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by aculver 1159 days ago
Wow, hi everyone! Was just about to walk over for the first day of RailsConf when a friend let me know we were #1 here! Honored!

I'm the original creator of Bullet Train, although a number of people now work on it. It's been a fun journey to this point!

When I first started building Bullet Train, it was a relatively unique offering. There weren't that many full-featured "SaaS starter kits" out there, although there was some prior art. The biggest inspiration for Bullet Train was what Laravel Spark was at the time. In fact, one of the guys who had got me into Rails in the first place had started building his next product on Laravel so they could take advantage of Spark!

These days there are an abundance of SaaS starter kits available in most ecosystems. I've had the pleasure of meeting and interacting with the authors of a bunch of high-quality starter kits built in different languages and frameworks and some of them have told me they were inspired in part by Bullet Train. I love that.

If you're interested in Rails and SaaS, we're running a conference in Athens, Greece on June 1–2 this year and we'd love to have you! https://railssaas.com

Happy to answer any questions anyone may have!

6 comments

It's so amazing to see how the tech community inspires and learns from one another. Laravel found inspiration from Rails. Then, seeing Bullet Train was inspired back from the Laravel ecosystem with Laravel Spark.

In the past, I was jealous of the Ruby ecosystem with an extremely large community (the grass is always greener on the other side?). And, thinking the JavaScript ecosystem was left behind, but now I am hopeful that the JavaScript ecosystem has finally caught up.

I can totally confirm Bullet Train is an inspiration for many SaaS Boilerplates. I was personally inspired by Bullet Train to build Nextless.js [1], a Next.js based SaaS Boilerplate, bringing SaaS starter kits in Next.js/React/JavaScript ecosystem.

--- [1]: https://nextlessjs.com

I was privileged enough to attend Andrew's LA RailsSaas conference and it was outstanding.

If you're in the EU running a SaaS or developing with Rails you should at the very least check out his upcoming one in Greece.

I don't want to derail but have to ask, is the theme/template for your site custom? It's beautiful.

Edit: To clarify I mean the marketing site linked here, not the starter template.

Thank you! This was the work of Tamik Soziev, who also created the original theme for Bullet Train itself. I'll make sure to pass on the note!
> I don't want to derail

Too late - that train’s already left the station.

yea @aculver, its really beautiful!
Hi we are exploring BT today

I'm trying to move a company that is now selling simple wordpress websites (and doing actually pretty well, do to their super expertise with design/graphic and marketing) to a 'higher' step with RoR, and BT seems something that may help them a lot approaching Rails.

Can anybody suggests resources, links, advice on how to start this new adventure?

ColdBox is a seventeen year old open source ColdFusion framework originally inspired by Laravel. The parent company is Ortus and they have offices in North America, Central America and Europe.

https://www.coldbox.org/

The "Join the Mailing List" link on the home page is dead now btw.
Thank you for pointing this out! Fixing now!