Mike Perham, Creator of Sidekiq: From Employment to Independence
This is one of the best businesses I have heard of. Even 6-7 years back, Sidekiq was grossing $80k/month [1]. I imagine it must be much more now. No servers to maintain, no employees, minimal support work and Mike has the complete freedom to work on updates whenever he prefers. Almost entire revenue minus payment processing costs must be profit. Imagine making $1M / yr working only 10-20hrs per week (Don't wish to presume here, but that's my estimate of the man-hours it costs to run).<p>> 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.<p>> 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.<p>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.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.indiehackers.com/product/sidekiq" rel="nofollow">https://www.indiehackers.com/product/sidekiq</a>