All right, what's up, everybody? This is Cortland from EndyHackers.com, and today I'm talking to Mike Parram, the creator of a very popular tool called Sidekick.

Sightkick essentially allows programmers to write code that runs in the background, so that it doesn't get in the way of other parts of the code that need to stay fast and snappy. Mike came on Andy Hackers and did a text interview

back in November and I've done about 150 interviews total and hits us somewhere in the top five

in terms of popularity and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that Sidekick is an open

source project and also the fact that Mike is basically running the business alone, and yet it brings in close to $80,000 a month in revenue. So, Mike, I'm super excited to have you on. How's it going? It's going great, Cortland. Thanks for having me, and congratulations on your move to Stripe. yeah thank you so i'd like to start the story at the very beginning because i want to get people an idea of

what kind of person goes on to run a million dollar of your company by himself? What were you doing before you started Sidekick?

Well, I've been a software developer for close on 20 years now, doing everything from enterprise software to consumer-facing web

properties, just worked for maybe a dozen different startups. And the common theme in all

of these companies was I was always working for somebody else and sort of solving their

problem and earning a salary while doing it.

And after this latest startup, I wanted to both work more on open source, solve the fact that

I wasn't making any money off of my open source, and also try to solve a problem that was

more interesting to me so that I felt more

fulfilled in solving sort of a problem that I had rather than somebody else having. So that's what

Jess stated sidekick. And how did you get into open source development in the first place?

Well, that was just a matter of scratch in your own itch. We all are

using various software libraries, various packages to solve various business problems we have.

And it's sort of natural to fall into using open source. But obviously, open source usually has

bugs or edge cases that aren't handled properly with how you need it to

work. And so therefore, you go and you change something and you push it back upstream to the

maintainer to sort of improve the status quo. And so I had sort of naturally been maintaining more

and more Ruby libraries as I broadened my Ruby knowledge and was working on various Rails apps.

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