[gavinballard]

Mike Perham has done a great job of turning two successful open source projects (Sidekiq and Inspeqtor) into successful businesses.

If you're interested, I recommend listening to his interviews on the ChangeLog Podcast (https://changelog.com/159/, https://changelog.com/130/, https://changelog.com/92/) where he talks about how he monetised those products.

I'm pretty sure that succeeding in this is not going to be a matter of how many "stars" your project has, but rather a function of the dollar value of the problem your software solves and how well you market the paid product. You should start that marketing now by providing a link to your project :).

[mperham]

Thanks for mentioning me. I'm happy to answer questions.

You're absolutely right though: your project is only as valuable as the problem you are solving. When someone told me early on that switching from Resque to Sidekiq was saving them $3000/month, I knew that there was a business here.

[jnbiche]

Thanks for the excellent resources, I'll look that up.

> You should start that marketing now by providing a link to your project :).

Well, I haven't even created the paid product at this point, it's still early in the game. Just trying to get a feel for the potentials.

[gavinballard]

> Thanks for the excellent resources, I'll look that up.

You're welcome!

> Well, I haven't even created the paid product at this point, it's still early in the game. Just trying to get a feel for the potentials.

Sure, but you're at the top of Hacker News right now and there's zero downside (and lots of upside) in getting your project in front of a bunch of developers. Even if they don't start using it right away, maybe it will stick in their minds and then six months down the track (when you do have a paid version) they'll Google it.

[mkarklins]

Thanks, didn't even know about Inspeqtor.