Case Study: Sugarmate achieves scalable, reliable growth, turning a side project into a business with Heroku

Sugarmate’s Founder Turns His Side Project into a Business on Heroku

Sugarmate is a companion app for continuous glucose monitors created by founder Josh Juster to give people with type 1 diabetes real‑time stats, alerts (like an overnight “Below Normal Call”), and cross‑platform access on web, iOS, Apple Watch and Alexa. The challenge was turning a personal project into a reliable, scalable service that could process continuous streams of data, deliver life‑critical alerts, and grow a user base without a large ops team or costly infrastructure choices.

Sugarmate’s backend runs on Heroku — a Ruby on Rails app on ~30 dynos with Heroku Postgres, MemCachier, Redis/Heroku Redis, Sidekiq job queues, HireFire for on‑demand dynos, and monitoring add‑ons. Heroku’s managed platform removed operational burden, enabled easy scaling, let the small team focus on features, and supported billions of readings and thousands of users as Sugarmate evolved from side project to business preparing for paid offerings.

Sugarmate

Josh Juster

Founder