Pat Allan, Creator of Thinking Sphinx and Flying Sphinx

Starting & Sustaining

Pat Allan turned his open source side project into a profitable Heroku Add-on. We talk about the advantages and disadvantages of building on another company's platforms, doing support for both open source users and paying customers, and some of the trickier parts of parlaying open source success into a profitable business venture.

Special Guest: Pat Allan.

Sponsored By:

• Starting & Sustaining: The second edition of Starting & Sustaining will be out in late 2017. Visit the site to get on the list and be the first to know as well as receive a launch discount.

Links:

• Freelancing Gods — Pat's personal web site.
• Thinking Sphinx — The open source gem for integrating Ruby and the Sphinx search engine.
• Flying Sphinx — Flying Sphinx is an add-on for Heroku that lets you use Thinking Sphinx (and thus, Sphinx) for all your search needs.
• Limbr — Limbr is a social impact startup on a mission to make mental health more acceptable and accessible.
• Drumknott — Drumknott provides hosted searching for your static Jekyll sites. All you need to do is connect things up via Javascript, and upload your page data to Drumknott's API.
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