On Rails Nadia Odunayo & Scaling Rails for Millions of Users as a Solo Dev
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Jul 28, 2025 Nadia Odunayo, founder and solo developer of The StoryGraph, shares insights from running a book-tracking platform with over 4 million users. She discusses the journey from Heroku to YugabyteDB for scaling, and the technical challenges of in-app purchases across multiple platforms. Nadia emphasizes the significance of user feedback while developing mobile apps with Turbo and the hurdles of app discoverability in a competitive landscape. Through her experience, she highlights the value of the Rails community and what it means to be a solo developer by choice.
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Turbo Empowers Solo Devs
- Turbo is the key Rails ecosystem feature letting Nadia power web, iOS, and Android with one app.
- It enabled her to maintain StoryGraph as a one-woman dev team with a shared backend.
Choosing Turbo Native Over PWAs
- Nadia and her co-founder decided against building native apps and embraced Turbo Native early on despite its beta state.
- This choice was influenced by the difficulty and user perception issues with PWAs.
In-App Purchase Challenges
- In-app purchases were the biggest challenge due to differing iOS and Android requirements and device-based purchase tokens.
- Nadia spent weeks solving how to link purchases on devices to user accounts in the Rails backend.
