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Comment by gavinhoward | Hacker News Reader

I am building a business right now, and I need a standard contract for customers.

So this is exciting! I am delighted!

I just wish I were in the target audience. My business is not a startup, and I'm going to need specific terms because I'm a one-man shop. (How do you handle taking a vacation as a one-man shop? Work will effectively cease.)

Maybe I'll look at the contributor list and find an attorney in my state, which would still be vastly useful to me.

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If you send us a note at support@commonpaper.com, we'd be happy to make an intro to one of the attorneys on the committee.

They can potentially help with configuring the standards for your business and/or drafting something custom if none of those are a fit

Thank you for the offer. I just went through the list, and unfortunately, I found none in my state. :(

I still might use the contracts, though. Thank you.

Business advice rather than legal but… your customers are working with a company, not a person: the number of people at your company is immaterial. Lots of well-funded startups send everyone on vacation at Christmas for 2 weeks, and in some parts of the world it’s very normal for people to take 4+ weeks off work in a row. Your focus should be on building a business that can operate while you’re on vacation, or when something unexpected happens like hospitalisation: putting vacations into a contract is the wrong solution (and people will think you’re bananas).

My business model is support for my software.

Can you tell me how to make my business run without me using that model? Most startups don't do support for this reason; I'm pretty sure it's impossible to do support without an available person.

But it's not unprecedented. Think Daniel Stenberg of libcurl.

I think most businesses solve this problem by charging enough to employ another person. If there's not enough value in the market for that then fair enough, but that would be the normal solution.

That is true, but it is a personal limitation of mine that I work best on codebases I don't share.

I have been thinking about how to handle this problem, and I'm not sure of the solution.

Would it require someone who works on the codebase? Or could you employ someone to be nice to customers and have just enough technical knowledge to do triage?

I have no idea.

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