docs.search("indie, founder, rails, successful") => Jason Bosco / Typesense

In this episode, Jeremy and Jess sit down with Jason Bosco, co-founder of Typesense, an open source, typo-tolerant search engine. Jason shares how he and his co-founder committed to simply showing up every day, putting in consistent effort, no matter how small, and how that patience eventually compounded into success.

We dive into Jason’s journey from VP of Engineering at Dollar Shave Club to building his own company, why Typesense has chosen to stay customer-funded instead of VC-funded, and how open source has been central to their mission of democratizing search. Along the way, Jason offers insights on perseverance, product focus, and the long game of building an indie software company and how it can all good and difficult can take a toll on health.

Jason Bosco

CEO & Co-Founder at Typesense

Previously VP of Engineering at Dollar Shave Club Previously VP of Technology at Verishop

• https://x.com/jasonbosco
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonbosco/
• https://www.crunchbase.com/person/jason-bosco
• https://github.com/jasonbosco

Featured Videos

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cdH1F6zbIg
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ER8FDiCMPCY
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QymF4NUmALM
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNLA8RCrYwk
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4Z3BYwizzw

Featured Links

• https://typesense.org/about
• https://typesense.org/blog/
• To Raise VC, or Not. Choosing The Road Less Travelled.
• The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday
• We bought HUNDREDS of billboards in San Francisco, for our open source product
• https://gorelay.co/t/pursuing-an-open-source-bootstrapped-long-run-path-towards-serving-the-fortune-1-million-with-typesense-s-co-founder-jason-bosco/915
• https://livecycle.io/blogs/dev-x-project-jason-bosco/

In this episode, Jess and Jeremy chat with Matt Swanson, CTO of Arrows, author of Boring Rails, and host of the YAGNI podcast. In addition to his blog, Matt shares a lot of his knowledge about product development on Twitter. We talk with Matt about how Arrows builds software, what it means to be a product engineer, the easiest way for devs to get to $10K MRR, working with generative AI tools, and how and why he publishes technical content online.

Related Links
Matt's Twitter
Boring Rails
YAGNI podcast
Arrows

Rhiannon Payne and Justin Bowen are one of the very few couples working together in the Ruby and Rails ecosystem. Justin is a long-time Rails developer, consultant, and AI and computer vision specialist. Rhiannon runs Sea Foam Media and is the Marketing Director for Ruby Central. Together they are building Active Agents, an AI framework for Rails. We chat about their professional backgrounds (Justin's in software development, Rhiannon's in marketing), how they collaborate as a couple, the birth of Active Agents, and AI in the Ruby/Rails landscape. Oh, and we may have a cameo from a few cats!

Rhiannon
Twitter
Bluesky
The Remote Work Era Book

Justin
Twitter
Bluesky

Active Agents
Website
activeagent gem on GitHub (latest release: v0.4.0)
Documentation (new)
Discord Invite

Sea Foam Media
Website
Twitter