Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs? Hello HN! [I'm a solo developer so this question is a bit personal to me] Would knowing if the creator of a product is like me or fully fledged organisation affect your likelihood of using any software they create? |
If you need to communicate with your customers this way just to get any then you need a different line of work.
Scrap every business idea you have until it rapidly iterates towards “users stumbling across an automated online service connected an automated payment processor” because thats what we do here
If “rapid” and “ideas” dont happen for you, get a job
and yeah, spinning up an LLC to shield any public records should be so ingrained in you that you never think about it
Once you factor in "survival of the tribe" or ultra-massive corps, the benefits of solo development can be overridden.
- their inability (or reluctance) in pivoting once they scale up (i.e. becoming an actual dictator instead of a benevolent one), and
- their likelihood of prioritizing engineering over sales. I love building shit, but selling is key and selling is a completely separate beast
It feels like a lot of startups people discuss here are really just set up to give an 'exit' to investors through selling to a bigger company (at which point the product probably dies).
If it is not, then I look for things like reputation, reviews, testimonials. A good product alone will not always get a sale. The person has to trust you and your company.
I’ve even discussed buying him out because it’s such a worry.
What you need to show prospective clients is that your business is viable if you're not around: there's continuity and support.
Especially if the value of the deal is, say, $50/month (so 2nd lowest tier)
If you're selling to big companies that consider what you do some kind of critical component, they might care.
If you're selling to end users or other businesses, they likely don't care at all.
Need to find something that I can build that
1. Does one thing well
2. Can get to an MVP quickly
3. People will pay to use
It was just meant to give a little bit of my perspective and how it might factor into the question overall.
I try to extract the level of passion the dev has in his product, because i do trust passionate creators.
If you ask for a feature, they tend to actually go out of their way to help, instead of having it rot on the backlog for a decade.
Well, like Scarface put it best, I don't trust him but what did he say?
"I trust me."
focus on the product first and foremost
the key of attracting big companies really lies in your sales talent
Hard work is something that a big corp can solve by throwing bodies at the problem. A proprietary data format or protocol but with an available, thorough specification (eg. a giant PDF from an international standard, an industrial protocol, and associated XML schema with a bunch of separate devices to talk to by just reading through thousands of pages of PDFs...). Another example of hard work is handling a high volume of support requests, just communicating to individual users might involve more hours in a single day than are available to a single user, and it might require supporting 3 shifts or 7 days a week, which a solo dev just can't do. These are tasks that a solo dev is likely to burn out on and which I would not entrust them with.
On the other hand, a difficult problem is something that can be solved by a single contributor, but which often cannot be solved by throwing bodies at it. The output may be something as tiny as a few hundred lines of code that realize a single critical insight. That insight might synthesize a lot of complicated and inaccessible concepts available only to someone who is an expert in multiple fields and who has experience gained over many consecutive years of work in a single field. A company that can put 20 people with 1 year experience and 4 year degrees on the problem may not ever come to that synthesis. For example, I've had the opportunity to work on some complicated coordinate systems and GD&T mathematics for multi-axis CNC equipment; just communicating the requirements to even highly competent engineers unfamiliar with the problem is difficult, much less actually implementing the mathematics and software required to accomplish the task.
Big organizations often make progress by, as the author of the linked post describes, following "Effective strategies [that] often consist of converting difficult problems into something that can be solved through hard work." But sometimes this analogy just doesn't exist. And often, the conversion process introduces leaky abstractions and waste. Really good big organizations realize this, and will farm out these tasks to solo contractors/entrepeneurs, work with research institutions, or (less popular lately) build internal 'think tanks' and R&D departments that can make progress on difficult problems, which the rest of the company can scale out with hard work.
