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Sidekiq makes ~1M/year in gross revenue. I believe the only full-time employee is the founder, and it doesn't sound like there are any material recurring expens

Sidekiq makes ~1M/year in gross revenue. I believe the only full-time employee is the founder, and it doesn't sound like there are any material recurring expenses: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/016-mike-perham-of-sidekiq https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/016-mike-perham-of-side... It's the most profitable one-man show I know of, although there's many that I've run into that ~500k, albeit with a much higher operational burden.

digianarchist 7y ago
Mike created a quality product that was much better than the alternatives at the time. I remember working in a Rails shop and struggling with Resque.
- iloveitaly 7y ago
  Agreed. Sidekiq solves a real problem much better than the alternatives. As soon as your app starts to make real money it's worth paying for enterprise for the support + added features. I feel like there's got to be other businesses to be built by creating 'premium' open-source packages for common pain points in application development.
stef25 7y ago
After skimming through the podcast transcript it's still not clear to me how this works. What's the difference with say the job queue system of Laravel / Horizon / Redis ? From what I can tell this has all the same features listen on the Sidekiq page except it's free. What am I missing?
- pkalinowski 7y ago
  Sidekiq is using Redis behind the scenes. It's a job queue system for Ruby and Ruby on Rails
  - stef25 7y ago
    Seems to have only a few extra features compared to Laravel's Horizon (from looking at screenshots, I could be totally wrong). https://laravel.com/docs/5.7/horizon https://laravel.com/docs/5.7/horizon Horizon is free, crazy something like this could be monetized so successfully.
    - pkalinowski 7y ago
      Never used Sidekiq myself, but I believe its value is mainly speed and reliability. It suits systems with hundreds of thousands of jobs to process. At least that's what I read on website :)
    - herval 7y ago
      For every successful product, there's at least 10 free tools that do the same thing (or something similar). It's not crazy at all - people (in particular larger companies) need support, assurances the product will still exist/be maintained in the future, etc. A lot of people will pay you just so they have a human on the other side of the line to talk to, in case things go wrong.
mperham 7y ago
I'm at ~$2m now. Still no employees.

digianarchist 7y ago

Mike created a quality product that was much better than the alternatives at the time. I remember working in a Rails shop and struggling with Resque.

iloveitaly 7y ago
Agreed. Sidekiq solves a real problem much better than the alternatives. As soon as your app starts to make real money it's worth paying for enterprise for the support + added features. I feel like there's got to be other businesses to be built by creating 'premium' open-source packages for common pain points in application development.

stef25 7y ago

After skimming through the podcast transcript it's still not clear to me how this works. What's the difference with say the job queue system of Laravel / Horizon / Redis ? From what I can tell this has all the same features listen on the Sidekiq page except it's free. What am I missing?

pkalinowski 7y ago
Sidekiq is using Redis behind the scenes. It's a job queue system for Ruby and Ruby on Rails
- stef25 7y ago
  Seems to have only a few extra features compared to Laravel's Horizon (from looking at screenshots, I could be totally wrong). https://laravel.com/docs/5.7/horizon https://laravel.com/docs/5.7/horizon Horizon is free, crazy something like this could be monetized so successfully.
  - pkalinowski 7y ago
    Never used Sidekiq myself, but I believe its value is mainly speed and reliability. It suits systems with hundreds of thousands of jobs to process. At least that's what I read on website :)
  - herval 7y ago
    For every successful product, there's at least 10 free tools that do the same thing (or something similar). It's not crazy at all - people (in particular larger companies) need support, assurances the product will still exist/be maintained in the future, etc. A lot of people will pay you just so they have a human on the other side of the line to talk to, in case things go wrong.

mperham 7y ago

I'm at ~$2m now. Still no employees.