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I wrote sidekiq.org starting 8 years ago and blogged about my experiences over time, e.g. https://www.mikeperham.com/2012/08/26/the-sidekiq-experiment-part-i/

I wrote sidekiq.org starting 8 years ago and blogged about my experiences over time, e.g. https://www.mikeperham.com/2012/08/26/the-sidekiq-experiment-part-i/ https://www.mikeperham.com/2012/08/26/the-sidekiq-experiment... I sell closed source Pro and Enterprise focused feature packs for my OSS projects. This is known as "open core". My first full year in 2013 I sold $85k. I'm in the millions ARR now.

samblr 6y ago
Your talk on IndieHackers was amazing. Could you please point to how licensing works in open source. I get the user has to buy license - is it like a key that talks to your server or how do you stop the abuse etc ?
- mperham 6y ago
  Every system and market is different. You will need to determine if licensing and piracy are significant issues (sometimes they are a good problem to have, it means people are using your tool!) Some languages and ecosystems are harder than others to secure. If you have $1m in sales and $1m in unlicensed usage, do you have a problem? In general though you should focus on building value, not building walls around your product.
mrskitch 6y ago
I pretty much stole Mike's business model, and peppered in some cloud-y saas for browserles.io. I'm almost done with year 3, and will hopefully hit 500kARR this year. Mike's story was a lot of inspiration for me, and I think licensing + cloud-ifying your opensource projects are a ton more viable than hoping for Patreaon or other platforms to pay you. Self-bootstrapped indiehacker style was great for me, but it does require a lot of up-front time and commitment in seeing it through. Upside is that it's not monopoly money being dealt with, and everything is on your terms.
- mperham 6y ago
  Wow, that's right on track with my growth. Congrats man, you'll be in the millions soon enough.
sbayeta 6y ago
Really nice story. Have you written again about it, more recently? I think I'm finally tackling a commercially viable idea, with potential customers in the enterprise sector, and it would be very insightful to learn more about your story. Thanks and congrats on your success
- mperham 6y ago
  I blog regularly but typically not about business topics, see my blog home page at https://www.mikeperham.com https://www.mikeperham.com I appear on various podcasts, e.g. The Changelog, regularly and talk about things there too. I'll be on FounderQuest in the next week or two.
ArturT 6y ago
Sidekiq Pro version was inspiration for me to create a pro version for my Ruby gem called knapsack that automatically splits tests in parallel on CI nodes/jobs. With the knapsack_pro version I focused on common needs of users and there was simple validation method to verify if particular feature was needed. People just pay if it brings value. In case of free open source tool, people tend to want something but you don't know if they actually will you use it and sometimes people demand a thing while you have to put the hard work. When you do paid version of your tool then somehow people are polite. :) Nowadays I have also support for running parallel tests in JS. More at https://knapsackpro.com https://knapsackpro.com and here is detailed technical explanation how it works https://docs.knapsackpro.com/2020/how-to-speed-up-ruby-and-javascript-tests-with-ci-parallelisation https://docs.knapsackpro.com/2020/how-to-speed-up-ruby-and-j...

samblr 6y ago

Your talk on IndieHackers was amazing. Could you please point to how licensing works in open source. I get the user has to buy license - is it like a key that talks to your server or how do you stop the abuse etc ?

mperham 6y ago
Every system and market is different. You will need to determine if licensing and piracy are significant issues (sometimes they are a good problem to have, it means people are using your tool!) Some languages and ecosystems are harder than others to secure. If you have $1m in sales and $1m in unlicensed usage, do you have a problem? In general though you should focus on building value, not building walls around your product.

mrskitch 6y ago

I pretty much stole Mike's business model, and peppered in some cloud-y saas for browserles.io. I'm almost done with year 3, and will hopefully hit 500kARR this year. Mike's story was a lot of inspiration for me, and I think licensing + cloud-ifying your opensource projects are a ton more viable than hoping for Patreaon or other platforms to pay you. Self-bootstrapped indiehacker style was great for me, but it does require a lot of up-front time and commitment in seeing it through. Upside is that it's not monopoly money being dealt with, and everything is on your terms.

mperham 6y ago
Wow, that's right on track with my growth. Congrats man, you'll be in the millions soon enough.

sbayeta 6y ago

Really nice story. Have you written again about it, more recently? I think I'm finally tackling a commercially viable idea, with potential customers in the enterprise sector, and it would be very insightful to learn more about your story. Thanks and congrats on your success

mperham 6y ago
I blog regularly but typically not about business topics, see my blog home page at https://www.mikeperham.com https://www.mikeperham.com I appear on various podcasts, e.g. The Changelog, regularly and talk about things there too. I'll be on FounderQuest in the next week or two.

ArturT 6y ago

Sidekiq Pro version was inspiration for me to create a pro version for my Ruby gem called knapsack that automatically splits tests in parallel on CI nodes/jobs. With the knapsack_pro version I focused on common needs of users and there was simple validation method to verify if particular feature was needed. People just pay if it brings value. In case of free open source tool, people tend to want something but you don't know if they actually will you use it and sometimes people demand a thing while you have to put the hard work. When you do paid version of your tool then somehow people are polite. :) Nowadays I have also support for running parallel tests in JS. More at https://knapsackpro.com https://knapsackpro.com and here is detailed technical explanation how it works https://docs.knapsackpro.com/2020/how-to-speed-up-ruby-and-javascript-tests-with-ci-parallelisation https://docs.knapsackpro.com/2020/how-to-speed-up-ruby-and-j...