Conversely, solo entrepeneurs need to understand when and how to transition from working on difficult problems to scaling out and delegating hard work. I'm currently waiting on a support request with a guy who is really, really smart, and really productive, but as his company scaled out from building one really innovative machine that solved a difficult problem, to building and supporting 20 of them at locations throughout the state, to now when they have lots of sales engineers, a manufacturing department, some traveling technicians, and some 600 units at locations all over the world... he never managed to transition out of his keystone roll at the top of the software department. He's got an ever-growing backlog of engineering change orders that all fall back on him, and while highly successful and valued, he's really unhappy because he's just completely swamped.
My advice is to carefully select what your product is and does. Is it something for which people would want to call in an expert? You'll be fine. Is it something for which they'd want frequent changes, extended hours of support, many years of operation, and that can be done by anyone with a modicum of competency? I'd rather find a bigger, more reliable company.
[1] https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/difficult-problems-and-hard...
[2] https://benjamincongdon.me/blog/2022/06/22/Mental-Model-Diff...
Sometimes, even if the authors stop development on a project like that but have provided said ways of actually self-hosting it, it can still be used even despite the technology being dead for a while, until a migration path to something else can be found.
Corporations are likely to retire projects eventually, release new major breaking changes and deprecate old API versions, or get acquired and have degraded service after a decade or so. Individual developers are likely to have limited resources to allot to the project and limited capacity to maintain packages long term, with a few exceptions, as well as life circumstances or priorities shifting can have a way larger impact on the future of the project.
Thus, using any non-open-source package carries longevity risks, using any SaaS solution that cannot be self-hosted presents even larger risks. Many people don't care though and will still gladly use either. Something along the lines of: "Why care about where this will be in 10 years if I'll be at a different company in a year, but want to solve this problem now?"
From a builder's POV, I also thought about this whenever I had ideas. Thoughts like - if I build this alone, will my customers be stuck or drastically affected if something happens to me? What will be the impact to my customers if I'm unreachable for a day or more (sick, traveling, etc).
For me, if it's a utility tool or software where my data is on my system, then I'm more likely going to be okay if it was built by a solo developer (this is how I green-lit my current project - https://nocommandline.com).
But if it's something where my data is on the cloud and/or the software is a key part of my workflow, then I would do some further analysis if I know it's a solo developer e.g. can I easily backup/extract my data, are there alternatives that I can easily move to, do I need to be able to reach support within a very short window (e.g. 6 hours). To be clear, this automatically doesn't mean I won't buy the software but the analysis will help me reach the decision. I have previously launched an idea that fell into this category but I provided the ability for users to export their data in JSON format from day 1 and I knew there were alternatives that users could move to with very little down-time
I think that if there’s some traction on the market fit, a solo developer can build out enough of a value proposition to attract colleagues and investors to the point that institutional credibility kicks in.
Would I bet my Fortune 500 company on a product that goes down if someone gets COVID? No.
Would I be both personally interested and floating it past reputable angels if one person could live-demo something new?
Bet your ass.
Once you go up in price point it becomes a bigger issue, I had many deals die when they realized I was a 1 man show.
That shouldn’t stop you. If you close a 50k recurring deal once a year, that still adds up to a great income.
A single person is always a liability due to the "hit-by-a-bus" factor.
The optics solution: Don't look like a single person, hide behind an LLC (in some countries you can look up the financials though so having money in it from consulting,etc is prob a good idea so it doesn't look vulnerable)
A trust solution: You could mitigate it by having an open-sourcing pledge and/or other organizations that you list as support providers.
This could be done in cooperation with other solo-developers that isn't competitors, list each others companies as support providers and give cursory introductions to them so they could take over or help customers in case of emergencies. This could also give a side-benefit of having a clear option to scale if one of you grow successful so onboarding would be quick. (Also in terms of marketing it'd give the perception of a bigger product if there are support providers there already)
if you have friends with established companies, you could ask them if they could be your “service partner”
i’ve done this with my friends for ever now
also note, that just like individual developers companies don’t provide any guarantees unless there’s a SLA in place
It’s only in the case of enterprise software or niche products that I wouldn’t trust a one man shop.
A lot of it depends upon who the "solo entrepreneur" is.
