Rails, hacking, and Stripe as a scoreboard: Marc Köhlbrugge’s playbook
In preparation for my RailsConf talk, I’ve been talking to founders who are choosing Rails, and Marc Köhlbrugge was an obvious choice. I’d followed his takes on building for a while, so when he agreed to chat, I expected a quick call.
Instead, our conversation went deep: entrepreneurship, the art of shipping before you’re ready, and the real (occasionally messy) work behind making products people care about. Marc’s insights were simply too good, so I thought it’d be cool to share it as a separate interview.
If you’ve ever wondered what happens when a teenage hacker from back in the day refuses to outgrow their curiosity and decides to build businesses instead of just breaking things—meet Marc Köhlbrugge. Marc is the founder of BetaList and Startup Jobs, a Rails devotee, and a serial builder who’s been quietly (and sometimes loudly) launching products from his base in sunny Portugal.
Marc’s story isn’t the usual venture-backed story of a “founder-product love at first sight”. Instead, it’s a series of experiments, hacks, and a whole portfolio of products and businesses. I met with Marc to talk about the reasons he keeps choosing Rails, and what he wishes existed in the Ruby ecosystem.
Childhood: MS-DOS, hacking games, and the joy of deleting your own files
Marc’s first brush with computers was less “Silicon Valley prodigy” and more “accidental sysadmin.” At nine, he was navigating MS-DOS in English (a language he didn’t speak yet), and by twelve, he’d hacked a game leaderboard—purely for the thrill of seeing his name at the top.
Many years later this inspired Marc to create Highscore Money which lets people pay to get into the highscore list.
“I found a website about hacking, and it had a frame that showed some files and folders. I tried to delete something—naturally, I deleted it on my own machine. Lesson learned!”
The real turning point? Reporting a security hole in the Dutch equivalent of Amazon at age 14. Instead of a lawsuit, he got a phone call from the CEO, a job offer, and a generous voucher.
The unpolished launch: why Marc ships before he’s ready
Marc’s approach to product development is refreshingly unromantic. Most of his projects don’t work out, and he’s fine with that. The real mistake, he says, is getting attached to a product for too long before you’ve even found out if anyone cares.
“If you’re not getting Stripe notifications, maybe something’s wrong. Ship it while it’s still obviously unfinished—people are more forgiving, and you’re less likely to take criticism personally. If you wait until it’s polished, you’re just protecting your ego.”
Marc points out how founders are great at finding semi-valid reasons to inflate the scope and put off launching and colliding with reality. This means working in the dark and making a lot of guesses.
BetaList, for example, started in 2010 as a Tumblr blog to get beta testers for another app. It was a hack to pitch to Techcrunch and get eyeballs, not a business plan. But it turned out to be useful for many people, and it’s still live and well (on Rails 8).
Rails in 2025: AI, APIs, and the missing pieces
Marc is enthusiastic about AI’s potential with Rails given that strong conventions really help AI to write and understand code.
“I’m proud that we already have a great book in the Rails community about patterns with AI–by Obi Fernandes” (See here for more.)
The lack of Ruby SDKs and code examples for many new APIs and tools is frustrating—especially in AI and web3.
Marc points out the missing UI component libraries in the Hotwire space (we discussed rubyui.com)–something with the copy-paste friendly approach of TailwindUI and with Stimulus controllers attached.
Browser agents are quickly becoming the thing, and we could benefit from something like Manus but integrated into Rails and built on top of existing open source like rubycdp.
“I like Kamal for deployment, but I miss the little charts Heroku used to give you. Sometimes I just want a dashboard, not a treasure hunt through SSH and logs.”
Finally, we touched the topic of email design: generating ERB email templates that work across email clients without issues is still problematic and unclear. Marc uses Maizzle to generate HTML, then asks AI to convert it to ERB. It’s a workaround, not a solution.
The Ruby Community: passionate, opinionated, and (mostly) friendly
Marc runs a community of makers and insists there’s something different about Ruby developers.
“Everyone I’ve met who uses Ruby is passionate. Maybe even a little too passionate. I’ve never met a Ruby developer I didn’t like—maybe because it’s not the default choice anymore, so you know they’re here because they want to be.”
Marc’s advice isn’t about “hustle” or “grit.” It’s about curiosity, speed, and the willingness to be wrong in public. So, if you’re still polishing your MVP, maybe it’s time to hit “deploy” and see what the world thinks.
