> I still have 0 employees and don't plan to hire. I tune my business processes to run as lean as possible: Most of my customers are on credit card so their payments are automatic. The gem servers take about one day of maintenance per year. I can't really outsource much of my support work because it is so technical and specialized.
> My gem server is a $6 droplet on DigitalOcean. Because gems are just static files, that little droplet can handle millions of requests per day with just Apache. Oh, and I run three servers in parallel for failover purposes for a grand total of $18/mo.
I wonder what makes Sidekiq special? I don't imagine any equivalent product (background job processing) in the other languages is raking in that much, if making any revenue in the first place.
I'm closer to $10m than $1m in annual revenue now.
My take on Sidekiq's secret sauce: a job system is a distributed system. Most of Sidekiq's commercial features are available as OSS gems but the complexity sneaks up on you as you integrate 3-6 of those features together. Building your own almost always leads to a worse system than the mature, well-debugged system which I have curated.
- Do you have any outside hired help? I see you still have no employees, but do you contract with anyone to do customer support as an example?
- How many approx customers do you have these days? $10M revenues = 10,000 customers. Is that roughly correct, if so - wahoo, congrats.
Mike has built a system that's rock solid, and he doesn't twiddle around with it willy nilly. He keeps it super stable.
The people paying for it (I'm one of those people) are paying for the reliability, in addition to the features.
Mike's also managed to find a real sweet-spot with the features he holds out for Pro/Enterprise. The stratification is just right to nudge you up, but it always feels like you're getting a good deal when you pay.
Time, know-how, and long term dedication are the key ingredients from my perspective. Maybe he's working 10-20 hours now, but there's support and development every day for the past 11 years.
> I don't imagine any equivalent product (background job processing) in the other languages is raking in that much, if making any revenue in the first place.
I guarantee, there are background job processors in other languages making revenue.
I had no idea until someone just hinted me that this was self-referential... LOL, apologies for the now-embarrassing other comment I made LOL (I only know you as "sorentwo", whoops!)
Yeah, I had a Sidekiq question on StackOverflow and Mike Perham answered himself couple of days later.
[0] https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/016-mike-perham-of-side...
I quit my job to go full in with EmailEngine exactly one year ago, when MRR for EmailEngine was $500, now it is $3,900 and steadily growing. I do work full time on it, but the result is async - the work I put into EmailEngine today brings me income sometime later, and the recurring income I receive today is unrelated to any effort I put into the company right now.
I googled “emailengine” and it’s wasn’t super obvious which was your business since so much paid ads exist for that search.
Do you have any concern that a customer is going to look under the covers and re-implement your product? I would guess the overwhelming majority of customers are going to be happy to just consume the API and go about their own business, but some products attract copycats, and handing out code / build artifacts makes that easier.
The tradeoff you've made makes a ton of sense if you're not concerned about copycats.
If you're worried about copying the API design, well, the implementation is the hard part, not necessarily the API design, which the Google vs Oracle lawsuit also showed, interestingly enough.
Any other great ideas?
This is why I love the ruby community, so much sense :)
It doesn't have to be like this. Your community tried to be better once. Have you forgotten?
https://jasonfleetwoodboldt.com/courses/stepping-up-rails/ma...
Regardless, it's probably better if we leave room for little jokes with each other.
OK, maybe it's only, say, 96% of Ruby users, or 100% of Rails users at least
Mike has always struck me as a great guy, really the kind of person who you're happy to know is building one of your favorite tools. In a world of starving open source contributors and mega corps throwing around weight, his success with Sidekiq stands out. It makes me very happy to see.
But for people who are interested in alternatives, I'd also suggest Good Job (runs on Postgresql).
This makes me curious about either
(a) conflict-of-interest rules at The Clymb that may or may not have governed the DTO directing the company to use his own separately-owned (commercial?) software.
(b) negotiating private ownership of software written for The Clymb.
One of those must have been relevant?
I never charged The Clymb to use the software. Previously they had been using delayed_job and were suffering badly from scale issues due to the use of MySQL as their queue store.
I've been using sidekiq now for almost a decade and had the pleasure to meet Mike at a Ruby conf many years ago.
Instead, we shell over the negligible monthly fees, spend no time thinking about it, and move on to solve real problems.
There are enough of us that it probably simply doesn’t matter.
I don't even necessarily disagree with your point that without being free those things wouldn't have taken off but we need to find a way to strike a balance in the developer community.
Sidekiq having a free version and an enterprise version walks an okay middle line imo.
So many communities across the web rely on people putting in their spare hours for free just to enjoy things. Whether it's spreadsheets in Eve, Addons and Weak Auras in WoW, forum analysis posts, or whatever goes on in the depths of pvpoke, so much free labor underpins massive parts of the world today.
I would love something that I could donate x money to per month and then based on usage, have it dole out to all the content providers with perhaps a minimum per month. It just seems daunting to do that as a) not a crypto scheme and b.) across all the various creator landscapes.
[0]https://www.polygon.com/2018/9/25/17901552/world-of-warcraft...
I don't see the problem in having that kind of business model, it still allows the community to thrive and offers entreprises a way to have premium support.
Plus it allows him to invest more time in maintaining the free version.
In sidekiq without super_fetch (a paid feature), any jobs in progress when a worker crashes are lost forever. If a worker merely encounters an exception the job will be put back on the queue and retried but a crash means the job is lost.
Again, no problem paying for Pro, but I would prefer a little more transparency on how big a gap that is.