For example, there's a certain foulmouthed Finnish engineer, that has had a couple of "out of the ballpark" hits, that, when he first developed them, were pretty much "solo."
I just can't square my own working style, my need to do things outside of work, and my desire for ownership of the things I work on with the idea that I need to be on-call forever for a thing. It's just too much stress.
If I’m trying things out at home, likely not. I already have lots of games and utilities that are solo dev work. A lot of us use OSS from GitHub done by solo devs.
Also depends on the software. Anything financial or security or cloud based isn’t a good idea to rely on one person. It matters how much I would rely on the software, how much risk there is, how much it would hurt to lose, and how much it cost. Games or paint programs or handy utilities, things like that I might be sad but not damaged if the solo dev software were to go away.
Maybe you can use this as part of your pitch, "you already trust lots of solo devs for your software needs".
So with that said, just don't actively advertise that you're solo, and fake it until you make it.
People making software, unless it's FOSS, that I can still use satisfactorily after you die, give up, go insane (I mean "enhance the user experience"), or get acquired by profit extractors who don't care, are in an extreme minority these days, so there's almost no reason to rely upon or trust "you" regardless. A solopreneur isn't necessarily riskier, and might even be less risky.
It's possible to use the latter concern in your favor — let people prepay for longer periods for guaranteed access, if they're they're worried about this. It's a good sign!
As with borrowing any money or taking any investment. Do some research about the investor and if in doubt try to reach out to an independent expert for an opinion on an offer in principle. If they're offended you do this you probably don't want to risk working with them.
But no, I wouldn’t as a person who hypothetically made buying decisions. It’s the “IBM problem” that non dominant companies face. “No one ever got fired for buying IBM”.
I guess it's fine. It's natural to know the partner you're about to take on has the incentive to continue developing their business and still have an "alive" product in the future.
Cease to exist = any event that deletes you from the equation from bankrupcy to the worst case scenario - death.
If you're the bus factor of 1, then I would never use your software (speaking from organisation POV).
If there's a contingency in place, and your software solves the problem I have (speaking from organisation POV), then yes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21908638 and https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1211406333653798913
I’ve considered writing up a worst case scenario plan or migration document to help with initial concerns that these apps will just go away.
Are there any funds out there that offer their name as a form of backing to give customers increased confidence? I think a big name would help, not just the money itself.
Thoughts?
Whereas the odds of a venture backed startup shutting down at any point over the next ten years is something like 30%.
So from a risk perspective, it's literally over 100x more risky to use a software product made by a venture backed company than one from a solo founder.
On all of my sales calls, I tell people that I'm bootstrapped and that I'm going to charge them extra so that I can reduce the risk to their business by staying bootstrapped, and I have yet to run into anyone who doesn't seem satisfied by that pricing strategy.
Death is not the only reason people quit working on a project. They could get a better offer, their family situation could change, they could get sick or injured, or they could simply get sick of it, just to name a few.
Also, keeping a SaaS online does cost money. And those costs increase as you scale. If you are small enough that you can run on a free tier, you are too small for me to have confidence that you are sticking around.
There's a lot of truth in this. Particularly since the free tiers on most cloud providers are explicitly designed to suck you in, then raise the rates tremendously as you scale.
A business that might be fine with 100 customers on the cloud could struggle mightily to cover the costs of dealing with 1000 customers on the same stack. The linear revenue growth doesn't match up to the insane cost increase as you go from "hobby project" to "small business" in the cloud.
Everything dies. This simple minded confidence game we require each other play to validate usefulness is getting old.
You’re one of seven billion humans who will die, one of millions of programmers to pick from to prop up trade of Daddy Dollars.
You’re not sticking around either and cannot prove your contributions were truly more valuable than anyone else’s (models have been built to ascertain which human leadership traits and which technology make us more productive and all became too complex to understand).
Don’t blink though; keep pretending we’re onto something with folksy anecdotes, and nostalgia for past wins.
