Solo founders, what’s your got-hit-by-a-bus strategy?
If you’re the sole person in charge of codebase, hosting, support, etc. - what sort of measures do you have in place to support your users/customers in the event that your life is unexpectedly taken?
Apologies for the morbid question. I suspect this is a real concern that is shared by many solo founders.
None. The company has trouble staying alive with me alive. It will be gone when I'm dead. Heck, the one that got acquired died even with me in an advisory position.
There will always be competitors. Some may spawn or be inspired later. Someone eventually does the same thing but better.
It's probably overengineering to try to keep a company alive longer than me. The primary responsibility is keeping my kids alive should I die within the next two decades, so I'd rather focus on that first.
Why?
I don't think you would be in any relevant position at all to care about a startup which is run by you in case you die.
Your family can't run it, others can't just take it over and you are 6 feet under.
Get life insurance and stop worrying about this if you haven't brought the company far enough yet.
Open-source it.
I don't really advise running any business 100% solo, but I have done it for a while until my company has grown a bit. At that time and now (with my current new project), my strategy is to open-source it if something happens to me. Then, any customer or close person can take it from where I left it.
I think it's often a poor focus for founders, until you have a real leadrship team in place and naturally have distributed responsibility. Companies dealing with startups are assuming some risks and should be aware of that. There are more highly probably events (going out of business for example) that your time is better spent mitigating. So my opinion is don't worry about it if you're a 1 person or small operation, just accept that there is a risk, and be honest with customers if it ever comes up.
I feel like this is something that solo founders don't address because continuity is a concept that attaches to shared assets. Once someone else cares enough to be involved the founder is no longer solo.
You can work with a lawyer to put your business in a trust so that if something happens to you the trust and trustee take over operations.
There was a very similar question posted two years ago, and it has a great reply by patio11:
> There are, roughly, three very different rationales to have business succession planning in place, and at the scale of a solo operator they have very different best options available:
> 1) I want to avoid negatively impacting paying clients in the event of a bus factor issue.
> 2) I want to avoid negatively impacting "the community" in the event of a bus factor issue.
> 3) I want to ensure my heirs receive the residual value of the income stream.
It's too long to repeat it here, but the the the rest of the comment by patio11 with his answers to 1, 2 and 3 are in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21908638
My stuff would end up being dormant or shutting down. I don't feel the need for continuity with my LLC nor my Android apps. If I'm dead, oh well. The Android apps are open source, so someone can recreate them.
A friend and I review each other’s “in case I’m dead” documents on a ~yearly basis. He runs a small MSP (~200 clients), I run a variety of small income producing things. The point of the documents isn’t to run the business perfectly, it’s to capture the day one…thirty issues for the survivors to either shut the business(es) down cleanly, or sell off. Even a simply "if I’m dead, this is what you should do” document is incredibly helpful to your heirs or whoever administers your estate.
The reason for a solo founder to at least think about these things is, sure, if you’re dead, you’re dead. But if you have any family they will inherit the mess left behind when you die. Even if your intent is the business should die with you there’s paperwork and pissed off clients/customers. If you run a sloppy LLC or C corp (minimal paperwork to keep up the corporate veil) your family will absolutely love to learn that you’ve dumped this pile of crap on them after your death.
I run a business that entitely runs itself on cron.
I guess the customers that ask for support would just churn, but the stable set of customers that know what they're doing would keep enough cash in the accounts to keep the lights on until AWS permanently shuts down.
Who cares? You're dead, bro
Putting your code and documentation into a third party source code escrow is a common solution.
No measures at all. If I die, the business will most likely die as well. Since it’s not a huge business that can support lots of employees, the impact to my family will be negligible too
My product is self hosted “IoT” hardware.
It doesn’t need the internet to work, by design, and is standards based. (Mobile App is optional)
There is always Apres Moi Le Deluge.
Much less than a bus can kill a one person startup.