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Comment by glenngillen | Hacker News Reader

As someone who built a content platform to address most of the same issues, I tend to agree. I'm definitely starting out with the mindset of "I want to grow this into a modest and long-term sustainable business, but...".

It turns out making sure my product isn't on the critical path for you always having a copy of your data, should I go out of business with zero warning, is actually a lot of work.

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Startup idea: a service that prevents your startup from fucking your users over when you go out of business with zero warning.

Our Incredible Journey as a Service (OIJaaS.. kinda sounds like ouija...)

It almost sounds like a type of insurance company. While the actuarial tables would be horrible on startups, the cost of keeping relatively small amounts of data alive could be easily spread across lots of startups.

Besides, you wouldn't have to buy the servers until the startup died.

I wonder if this would work as an add on for a backup company? Calling @backblaze!

Or possibly The Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/) and/or Archive Team (http://www.archiveteam.org/).

It's been done: http://www.shutdownify.com/

... and they've shut down. How predictable.

Honestly that was a very very bad idea for a startup.

If you've read some of the rationale and things Dustin is trying to put in place "when you go out of business with zero warning" can mean get hit by a car. Being all hand-wavy as though not fucking people over in that instance isn't particularly helpful or realistic. Especially when such a high percentage of people expect to the services they use to be completely free in perpetuity.

Business continuity and succession plans aren't free.

I should add: if you're using such a tool, it's valuable, and you want your data to stay around then pay Dustin for all of his effort! The biggest challenge I've seen here is people wanting things to last forever for zero cost.

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