How Sidekiq makes $80,000 a month | Hacker News Reader

How Sidekiq makes $80,000 a month

indiehackers.com

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I'm really fascinated by this career path. As I approach 40 I'm really feeling the pain of the whole developer vs manager dichotomy. The fact is, I've always been comfortable on both sides as a generalist and a team lead, but as my career progresses I'm increasingly feeling the pressure to specialize either by going full-time or specializing in some area that can command a hire salary than the reams of bootcamp dev grads + 5 years experience are claiming. One path would be to found a company and raise money, but I don't really want to spend my brainpower on pitching investors, and the thought of having employees dependent on me feels stressful. I figure I have enough general experience with tech and business that I ought to be able to bootstrap a comfortable solo lifestyle business, but what?

I am pursuing this path. I'm interested in fulfilled by Amazon-type products in addition to software projects. It's truly amazing how "easy" it is run one of these businesses solo in comparison to before the internet.

What do you mean by "fulfilled by Amazon-type products"?

I guess he means Amazons' FBA, their drop shipping service.

one business model out there is: Find a product like vitamins and slap your brand on it put it on amazon and let them fulfill it.

I'm just on the other side of 40 and have similar developer vs manager pains as you. Had my own bootstrapped company for several years, sold it, and lately have been working as an engineering manager at a startup.

Its nice not having the normal worries of a founder but I already have the itch to do something again. Problem is, I never have luck when I go out looking for an idea. The idea usually finds you. You just need to make more opportunities for serendipity.

Also, don't think you have to found a company AND raise money.

> I ought to be able to bootstrap a comfortable solo lifestyle business, but what?

I can't help thinking that his blogging & communications was integral not only the success of the product, but the inception aswell. Something magic happens when you build a flow: more stuff appears from nowhere.

I'm trying to do the same. But after spending the last few months building my own product, I feel like I'm not ready yet. The mistake I made in my career so far was not knowing enough about one industry, it's very difficult to think of a profitable idea if there isn't an industry you know inside out. So I'm considering going back to full time employment, pick an area that I'm really interested and learn that market well.

Pick something that you enjoy ... What does pro athletes like more then money, fame, good looks, and medals ? They like training and competing over all else. So in order to get successful you need to really like what you do. Sometimes it will feel like "work", but that usually means it is work.

Almost $1M as a solo founder - impressive. I wish many years of success and continued revenue for Sidekiq, and hope the founder never succumbs to the dark "we're gonna scale from $1M to $1B" side.

Having met Mike several times, I can assure you that won't happen.

Interesting. What specific things did you observe which led you to that conclusion?

Mike is a very laid back guy - I would have thought he was making more like $8000 a month, not $80,000, based on his general demeanor.

I can second this. Mike is incredibly down to earth. In talking with him (briefly) about Sidekiq as a business, he seemed intent on making sure it remained compatible with his current lifestyle.

Nice interview!

The guy behind indiehackers.com, csallen, is doing an incredible job with the site. Interesting interviews tailor made for hackers, the forum is an interesting place and it's been fascinating to follow his journey which he shares in vivid detail.

We love and use Sidekiq at our org. We even released a gem for it that enables concurrency throttling : https://github.com/sensortower/sidekiq-throttled

There is a bit of a feeling that the community version is somewhat 'nerfed', but it's really Mike's freedom to release the pro/enterprise version.

Though stuff like this: https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq/blob/master/lib/sidekiq/l... scares me~ :)

I suppose we'll have to get used to stuff like this. With UTF8 it's really no different from regular words. Even the Go tour has an example of writing go in Chinese, I think.

This always makes me laugh when I randomly come across it: https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq/blob/659dea9601b3a283d9c8...

The Ruby on Rails podcast recently had Mike Perham on as a guest [0], where they talked a bit more about Sidekiq for those who are interested.

0: http://5by5.tv/rubyonrails/222

How does Sidekiq compare to Celery (apart from being a different language)?

