Ask HN: How to keep your side projects going after you die?

7 points by cleanyourroom 7 years ago | 2 comments

I have a couple side projects that generate income without much interaction beyond paying my hosting bills and keeping packages updated. This doesn't require much technical knowledge, but is likely beyond what any of my next of kin would be equipped for.

I've made some arrangements on the financial side to ensure that ownership transfers properly and automated payments so long as income > expenses, but things change and minor manual modifications will doubtless be necessary at some point in the future.

Is there some service where I can pay someone with technical knowledge (and ideally a fiduciary duty) who if given credentials for my hosting providers and servers, will make sure that the website stays up for as long as possible?

patio11 7 years ago |

Mind if I ask what is motivating this?

Is it "You want to have your next-of-kin benefit from the income stream?" Then rather than doing hard software engineering you should do easy financial engineering and purchase term life insurance on yourself. If you pass away suddenly, your heirs walk away with millions of dollars with zero execution risk and the servers fall over when they fall over.

If you think these projects create lots of value in the world and you'd be sad to see it go away, then this is business continuity planning. The thing you probably want to do is have a will which will entrust a pot of money (c.f. term life insurance, above) to a lawyer with instructions for them to spend some on a technologist to parachute in, prepare the projects for sale, and sell them on.

There is a variant of this where you fund a foundation to run the projects indefinitely but that seems like unlikely to be the best solution given "side project."

gus_massa 7 years ago |

This is not exactly what you are asking for, but I hope it is useful. From patio11: "What I Learned Selling A Software Business" https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/selling_s... HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11347006 (439 points | Mar 23, 2016 | 84 comments)