Episode 661 | Millions in Revenue As a One-Person Software Company

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Management, Entrepreneurship, Business, Marketing

4.8 • 792 Ratings

🗓️ 16 May 2023

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In episode 661, Rob Walling chats with Mike Perham, the founder of Sidekiq, who is a solo founder doing millions in revenue as a one-person business. If this isn’t unique enough, Sidekiq originally started as an open-source project before he later monetized it by selling features that aren't available in the core product. You'll also hear how it took him ten years to become "an overnight success" because of all the things Mike tried before launching Sidekiq. Episode Sponsor: Find your perfect developer or a team at Lemon.io/startups The competition for incredible engineers and developers has never been more fierce. Lemon.io helps you cut through the noise and find great talent through its network of engineers in Europe and Latin America. They take care of the vetting, interviewing, and testing of candidates to make sure that you are working with someone who can hit the ground running. When it comes to hiring, the time it takes to write your job description, list the position, review resumes, schedule interviews, and make an offer can take weeks, if not months. With Lemon.io, you can cut down on a lot of that time by tapping into their wide network of developers who can get started in as early as a week. And for subscribers of Startups For the Rest of Us, you can get 15% off your first 4 week contract with a developer by visiting lemon.io/startups Topics we cover: 2:51 - Sidekiq’s unique business model 5:24 - Running a multimillion-dollar software company with no employees 6:41 - How did Mike get here? 8:23 - Mike’s approach to monetizing Sidekiq 12:58- The 10-year overnight success story 14:13 - Did Mike ever have any doubts about this not working? 16:54- Mike’s thoughts around building on top of the Ruby ecosystem 19:26 - Why doesn't Mike hire any employees? 23:31- Mike’s approach to competitors 26:08 - Mike’s response to open-source purists on Hacker News Links from the Show: Mike Perham (@getajobmike) I Twitter Sidekiq Code Code Ship: Mike Perham Hacker News Discussion about Sidekiq MicroConf Youtube Channel If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you. Subscribe & Review: iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to Start Up for the Rest of Us.
0:02.0	I'm Rob Walling.
0:03.1	This week, I talk with Mike Perram, the founder of Sidekick, the solo founder with no employees,
0:09.7	who is doing single-digit millions in revenue as a one-person software company.
0:14.8	Mike's story is pretty unique and that he started an open source project
0:19.2	and later monetized it by selling features that aren't available in the core product.
0:25.8	As you listen to the interview, you'll hear me ask Mike about how much luck factored into this.
0:30.8	I mean, we talk about how he's had this amazing success, and then we talk about how it was 10 years to overnight success,
0:37.2	because he launched a bunch of
0:38.9	different open source projects and none of them succeeded and then finally sidekick did and
0:44.1	sidekick is a tool we used at drip i know a lot of folks in the rails community use it as their
0:48.4	queuing mechanism but realistically if mike hadn't had this amazingly successful open source project
0:53.9	then none of the rest of this works.
0:56.3	So it's an interesting and I think a pretty unique story on today's episode.
1:00.7	But before we dive into our conversation, I want to let you know that we have several open podcast sponsorship slots on this here very show.
1:09.3	We've run a few ads on the show over the last couple years,
1:12.8	and our sponsors have received amazing results from being in front of this audience of ambitious,
1:19.2	bootstrapped, and mostly bootstrapped SaaS founders. If you're interested in learning more,
1:23.4	send an email to sponsors at microconf.com and ask about the podcast sponsorship options.
1:29.6	And with that, let's dive into our conversation.
1:40.6	Mike Perram, welcome to start-ups for the rest of us.
1:43.8	Thanks for having me, Rob. What an incredible story, sir. You started Sidekick 11 years ago, and it's an open source project that you have monetized through premium support. And I knew of a sidekick because my last startup drip, when we went to start building it,
	...

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