IMHO Sidekiq succeeded, because it works smoother, than other (Ruby-based) task scheduling systems, but can we say the same for Celery? It seems pretty stable and is used in production by many organizations and companies, so the question is, could one do the same for the Python ecosystem, or is Celery just in such a good shape, that it's hard to compete with (considering the same open-core model)?

I really love sidekick and use it in several projects. It's one of those gems that just feel really well put together and complete. And once you add it, it opens up all of these possibilities that you might not have considered previously.

Huge props to the developer, and I'm glad that he's been able to make a living off of this.

Kudos to Mike. I'm glad to see Sidekiq Pro/Enterprise are this successful.

My favorite things about Sidekiq (and how Mike runs it) are:

1) The documentation and wiki pages of Sidekiq. [0]

2) The weekly happy hour chats. [1]

The docs and getting started guides are some of best I've seen in OSS -- everything is well-documented and thought through. There's a lot of good things to emulate here.

In addition to his years of conferences talks, blogging, and helpfulness through over mediums... Mike has a weekly happy hour on Fridays to answer questions. I've done it a couple times and he's been extremely helpful.

[0] https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq/wiki

[1] http://sidekiq.org/support

> When you learn something, blog about it. People admire and trust those who educate others.

So true.

Great article. I feel like "exciting" applications that made it big get far too much of our attention. There's real value you can create by doing something "boring" like a background job framework.

Most business solve boring business needs. Find something you find interesting and exciting, that most people regard as a boring chore - and solve the problem in a tidy, approachable way. Is this a more reliable way to actually make a living on your own?

True that. I had been thinking on similar lines myself. If you observe the restaurant industry, an exciting menu isn't the only thing responsible for its success, sure it night help, but most restaurants will have similar items in their menu. The key is boring things like sustaining the business for sufficient time until it crosses a threshold of patronage and consistency in the taste of the food. So yeah, exciting things are overrated.

Oh damn, that's a lot more than I expected. What a success. That's almost a million dollars per year!

I'm a fan of sidkiq but holding out using a different more atomic redis command for 'pro' is pretty lame - it's closer to 'intentional gimping' than 'open-core'.

Demo-, trial-, hobbyist- and home-editions of software have always been intentionally gimped. From a pure engineering point of view, there's no inherent reason to not give everyone the "best" bits.

Obviously choices have to be made, I don't understand how you can begrudge the guy his living. It's certainly better than random hot developer tool startup that takes VC funding, grows like crazy, then either implodes, gets purchased, or changes their policies so you get screwed by depending on them. With Sidekiq I feel pretty good about relying on it compared to a lot of stuff out there.

I don't begrudge anyone. You can choose a commercial license and get paid. But people don't choose commercial licenses because they want adoption and free support of their tools. I have nothing against 'open-core' with 'expansion-packs' that actually target niches and require development effort - switching redis commands doesn't meet that requirement for me and thus is fails into the category of 'intentional gimping' which I think takes advantage of your community who isn't getting any of that 80k/mo.

That said, Sidekiq is, by no means, egregious here but it's a problem which deserves to be called out.

It's called running a business. And because it's open source, anyone is free to fork Sidekiq and make a version that uses the atomic Redis commands. What people are choosing to pay for is Mike.

You can fork Sdekiq and add the Redis command yourself - actually I'm wondering if someone has already done it.

Sidekiq fetches jobs same as how Resque fetches, which is based on what is easy to do in Redis: LPOP. It's been that way since day one.

Adding reliable fetching is much, much harder than you think. It's taken me years to get it right.

What's the opensource alternative to sidekiq? I am impressed he gets this much money out of developer tools...

Sidekiq is open source (LGPL). There is a free version that is pretty powerful: https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq

https://github.com/resque/resque is an alternative

delayed_job if you don't want to run Redis https://github.com/collectiveidea/delayed_job

Can someone please explain the open-source yet earning? Is it that part of the project is open source and the rest is paid and closed source? How to protect products if they're open source?

