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Especially if the value of the deal is, say, $50/month (so 2nd lowest tier)
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…
Google Reader the first that comes to mind.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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% The real figure is more 2.1% (source: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html )
I'm confused, where does the 2.1% come from. It does look like 0.001795 which is 0.2% for a 30 year old in the source you linked
.001858 for year 31 = .998142
...
.002482 for year 39 = .997518
---------------------
.998205 x .998142 x ... x .997518 = .978997 survival rate over 10 years
1 - .978997 = .021003 chance of death = 2.1%
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.
- 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
I’ve even discussed buying him out because it’s such a worry.
Only once did we actively cancel a contract with a solo entrepreneur. It was a payment platform (on top of Stripe). We later learned (via Twitter photos) he also did a coast-to-coast camping van trip for several weeks. I think he was living in the van, too. All fine. But then during a customer complaint we couldn't get hold of him for days. Maybe in a national park without cellphone reception? It was too much of risk…
I think this is the biggest issue with solo entrepreneurs. Nobody does support and keeps their business running when they are not available. This at the same time is one of the most stressful parts of being a solo entrepreneur. When I ran a one-man-show in the early 2000s I never had time to really take two days off. I needed to be online and at least reply to a few emails every day. Money was good, but there was no…
Note that one of the main start-up failure reason is cofounder conflict: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/startup.google.co...