Sure, it depends on what you are doing, but I imagine that for most paid SAAS models, the cost of cloud computing is a small fraction of what they bring in revenue. In many cases, so small as to be effectively $0. As an example, stack overflow gets hundreds of millions of visits a month, but is run on two physical servers (plus an additional two for backup). As a more personal example, I have a small SAAS side project and my server costs run me about 0.5% of my revenue (the rest is all profit other than the value of my time). I could probably get that down to 0.1% with some code refactoring, but even with the current code, I could easily 10x my number of subscribers and not increase server costs by even $0.01.
To add to this, in my experience, the companies I've worked for have tons of extra capacity with their cloud services. For example, using t3.large vs t3.small instances at 4x the price indiscriminately. Why? Because server costs are just a rounding error compared to paying a bunch of $100k+ salaries.
Regarding it costing money, yes, of course. But costs increases as users increase. If you're giving away your product for free, that's an issue. If you're charging, then I don't see the problem.
AWS has a free tier, so I wouldn't apply that rule too much.
The real figure is more 2.1% (source: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html)
I feel like the indie hacking lifestyle doesn't really attract people who are at high risk for most other common causes of death at that age, in the same way that, say, raising venture capital seems to be an attractive option for people already at risk of suicide or drug overdose.
Where is this number from? Googling, I see numbers like 75% of venture backed startups failing [1] and 90% of all startups failing, most of that within the first year. The suggestion that 70% of venture startups live for at least a decade smells unlikely.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390443720204578004...
> from a risk perspective, it's literally over 100x more risky to use a software product made by a venture backed company than one from a solo founder.
Yeah, no this is not even close to true (because, as many others have pointed out, death is not the primary risk to a solo founder, funding & motivation are). Unfunded startups fail at a higher rate than venture backed, from what I can find. YC funds solo founders, but advises trying to find a co-founder because the risks are higher. https://www.ycombinator.com/library/7P-does-yc-fund-solo-fou...
If you include acquihired teams / sunsetted products, that number is even higher.
Both types of products also have a chance of being bought for cheap when they are failing, and at least kept alive on life support.
What I'm saying is that their chance of death is .2% but their chance of discovering Buddha, deciding to give up everything and become a monk, or meeting the woman of their dreams and going to live the simple life in Thailand, and so on, are much, much greater.
When he is asked to defend it, he clarifies that he's only talking about companies that solve a major pain point, have no other competitors, and a low cost of implementation. (Obviously the failure rate of VC-backed companies with amazing PMF and amazing operating margins is much lower than 30%!)
His comment is the highest voted in this thread (assuming HN sorts that way) -- this is a classic example of 'this person says something I want to believe and has some numbers so I'll upvote it without even a rudimentary interrogation!'
Whilst I have not kept a list myself, I've seen SaaS products drastically change after acquisitions. Some SaaS products under new ownership stop serving small customers all together and focus on large enterprises. This is as a much risk as shut downs.
In terms of Bootstrapped SaaS, what I have noticed since 2004 is that bootstrapped does not mean the companies are operated by a single person.
As a bootstrapped SaaS founder, you can start building a team with revenues by hiring team mates. By doing this, you reduce the risk rate for your customers.
Until you have revenues to hire talent, you can also bring on free talent from companies like https://skilledup.life. This is my latest tech startup.
I have also been building subscription based tech products since 2004 with many failures and two Exits. I bootstrapped them all and continue to do so. The biggest issue I have during all these years is lack of capital to build teams.
I'm solving my own problem through SkilledUp Life. My team now includes 2 salaried staff and about 20+ Volunteers.
We are one solution. But there are many ways to de-risk a bootstrapped SaaS business.
All the best Manoj
I would guess there are many cases of solo founders shutting down their business other than founder death...
Sure, but it really only makes sense to consider cases where:
A) The business has paying customers
B) It's very important to the customers that this product remain available
C) The founder is unwilling to give or license the source code to those customers
In practice, all three of these factors being present is uncommon. Usually if the product is actually important to a customer, they just pay to acquire the assets. And there is usually no reason for a solo founder not to take that deal if the alternative is just shutting down the business.
