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How Sidekiq makes $80,000 a month

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Re: How Sidekiq makes $80,000 a month

#13
post #5

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 g…

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.

Re: How Sidekiq makes $80,000 a month

#14
post #10
post #2

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?

Re: How Sidekiq makes $80,000 a month

#16
post #5

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 g…

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.

Re: How Sidekiq makes $80,000 a month

#17

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.

Re: How Sidekiq makes $80,000 a month

#18
post #14
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: How Sidekiq makes $80,000 a month

#19

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?

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.

Re: How Sidekiq makes $80,000 a month

#20

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?

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

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