How to reduce emergency workload for small startup
We're a 3 person team launching a web app soon. Only one of us is a developer. What are other options rather than just having him on call for technical emergencies 24/7?
- making sure you don't call him if you can fix it yourself, or if anyone else BUT him can fix it
- identifying probable or possible areas of failure and have him provide a little advanced training for how to handle incidents
- making ABSOLUTELY sure that any incidents that do occur, are addressed with systems to prevent or repair any recurrence of the same problem. Preferably automated systems whenever possible. You should be doing this anyway, but if you want to know how to minimize the emergency workload, the best way is to make sure each emergency happens only once and never happens again. Thus the number and severity of emergencies will naturally decrease over time.
If you've got good code and tested the product well the quantity of emergencies at launch should be quite low as unless you are launching a new product to a lot of existing users you're unlikely to get a large amount of usage at launch.
As you scale up your customer base and your business, be sure to think of your lone developer first and provide him with extra resources (and you with less risk) by increasing your development team.
Good luck!