For a venture backed business, maybe the lawyers decide there is too much legal risk or whatever. But for an indie hacker, that doesn't happen.
We hear stories all the time of folks getting burned when venture backed startups shut down without giving people any time to switch to another product, or sometimes even to expert their data. When is the last time you heard about this happening from the paying customers of a solo founder? Literally never.
Citation needed. I worked in startups my entire life. I thought it was closer to 90+%.
What does this statement mean? Are you implying to your potential customers that charging them extra translates into profits to entice you to continue the business or that the efficiencies allow for business continuity services like providing the source code in escrow?
That I'm not going to dump product on the market below cost to gain market share. Since even though doing that is obviously saves customers a little bit of money in the short term, in the long term the money raised to do that needs to be paid back ten fold, which ultimately comes out of their pockets.
It's just much easier for a business to keep its interests aligned with its customers if there isn't some third party who is trying to extract money from both.
It costs time (customer support, security updates, deprecations, third party api changes, etc, etc.) and time is a limited quantity for a person. Eventually other things are a better use of their time from either an economic point of view (other ventures, etc.) or a personal point of view (family, etc.).
It's clearly not, due to what the sibling commenters have been staying (people discontinuing products for reasons other than dying, etc.) I get the gist of your point but this 100x number is not just hyperbole -- it's silly.
Oddly, most of the time its other small businesses that are worried.
If this weren't solving a pain point and if there were other alternatives on the market, then this positioning might not work as well. But building something where folks don't really have any better choice was also a purposeful decision.
If you're not familiar with escrow services they are a mutually trusted 3rd party. You provide your source code, build tools, etc. - everything needed to re-create the distributed artifacts - to the escrow service and they verify that has been done. Should you go out of business or some other event in your sales contract is triggered the escrow company will provide those materials to your customer. My recommendation would be to find a reputable escrow company you like and utilize them. You can have them on the ready when you're creating your sales contract.
It depends on the type of software.
"Yes" for utility software of narrow scope. I use scanner utility software called VueScan which was a solo developer (Ed Hamrick) until his son joined.[1] I also used RegexBuddy which I think is a solo dev.[2]
But "No" for critical workflow software that requires proprietary opaque data formats such as a clone for Evernote or similar note-taking tool.
Basically, it's a risk analysis of how much "investment" the user loses if the solo developer quits updating the software or goes bankrupt.
But most end users? They have zero idea, and would never think of such things.
They'd just use an app store, or google for something, and click->install.
Don't tell your prospects that all companies big and small can fail and don't use data to prove your point. It might all be true, but telling your prospects they are doomed whatever they decide is not getting you to a 'Yes'.
In my case I have niche products that are still largely unique and don't have to compete with bigger organizations. A competition I would lose in a heartbeat if customers had the choice regardless of price or chances of success. I still make sure that I have a decent solution for the 'bus' argument and I am generous with supplying access to the code they need to keep their application running when I do get hit by bus, financials ruin or old age. At best I can say: It worked up till now.
But theres a big difference between solo developer and "literally the only person that will ever be involved". If you are dealing with businesses then you need to act like a business. There needs to be contingency planning and availability. Another commenter gave their story of how one such dev didn't have support triage setup when they took a trip, and so the customer wasn't able to get in contact. Thats the stuff I'm talking about.
In reality theres no reason to only have that redundancy during specific time periods (since you want to ensure they know what they are doing already at the point they are actually needed). So my suggestion is to walk the walk from the beginning. If this is the US, you should already be doing admin things like payment and ownership under some corporate structure already (LLC, Corp, etc) for numerous reasons. For the day to day stuff, I think it makes sense to bring on assistance on a regular basis. For instance, you can have a support person help out 1 day a week, or a few days a month, or whatever makes sense for your load. The important thing is that they are being involved before absolutely needed so that when they are needed its not something special.
