Gigalixir

For the past year, I've been heads down in Gigalixir keeping all the balls juggling in the air at the same time. One thing that's fun about acquisitions is they are 0->100 km/hr in an instant. It's not a slow ramp up as your product or service gains traction.

Unfortunately, that means no in-depth updates until now for the community. I wrote up some historical information below from the past 15 months just for some context of "how we got here...".

Going forward, I'm excited to share more about what it's like trying to continue growing a promising platform with an engaged engineering customer base...

Taking over a project of this scale can be daunting and...well, scary to be honest. Nobody wants to mess up anything that's already working. To be honest, I've had a lot of anxiety over the year and really had to double down on making sure we were tackling the most important and urgent projects in the most appropriate order.

We all know stories of acquiring the wrong company and your money goes poof. I knew from the start this was not one of those companies, however what if I couldn't steward the business forward and tripped us into some irrecoverable pit? This concern can lead to some sleepless nights.

By the end of the year, we could breath a little easier. We'd survived 12 months of continuous operation, passed through our first real scalability challenge, and were making daily improvements to the platform that customers requested. We'd hardened the security of the platform, instituted more through end-to-end testing, and learned more of what the Elixir community needs to succeed in their own projects.

In the end, that's what makes the business so exciting...to see the amazing projects our customers are deploying. Medical, retail, infrastructure, crypto, educational, etc.

Like I always say to my friends, "We run a portfolio of software cloud infrastructure companies. I realize we're not curing cancer, but some of our customers are, and I feel honored to be just a small part of that eco-system."

The business was still growing, and some of our largest customers were starting to really test the scalability of the original design.

It's no secret that most side-projects aren't architecturally designed to achieve real dynamic growth and not buckle at some point. Although frustrating, it's just part of the territory operating a growing technical company.

We started to hit some of these scalability issues in the middle of 2022. Of course, they affect our heaviest users first. Nobody ever wants their best clients to suffer any issues - it's best if we never hear from them except to ask "growth oriented" questions - and we spent many nights working through these issues to address how to fix them long term.

It took a while to iron everything out, but we got to spend a lot of time talking with our heaviest usage customers, learn more about what they really want out of the service, and everyone was left better off after these rather exciting events.

At midnight on New Years Eve, typically a slow time for project deployments, the new team assumed the role of primary engineering on Gigalixir. Jesse stayed on board for a year backing up operations, development, and helping customers with unique situations that inevitably occur over the course of a year and a responsibility transfer.

Fingers crossed, but everything went smoothly with the handover. There were a few hiccups, but they were all with regard to internal business operations (like billing, bank accounts, etc) and the actual Gigalixir service kept running along just like normal.

Whew...I can finally sleep restfully through the night again, so I hope.

When a project that runs mission-critical apps changes hands, there needs to be a serious set of discussions to guarantee that the responsibilities are transfered smoothly and seamlessly. Ideally, customers won't even notice the transfer took place and the new operators can slip into their role, pick right up where the prior operators left off, and the train keeps running on the tracks nice and smoothly.

We all know that's hard, it's hard to bring new people into a project, especially one where the knowledge is mostly in notebooks, brains, and historical domain expertise.

That's why Jesse reached out months before he was ready to hand over the project to potential stewards of his Gigalixir project.

Discussions about critical infrastructure, what tasks needs to be done no-matter-what to keep the platform functioning, and which customers needs special care are some of the first steps kicked off in October 2021.

Like every "overnight" success, Gigalixir grew slowly - but steadily - from nothing to becoming a profitable platform in the 2020-2021 time frame.

For the first three quarters of 2021, Gigalixir generated gross revenue of ~$395K and was growing at a CAGR of roughly 100% from FY18 to FY21.

In August 2021, Gigalixir had its best month with its highest ever MRR of c.$43K.

Jesse felt he had taken Gigalixir from just an idea to a viable business and was ready to pass the reigns to someone who could help push Gigalixir to the next evolutionary step.

Way, way back in 2017, Jesse identified a need for Elixir developers to have a Elixir-friendly platform to deploy their apps online. He created the only platform that fully supports Elixir and Phoenix without requiring users to build production infrastructure or deal with maintenance and operations.