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Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs?

#151

Post by jjav »

codingdave wrote: post #23
Alex3917 wrote: post #13

For your typical solo founder in their 30s, their odds of dying at any point over the next 10 years is something like 0.2%. And short of them dying, their business isn't going anywhere because keeping a SaaS startup online doesn't cost anything -- if you have the skills to do it yourself. 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 r…

If it is working for you, that is great, but... 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…

> 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.

AWS has a free tier, so I wouldn't apply that rule too much.

Re: Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs?

#152

Post by [deleted] »

buf wrote: post #28

I'm the sole developer of www.castingcall.club and www.closingcredits.com. About 1M people use these two products a year and I've ran them for about 7 years. 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 prod…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs?

#154

Post by dahart »

thfuran wrote: post #118
dahart wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s exactly the opposite of why it’s an unrelated analogy (which was stated). People live days of their lives far more often than they check baggage. Death is not a once per year risk. The risk of losing luggage per day or per hour of traveling is much higher than the risk of dying per hour/day of living.

>Death is not a once per year risk. It absolutely is in the context of a discussion of annualized mortality rates.

My point was a response to the statement that baggage checking happens more than once per year. Life also happens more than once per year, and in fact it happens more often than checking baggage, right?

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.

Re: Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs?

#155

Post by dahart »

marcosdumay wrote: post #119
dahart wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s exactly the opposite of why it’s an unrelated analogy (which was stated). People live days of their lives far more often than they check baggage. Death is not a once per year risk. The risk of losing luggage per day or per hour of traveling is much higher than the risk of dying per hour/day of living.

You are comparing it with the risk of dying in an year. That is a once per year risk.

It’s not a once per year risk, it’s an average. And you agree that changing the choice of time window for averaging will dramatically change the results, don’t you?

Re: Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs?

#156

Post by tedmiston »

dahart wrote: post #105
Alex3917 wrote: post #13

For your typical solo founder in their 30s, their odds of dying at any point over the next 10 years is something like 0.2%. And short of them dying, their business isn't going anywhere because keeping a SaaS startup online doesn't cost anything -- if you have the skills to do it yourself. 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 r…

> the odds of a venture backed startup shutting down at any point over the next ten years is something like 30%. 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/SB1000087239639044…

Yeah, the 30% number is way off. The vast majority of startups die off. That percentage is likely 90–95%, maybe even 99%.

If you include acquihired teams / sunsetted products, that number is even higher.

Re: Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs?

#157

Post by __d »

conductr wrote: post #120
taylodl wrote: post #110

I treat solo entrepreneurs the same way I treat small companies that have a high probability of not remaining in business in five years: a risk. A risk doesn't mean I'm not going to do business with you, it simply means I have something needing to be mitigated. Typically I mitigate that risk via the use of an escrow service. If you're not familiar with escrow services they are a mutually trusted 3rd party. You provid…

This must be a huge contract otherwise I'd just charge you an insane premium if you asked me to do that, such a PITA

This is a very standard thing to (a) do, and (b) be demanded in a contract.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs?

#158

Post by quickthrower2 »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #33

It depends on the nature of the dependency being taken. (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…

s/breeof/breed of/

Re: Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs?

#159

Post by __d »

conductr wrote: post #144
taylodl wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huge contract? Not really. Especially when many larger clients whom you'd love to have for a reference will demand it. Take care of it up-front and don't wait until you get into contract negotiation. If the client knows you don't have a software escrow service already in place they may ask for the moon. Head that off at the pass and have it ready to go from day one. In fact having it ready to go might help you clinch…

But I don’t have to please every client and don’t have to jump through hoops for small dollars. It would depend on the product/market if this was the normal expectation then I’d find that out rather quickly and may decide differently. But I’ve never been asked for anything like this and would gladly just say no if it was a small dollar value at stake.

I guess it would depend on the size of the sale.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs?

#160

Post by __d »

bjacobt wrote: post #112
taylodl wrote: post #110

I treat solo entrepreneurs the same way I treat small companies that have a high probability of not remaining in business in five years: a risk. A risk doesn't mean I'm not going to do business with you, it simply means I have something needing to be mitigated. Typically I mitigate that risk via the use of an escrow service. If you're not familiar with escrow services they are a mutually trusted 3rd party. You provid…

Do you have any recommendations for escrow companies?

I've used both a local IP law firm, and Iron Mountain.

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/)

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