Taskforce.sh

Just under a year ago, in March 2022, I wrote about how we had reached the milestone of 4k MRR. At that time, I wasn't sure whether we could double that amount in just one year. However, I'm delighted to report that this month we hit another major milestone: 100k ARR, or 8333 MRR.

Reflecting on how we got here, I realize that it's not down to any single factor, but rather a combination of different factors that have all played a significant role. Here are the three most important ones, in my opinion:

1. Diversifying our product range.
   When we first started out, we had just one dashboard, but we now have three different products that generate revenue: the SaaS dashboard, the on-premises dashboard, and the commercial Pro version of the library. Currently, the SaaS dashboard and Pro version account for around 90% of our income, with the on-premises version contributing the remaining 10%.

2. Continuous improvement of our open-source software and documentation.
   We've put a huge amount of work into enhancing our libraries, improving our documentation, and resolving any questions or issues that our users have. I believe that this has attracted a lot of new users, with a portion of them eventually becoming paying customers. We're currently seeing over 3 million downloads per month for Bull and BullMQ combined.

3. Focusing on marketing.
   I've made a concerted effort to ramp up our marketing activities, which has involved creating several blog posts with hands-on tutorials, as well as launching a new marketing site that I'm currently promoting. I'm hopeful that these efforts will yield positive results in the coming months.

Looking ahead, I have a lot of plans for this year. Here are just a few of them:

• Releasing a new version of BullMQ for Python, and possibly one other platform (such as Go, though this is still undecided).
• Developing new products that will make it easier for enterprises to use BullMQ. I believe that there are many potential customers who could benefit from this.
• Continuing to refine our marketing efforts, with a particular focus on creating high-quality, engaging content that resonates with our target audience.

Overall, I'm incredibly excited about the future of Taskforce.sh and what we can achieve in the years ahead. Let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions in the comments.

It is a bit crazy that after several years in business, I did not have a proper landing page for the product that is actually generating revenue.

Since the product is open-source, I relied only on the README file on GitHub (https://github.com/taskforcesh/bullmq). But to double down on the marketing side of things, a proper landing page was needed, to get better SEO and to give a more serious image of the product. At the end of the day, it is a matter of trust. If your users trust your product, they will likely use them in their next project and eventually subscribe to the paid versions of the product.

So, without further ado, I'm excited to announce the launch of the new landing page, https://bullmq.io, crafted with the help of Eleventy - the most efficient tool I've found for building marketing websites.

All right, so it took almost a year to go from 2k to 4k MRR. I guess this is a slow growth compared to other rockets out there. On the positive side, it is still a 100% yearly growth and I do not think it is bad at all. If I could sustain such growth, in a couple of years it would be a pretty decent business.

Most of my time during the last months has been spent working on issues in the open-source libraries Bull and BullMQ, I got precious help from a part-time developer that is killing it.

Two new features that I also implemented in Taskforce.sh, and that I think will reduce churning are better metrics (with charts showing historical data) and an alert system. Alerts are actually a super important feature; you need to know if your jobs are failing or misbehaving as soon as possible so that you can take action, and of course, when you have the alerts in place you will be more reluctant to cancel your subscription.

There is still so much more I have planned to improve in the rest of the year, but before that, there is a series of new articles that I need to publish as marketing has been lagging lately.

See you in the next update!

The last couple of months I have been quite busy preparing two new products that I expect will result in a revenue boost.

The first product is an on-premises version of the SaaS. This seems a bit counterintuitive but I have been getting requests for on-premises since I made the first release.

As it turns out, many companies, due to certifications and security concerns cannot use SaaS products that are tightly connected to their internal development workflow, so they are prepared to pay more for the possibility to run the software on their own premises. The on premises version was actually available a couple of weeks ago and without any marketing we have already 3 companies running it, so I have big expectations when this is announced properly :)

The other product is a licensed version of the BullMQ library. It is just a hard fact of life that it is extremely difficult to monetise open source even if your software has a great success. The Taskforce.sh dashboard is getting more and more traction, but not at the speed I would like it to go. Furthermore there is not a direct relationship between which new features I implement in BullMQ and amount of users paying for the dashboard service.

I concluded that the only way forward is to offer a commercial version that includes premium features and better support. Most of the new features are actual features requested some time ago by BullMQ users, so I expect these features to be useful to the existing and a growing number of users.

Of course I am still a big believer on the open source movement and will continue to support the open source versions of the software for years to come, but they will not see so many new advanced features as they did in the past.

As with any new product it is always a bit of gambling, so I wonder what do you think? I am taking a completely crazy direction, should I do something different or just persevere on these products? Please let me know in the comments.

After months trying to get my own hosting business to take off, I finally took a step back and decided to out source the hosting entirely. This will allow me to focus more on the queue management part and to put more efforts maintaining the open source libraries Bull and BullMQ.

Brian O'Rourke from RedisGreen kindly accepted my proposal so now you can sign to high quality redis instances and you will be sponsoring the future development of Taskforce.sh.

This sponsorship is hopefully just the beginning since we plan to do tighter integrations in the future and also support natively the BullMQ redis module when it gets ready for production usage.

So remember, if you are in need of a Redis instance consider using the ones from RedisGreen and help us sponsor our open source libraries.

https://dashboard.redisgreen.net/new?utm_campaign=BULLMQ

This is an important psychological milestone. Most of my time has been invested in improvement the app itself, documenting, creating new tutorials, blog posts, fixing issues and adding new features to Bull/BullMQ libraries which are the raison d'être for Taskforce.sh anyway. Support has also required a lot of attention, but I find it one of the most satisfying activities right now, nothing better than help your customers and get their appreciation in exchange.

Still I find difficult to make predictions on the growth rate, not sure if it is growing at a % of current MRR or at a fixed static rate.

Major concern for future growth is churning. I have tried to get a grip on the reasons behind it, seems like many of the churns where due to projects or startups failing, or just moving to different technologies altogether. Still we have a lot of loyal and happy customers, and as the feature set of the service increases I expect less and less churning.

All in all I am quite happy with the development, even though it is still not enough for making a living its at least starting to cover a big chunk of the development costs.