Case Study: SmileBack achieves rapid launch and $1.4M ARR with Heroku

SmileBack Goes from Proof-of-Concept to Million Dollar Business on Heroku

SmileBack, founded in 2014, is a simple customer-satisfaction platform that captures post-support sentiment with one-click emoji responses. The team needed to move quickly from proof-of-concept to production, handle ever-growing volumes of feedback data, and iterate on features without building or managing their own infrastructure or hiring dedicated DevOps.

They built and launched on the fully managed Heroku platform — using Heroku Postgres for scalable storage, Dataclips for easy data sharing, and add-ons like Sentry and SendGrid — delivering an MVP in weeks and safe, performant queries for new features. The result: near-zero downtime, minimal operational burden, faster product development (e.g., word-cloud analytics), and growth to a multi-million-dollar business (~$1.4M ARR).

SmileBack

Henrik Heimbuerger

Co-Founder & Former CTO