I was a solo dev / sole entrepreneur for ~2 years, then raised. My product could be considered core. This meant that at about 1,5 years in I was basically unable to take a holiday (picture me sitting on the hotel bed during a family outing answering tickets, fixing infra).
Having continuity, support etc. all are basics you need to have once serious customers join. Even more simple, you need code reviews! You need a second pair of brains / eyes to actually make things better. Edit: and don't forget on-call. Being on-call for 2 years straight is not good for almost everything in your personal life.
While I have no plans of stopping working on them in the near term, I have listed that in the event of my death, an entrusted tech savvy person will take over these two companies.
That said, all my users have no guarantee that I'll continue to work on these products, but that's true of just about any company. I think as a solo developer I have to earn the trust of users by building in public and being a partial public figure.
Google Reader the first that comes to mind.
Just a word of rec. On mobile (Android/FF) the post titles are vertically stacked, which is tough to read for people. If you keep the text horizontally aligned and rotate 90 degrees (or dont and make horizontal) it'd make it easier to read.
Edit: Just checked out Closing Credits too. Super cool work
Some of the site is just ancient and I'm doing a big rebuild right now. I've added a note to fix that. Cheers!
After the first time when users call for help they know they're going to talk to me and that I'll go click by click with them to get them up to speed or reproduce the issue they're experiencing, and that I'll address any issues they run into.
Truth is, I very seldom get calls for help, or bug reports, or suggestions for new features. I have a "News" page where I post what I'm working on, and a "Beta" app they can check out to test new features and check out design changes.
I develop on an Mac Mini and mostly use BBEdit, Fetch, and Firefox/Brave. Over those 20 years I've had to call BBEdit and Fetch for help a few times and their support has always been top notch. I doubt they have many employees or get many support calls. Their software is mature and does what it's supposed to do.
I've also tried to get support from Apple, Google, and Microsoft on occasion over the years and it's close to impossible to talk to anyone. The one time I talked to someone at Google about an Adwords account they were rude and worthless (that was close to 20 years ago). I don't recall ever talking to a person at the others, but I recall feeling lost when searching for help on their websites.
I reported an issue to the Opera web browser folks earlier this year. They didn't respond at all. They did fix the issue, but never made any announcement about it. That bothered me enough to download Brave and I've been using it since to test my work. I don't know that they'd be any better, but I haven't had an issue with their browser to worry about.
I have a "one strike and your out" approach to apps and services I use.
What does make me suspicious are companies which don't identify themselves - no identifiable person or address.
Otherwise it depends on what you are asking me to rely on you to do, and what are my options if you fail.
Google's long list of killed projects is a good example, but any large (especially publicly traded company) may kill a service if they decide the economics don't look good.
You see this particularly when a large company grows by acquiring smaller companies, resulting in a stock price boost; but then a few quarters later there's a need to offset greater business failures by cutting costs, so some divisions or projects get axed.
I would probably trust in this order:
1. small focused profitable company
2. large private profitable company
3. solo operator
4. large publicly traded company
Do I trust solo entrepreneurs? Yes.
Would I use their software within my organization? No. Or at least, not for anything critical. Not because I do not trust the person, but because life is crazy and that product's bus factor is too high.
i found this to be a great way to sell my software
i’d offer prospects a partner agency, which will do the hosting, while i’m building the product
the customers get guarantees, while me and the agency share the profits
That way, the customer risks only the setback in time for the solution, they know what the cost is up front.
I set the cost comfortably high, my hourly rate on average on those projects were more than 20x what I am earning at my current position.
My customers were all happy, and probably still got off cheaper than if they'd hired a big pro consultancy firm.
Some tips to look like a small business (which is fine for most clients) instead of solo developer: * Get incorporated * Get "advisors" or "partners" that you can list, but do not actually do any work * Get freelancers that you can list, but only hire when required * Hire 1-2 part time students and let them answer calls or and do accounting/busy work
Last but not least, just have a great product and customers will work around their due diligence processes ;-)
So, this is just optics. Land and expand, for example, is a way to force their arm. If you are already there then they can cry about it or buy the enterprise plan :)
Now here’s my thing about software. That baker, when you provide your PII and financial data to them they’re using third party service. They’re not _in_ the data, unless they want to be.
