Chris Oliver

Chris Oliver is a self-taught programmer who has been coding since seventh grade and became a fixture of the Ruby on Rails community. He founded GoRails, a screencast and tutorial site that teaches Rails developers how to solve real-world problems, and built a small product business around it.

His products include Jumpstart Pro, a Rails SaaS template that gives founders authentication, payments, teams and more out of the box, and Hatchbox, a simple, inexpensive hosting and deployment service for Ruby and Rails apps. He also maintains popular open-source gems such as the Pay gem for Stripe and other payment processors, and co-hosts the Remote Ruby podcast.

Oliver appeared on the Indie Hackers podcast to explain how he grew this portfolio to over $1 million in revenue as a solo founder, mostly by teaching and building tools for the same audience.