Making the Inc. 500: Four Years of Building Intridea

It started with three people and a conviction that web development could be done differently. Four years ago, we set out to build an agile, modern web development company focused on Ruby on Rails. Today, we’re nearly 50 developers, project managers, QA engineers, and innovators. And today, we found out we made the Inc. 500 list.

Inc. lists us at #335 in the top 500 fastest-growing companies in America, and places us at #33 for our industry and location. That means we’re the 33rd fastest-growing privately-held software company in the United States. Four years ago it was three of us around a table. I’m still getting used to the rest of that sentence.

The Rails Revolution

When we started Intridea in 2007, Rails was still relatively new. The framework had been around for a few years, but it hadn’t reached the mainstream yet. Most companies were still building on PHP or Java, and the idea of convention over configuration was still controversial. But we saw something in Rails that felt different: it was elegant, it was fast to develop with, and it had a community that was passionate about building great software.

We bet everything on Rails. We built our entire consultancy around it, we contributed to open source projects, we wrote blog posts and gave talks. We believed that Rails was the future of web development, and we wanted to be part of that future.

The bet paid off. Despite the relative infancy of the language and framework, the demand for Rails development has been extraordinarily high. Even in a declining economy, companies were looking for ways to build better software faster, and Rails was the answer. We found ourselves in the right place at the right time, but more importantly, we had built the expertise and the team to deliver.

Building the Team

Going from three people to nearly 50 took more than hiring. It took finding people who share your vision, who care about writing good code, who want to solve interesting problems. We’ve been lucky to attract some of the best Rails developers in the world, people who are passionate about the framework and about building elegant solutions.

And the team goes beyond developers. We’ve built out project managers who understand both the technical and business sides of software development. We’ve added QA engineers who ensure quality without slowing down delivery. We’ve brought in designers who think about user experience from day one. It’s a complete team, and that’s what allows us to take on complex projects and deliver them successfully.

The Rails Community

The framework is only half of what makes Rails special. The other half is the community. The Rails ecosystem is made up of hearty and enterprising engineers who are continually creating open source plugins and gems, documentation, and patches. They’re ensuring that we can all have a future working with a language that we love.

If you look at the advancements that have been made in just a few short years, you’d think Rails developers don’t sleep. In fact, I’m not sure they do. The pace of innovation in the Rails community is incredible, and we’ve been proud to contribute to that. We’ve built open source tools like OmniAuth that thousands of developers use every day. We’ve written documentation, answered questions on Stack Overflow, given talks at conferences. The community has given us so much, and we’ve tried to give back.

An Elite List

The recognition matters to me for a specific reason: it suggests you can build a successful company by doing great work, treating clients well, and contributing to the community. We didn’t get here by cutting corners. We got here by writing the best code we could and learning everything we could in the process.

The Inc. 500 list includes some of America’s most iconic companies: Microsoft, Oracle, Zappos, Patagonia, E*Trade, Intuit. Companies that went on to reshape their industries. It’s strange to see our name anywhere near theirs.

But making the list doesn’t change anything about the day-to-day. Tomorrow we sit down and write code, same as today.

Making the Inc. 500 during a recession says something about Rails itself. Companies needed to build software faster and more cheaply, and the framework’s emphasis on convention over configuration and rapid development gave them a way to do it. We happened to be standing where that demand landed, with the team to meet it.

What’s Next

The path here has not been easy. Four years of working day and night, of close calls and lessons learned the expensive way.

So what is next? More satisfied clients. Well-implemented web solutions. Happy engineers. More open source contributions. The same work, done the same way.

We’re grateful to our talented and fiercely dedicated team, to the hundreds of clients we’ve created lasting relationships with, and to the Ruby and Rails communities. Without them, none of this would have been possible.