Ask HN: Solo founders, what’s “stuff breaks while you're unavailable” strategy? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Solo founders, what’s “stuff breaks while you're unavailable” strategy?

7 pointsleros11 comments

There is a current post with a similar title asking about your "get hit by a bus strategy" and I think the answers are missing the mark, so I'm posing a slightly different question.

There are times you are absolutely unavailable (sick, on a plane, off grid, dealing with a personal emergency, etc). What's your strategy when all hell breaks loose and you just can't step away.

In other words, being on call 24-7-365 is not realistic. Do you have a plan?

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My folks from Founders Cafe https://founderscafe.io/ told me to create a flowchart of what to do in case that I am not here and there's a problem in the workplace. I'll give them to my employees and I make sure that the chart is clear, so no misinterpretation will take place.

For example, a Server's:

- disk fails (ZFS with hot spares)

- power supply fails (each server has two)

- someone cut the power (there's another server)

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Most issues will be caused by me, so the general answer is don't leave before testing.

Not a solo founder, but this is a huge part of it. Do not deploy changes to code or architecture unless you CAN be on call to fix what breaks.

Yes. As a founder, I'll have to witness it first to make sure that I get responsibility for what happened. It's not that I don't trust them. I just don't want to blame people in my workplace. My peers from Founders Cafe helped me create a strategy for this. https://founderscafe.io/

Do you not worry about something breaking even with an older deploy? Random things happen.

I don't worry about random things.

Yes, e.g. hardware of hosts breaking, datacenters getting disconnected, etc.

I'm not a solo founder, but if I would be I would most likely pick a solution where I would have to maintain the least amount of infrastructure (e.g. using SAAS/FAAS offerings). That would mean in most cases someone else gets paged if things break. Still doesn't guarantee 100% availability since it can't prevent code bugs from doing bad things, but there would be still less things to worry about.

This is my take. I build products that have the critical infrastructure be fairly simple and hosted completely on third party systems. The most custom part of my system is just the customer portal, which can go down without impacting the core product functionality.

My team from Founders Cafe told me to create a strategy, kind of like a flowchart of what to do in case I'm not on call when there is a problem. I give them to my employees/freelancers. As soon as I am available, I'll check the conditions of the workplace first thing in the morning.

I am really looking forward to the point where it doesn't take all day for someone to show up in my Discord to mention the website is down.

Until then it's apparently not a huge problem.

Risk acceptance. What happens if you die tomorrow by a car accident? Accept that risk and switch focus to more important things.

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