3. Rebuilt countless features

But through all these changes, Rails remained the constant.

The Future Vision: The Developer App Store

Democratizing Online Entrepreneurship

Whop's mission is clear: to enable anyone to make money online. The team bets that the traditional 9am-5pm is disappearing in favor of a renewed entrepreneurship.

The App Ecosystem

The main strategy to achieve this? A developer app store that allows developers to create applications on the Whop platform. These apps can take two forms:

Applications B2B

Tools to help creators:

1. Reduce their churn (attrition rate)
2. Find new customers
3. Manage their business more efficiently

B2B2C Applications

Apps that creators can then sell to their own clients. For example, an app that connects a FanDuel account to display verified bets in the sports betting sphere, thereby strengthening end-consumer trust.

A Message to Startup Founders

Iteration as the Key to Success

For Jack, the ability to iterate quickly is the key to a successful startup. You never really know what you want to build at the start. You have to listen to your customers and keep moving forward, again and again.

Why Choose Rails?

Jack was himself skeptical at first: It's old, no one uses it anymore; we must use modern stacks! Yet deciding to try Rails was one of his best decisions.

Concrete advantages

1. Exceptional productivity: Rails lets you iterate faster than any other framework Jack has used
2. Joy of development: Developing with Rails is simply enjoyable (and yes, that matters!)
3. Real scaling: Whop processes $140M per month with a small team
4. Convention over configuration: Fewer decisions to make, more time to create

A Marketing Problem

Jack admits it: Rails has a perception problem. Many founders don't choose it, but he believes the Rails community can do better to showcase its power. And testimonials like his contribute to that!

Conclusion

The story of Jack Sharkey and Whop is a concrete demonstration that Rails remains an exceptional choice for startups in 2025. With the right mindset (a scrappy team and motivated builders) and the right tool (Rails), it is possible to build a platform handling hundreds of millions of dollars with a small team.

For junior developers who are still unsure which technology to learn, this testimony should reassure you: Rails isn't 'old'; it is proven. It isn't 'outdated'; it is mature. And above all, it will allow you to build quickly while maintaining a maintainable codebase in the long term.

As Jack says: once you discover Rails, you will realize it's the superpower you need to grow your startup.

Find the full discussion on YouTube: