Case Study: humanpredictions achieves rapid MVP launch and scalable growth with Heroku

Heroku’s Free Plan Enabled Speed to Market and Scale for Recruiting App

humanpredictions is a Chicago-based startup (founded 2015) that uses machine learning on daily-indexed public data to surface professionals likely open to new jobs and recommend personalized outreach. As a bootstrapped team they needed to build an MVP quickly, contain costs, and prove commercial viability while preparing to scale.

They launched on Heroku’s free plan, getting an MVP with ~10k profiles to market fast, then moved to paid dynos, Heroku Postgres, background workers, Elastic Cloud and Redis for performance, and a second app server for rolling deploys. This approach kept DevOps overhead low, validated early customers, supported growth (with Kafka on the roadmap), and helped earn industry recognition as they scaled.

humanpredictions

Elliott Garms

Co-Founder