Again, this is my opinion. I feel that when you’re _in_ the data—making decisions about data flow, management, PII— there is a moral and ethical danger a solo-developer can make bad decisions about a customer’s data.
That might be shocking idea, but just think about a savings and loan run by one person. You could get George Bailey, or Knuckles the Loan Shark.
If it's a self-contained desktop software, it's one thing.
If it's a 24/7 online service, it's another.
If the online component is optional or not critical, it's the third case.
I think what makes it easier in my case is that the product is self-hosted, so the clients don't have to rely on me to keep things running, plus they always have access to their data and product, even if I disappear.
Furthermore, I make sure to only release builds/publish updates that are not broken and that I am available in the days following a big release.
That being said, there have been many cases where companies (usually on the bigger side) decided not to work together because of my small company size and associated risks (but this mostly happened when discussing special uses-cases or partnerships, not when simply wanting to purchase and use the product as is).
I use good software, that isn't written by bigots and doesn't support bigotry.
I prefer good software from solo or small indie team developers because they tend to not only respond to feedback, but actually incorporate that feedback. I prefer it even more if their income is centered around their software because then making the app awesome and listening to users is core to them having food on the table and a roof on their heads, and that benefits me, the user, a lot.
separately: your Ask HN question title is a _radically_ different question than the one in the body of your post. I trust solo developers exactly as much as i trust any other individual i don't know.
If you have a laundry list of features and grand plans to do more, I'd avoid you like the plague. Reliable software is time consuming, and piling on more and more features tends to break corner cases.
If your software is extremely simple, with a few well-defined use cases, and it's clear that you only spend 1/3rd of your time actually programming, I'd probably consider it. (And in this case, there's a good chance you'll hire contractors or employees when your company grows.)
In the former case, (laundry list of features,) I'd conclude that you're a programmer who doesn't want a boss, and quality will probably suffer. In the latter case, I'd conclude that you're a businessman who happens to be selling software.
The reality is probably that most people don't think about if the product they're using is made by a solo dev or not. They only care if it solves their problem in an easy and nice way.
Same thing with clients if you're a contractor — don't rely on that client to pay 60%+ of your income — you'll be in for a world of hurt if something happens with that relationship.
(Startups are roughly in the same bucket. As is Google X where X is less than 5 yo)
If you are a pingdom clone then sure! I will easily be able to move to another pingdom clone.
If you send my emails, I can move too bit with a bit more pain and maybe some spam reputation issues.
If you organise all my teams work that is more of a headache to move off of.
If you provide a very specific breeof cloud platform, like a Firebase clone, and I am coded up to the eyeballs with a tight coupling to your api, I would be way more wary. If you go down so do I for quite some time.
But if your cloud is just a faster PostgreSQL then maybe that is not so bad.
2) If what your offering is something that involves sensitive data, financial stuff or something I need to sell on to another company I'd probably be more inclined to go for a more corporate setup so if things go bad it's not going to reflect so badly on me.
3) I try to avoid getting locked in to anything so regardless of whether your solo or a corp I'd want to be confident that I'm able to continue if you/the corp drops dead.
4) As someone who has generally been a solo developer (although freelance rather than managing to get my own 'product' out there) I've seen first hand the +/- of this. On one hand my clients appreciate that they can pick up the phone or send an email and speak to me who has inside out knowledge of what they're talking about, I'll work my arse off because I've got a lot to lose. However that might be impacted by me having a bad day, a holiday, being sick, a new shiny project or just a general lack of motivation.
In fact having it ready to go might help you clinch the deal. If you're part of an evaluation and you're ready to proceed and your competitor has to go and get this setup - you're more likely to get that business. Likewise if you're the competitor who's been caught with their pants down then you're more likely to lose that business. Every salesman I know is always looking for something to give them an edge for closing a deal!