From TFA: "My second idea was to move to an open core model: hold back more complex or enterprise-specific features from the OSS version, sell those features as an "expansion pack" on top of Sidekiq. Thus, Sidekiq Pro was born. This proved to be popular and forms my business today."

http://sidekiq.org/products/pro

http://sidekiq.org/products/enterprise

Correct, sidekiq is open source by default. The pro portion of the code base is closed source. Sidekiq is one almost a must have for any Rails app. I'd imagine some people just want to support him and pay the licensing fee. It reminds me of how people were willing to pay for Pivotal Tracker when it was free.

https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq/wiki/Commercial-collabora...

I try to start similar dual-licensing model for my project. But I don't get this. The link page and "In order to unambiguously own and sell Sidekiq commercial products, I must have the copyright associated with the entire codebase. Any code you create which is merged must be owned by me. That's not me trying to be a jerk, that's just the way it works." - it has no legal value. I think all contributions are also LGPL unless contributor gives a consent to give up the change as commercial or public domain etc. In my opinion if Sidekiq Pro is forked from Sidekiq then Pro code should be released under LGPL or he should share part of $80k/monthly with all contributors. What about previous contributors' rights when the project switched to LGPL or dual? Can somebody explain this scheme?

Changes contributed to Sidekiq are LGPL. Changes contributed to Sidekiq Pro must also assign rights for those changes to me so I can sell them. I do have customers who have access to the Sidekiq Pro source code and send me pull requests when they find bugs or enhancements.

Core is open, paid product extends the core, and you access via a private gem server. You have the code at that point, and it's not DRM'ed or encrypted or anything. Nothing to keep you from running it after your subscription stops. Some features, like unique jobs, are covered by other open source extensions to Sidekiq - Mike happily lists those projects inside of Sidekiq's wiki. Much of this openness seems counterintuitive, but it's obviously worked out very well.

Not being of the Ruby world, I did not understand what his licensing method would entail. Amazingly simple, yet profitable. I guess the fear of missing out is what keeps the annual subscriptions re-upped.

I'd say a big part of it is that most of the subscribers have a business to run, and it's generally good practice to stay legal. Besides, if it's working and worth the price, you keep paying.

We give away most of our[0] content free but charge for membership to access PRO content. We also don't DRM or even try that hard to prevent theft. There are some "bad actors", but we keep growing MRR at a rate that is working for us.

Helpful, honest, and generous as a business model can be very effective!

[0] https://egghead.io

By the way, I punched in sidekiq.com without a second thought and the domain is on sale.

Only 3K!

Is this one of those "indiehacker" projects where someone created a XYk $ business over night? It's almost like those spam-adverts that you see occasionally on websites if you don't have a proper blocker " $$$ work from home, see how she earned 5000$ / month".

This guy is really beating his own drum every week.

Anyway there are interesting projects there and good luck to all the people working on those things. I just wish the advertising was less "click baity" and more truthful.

You might be interested in reading this story. Mike has run an enormously value-creating OSS project for several years. It is one of the most interesting technically-oriented business in the Ruby community, and one whose model should be studied with attention by many HN readers.

Can I encourage people to have less reflexive skepticism about running a business on the Internet? Plenty of people do it. Some of those businesses make more money than you presently think is likely or possible. This is mostly a function not of spamminess or evil but rather that skeptics have an artificially constrained view of what is possible because skeptics have probably not run a similar business and skeptics may have holes in their understanding of how Internet businesses operate at modest scales.

Previous HN thread for additional context, including (predictably) folks who said that the successful OSS project featured in it was a) not an OSS project and b) would never be successful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6480854

I wasn't referring to sidekiq but to indiehackers.

I've never claimed that anyone built a business "overnight" on Indie Hackers, or anything of the sort.

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