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Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

Now compare the longevity and sustainability of this software product to VC-funded startups, which are more like blips on the radar before they disappear by going bankrupt or getting acquired.

Having multiple people in a company does not guarantee that it will stick around. People saying "but it's a one-person business, I can't trust it in the long term" are wrong.

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> People saying “but it's a one-person business, I can't trust it in the long term" are wrong.

The problem is: people aren’t immortal. That one person could be dead tomorrow. So, you can’t trust any one person business in the long term, by definition.

Depends on what level of trust you need to have. Obviously you can’t even trust a multibillion-dollar public company like Google to keep maintaining a product forever, or even for a couple years.

On the other hand, someone selling a stable piece of desktop software doesn’t even require a tremendous amount of trust. Just the trust not to ship malware or massive security holes. Even if they fully retire and delete the source code, your software will keep working. That’s more than I can say for Google reader, or the Humane AI Pin.

When he dies, if not before, he or his family can sell the business. There's even websites/communities where you can post this kind of business for sale.

The software will still work for years even if his who family is wiped out in a plane crash.

A saas product will die when the credit card bounces a couple of months later.

>even if his who[le] family is wiped out in a plane crash.

Thanks for that cheery thought.

At age 59 there is a 5% chance he will die in the next year. What's the chance that your enterprise SaaS is going to get canned in that period?

Actually less than 1.5% chance of dying (at least for American men, Brits would be similar).

https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

I have business continuity plans. And my point still stands: in practice, within a 5-year time horizon, you are much more likely to see a VC-funded or corporate-owned service shut down, than see a sustainable single-founder business disappear.

see: our incredible journey

side note: after I typed "our incredible j", and then in this very text box, mind you, not even in Google, the full word "journey" popped up as a choice for me to select.

shows ...

here you go, downvoter dude (we can guess you're from one of the types described below, or aspire to be, meaning the startups that gets acqui-hired, and dumps their users ):

https://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/2013/02/27/our-incredibl...

https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/post/89180616013/wha...

https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/about/

nah I just don't like your writing style.

It's all just mindgames bullshit to get you to accept worse terms, or ignorance. Your characterization is right. VC boosted products are sometimes like shit crops sewn in bad soil but laden with chemical fertilizer to force growth. They might have no fundamental strength.

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