It's not zero effort, but it's not that hard. There's plenty of firms provide the service.
Every time my former company shipped a release, we'd bundle up the source code, libraries, build scripts, etc, burn a DVD and send it off to Iron Mountain. Every time you do a sale that wants escrow, you add their details to the list and send that off to Iron Mountain too.
These days, I'd probably ship a Docker or VM image from the CI system: you need to give the customers something they can use to create their own builds.
We had some customers who actually tested the process, and when the company was sold and the product canceled, one customer took the option of getting the source code, and continued to make their own builds for a bunch of years afterwards.
ie. It shouldn't be at the suggestion or cost of a single customer, it is an accepted business cost to you.
The local law firm kinda surprised me that they did it, but it was very convenient for us, and cheap.
As we started selling to bigger companies, we found they were less comfortable with a smaller escrow firm, and eventually one actually demanded that we use Iron Mountain. So we switched to them. They were both a little more thorough, and a lot more expensive, but it still was a pretty minimal cost overall.
(edit: Looks like they've sold that busines -- here's a link I found https://softwareresilience.nccgroup.com/software-escrow/)
doesn't it put a big incentive to letting them die?
Software created by solo devs is used by many times fewer people, therefore it’s zero surprise that the total number of displaced customers is lower. You need to calculate the percentages, not hold up anecdotes of not having any rumors.
I don’t see how (C) can reasonably factor into any statistics. I’d love to hear how often you think this matters, but I’m extremely skeptical that shutting down a solo business and giving source to customers has happened enough times to even talk about relative to the number of times that hasn’t happened. I’d like to hear about when giving source to paying customers is even helpful. Depends highly on what kind of software we’re talking about, and depends highly on what kind of customers, but assuming that paying customers can generally do anything with source code seems like a really, really big assumption.
I'm in my 40s and officially more likely to have my heart kill me, than myself.
My former company sold on-premises enterprise software. Sales were usually a monthly fee in the $10k+ range.
Our company started quite small: 4 people, and in Australia but selling into the US and UK mostly.
Basically every one of our customers wanted source code escrow. The cost to use was minimal, both in effort and for the escrow agent.
Sure - you were hosting your DB just fine with 100 customers using standard SSD, but now at 1000 you're blowing your IOPS budget and need to upgrade to premium SSD. The premium SSD costs twice what the standard SSD does for the same space - your usage will not have doubled.
Or - god help you, you were hosting your db just fine with 100 customers using a small VM, and to avoid having to think about it, you've decided to move from a self-managed db on a VM to something like Cosmos DB. No growth in usage at all from you, but your costs are about to shoot way up.
Or - I've added a customer in a region that has poor connectivity to my current region of choice - oops, setting up edge services closer to them is going to hurt. Now I'm sending data between regions, incurring all sorts of costs between services that I wasn't with a single region setup.
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My experience with the cloud (and I've been a heavy user of both Azure and AWS, not as much GCP) is this: There are bands of costs, within that band, costs will tend to grow linearly as you grow.
The problem, is that you will outgrow the band you're in. There is a hard limit on something that you weren't thinking about (IOPS, for example) and once you hit that you have to jump to a different band with a new cost structure.
Usually, that means increasing base spend by a large amount compared to usage, and then getting slightly better cost/use at the new higher base.
.001858 for year 31 = .998142
...
.002482 for year 39 = .997518
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.998205 x .998142 x ... x .997518 = .978997 survival rate over 10 years
1 - .978997 = .021003 chance of death = 2.1%
30-39 is 2.1%
35-44 is 2.5%
40-49 is 3.3%
---------
30-49 is 5.3%
Ranges are inclusive of entire year. 30-39 is 30th bday to 40th bday
Maybe I'm immortal :)
It absolutely is in the context of a discussion of annualized mortality rates.
It’s misleading to annualize these stats because the participation rates per hour and per day are very very different. This is why sports risk is usually calculated in participation hours and not annualized, to prevent such misleading comparisons.