Hacker News Reader

Comment by raw_anon_1111 | Hacker News Reader

Neither my company nor any of the five companies I’ve worked for over the past ten years would ever trust any of their business to a one person SaaS shop we would throw some developers on it first.

Let me take that back. I was the developer lead for a company from 2016-2018 and we found this 2 person SaaS with a product that we needed. We were going to be 65% of his revenue if we signed the deal.

I spoke to my CTO and lawyers. We made the guy offer us a self hosted version and escrow his code with a third party that we would have the rights to depending on certain events.

View on HN

I have been running a one-man sideline Saas for 18 years. I have found that most customers have no concept of what the company looks like behind a Saas product.

The only time I had the, "What happens if you get knocked down by a bus?" comment, was for a big bespoke contract, which I got.

I have never aimed to hoodwink anyone. I have just been surprised to learn in the average person's mind Saas = company of many people. One client of 10 years was shocked when I told him by email that I was in my 50s and a company of one.

I am in a similar situation. It does not feel safe for big companies to rely on one man shows or small companies. Are there any ways for small companies to get out of this?

Ask some founders or do some research on how B2B companies got started. My n=1 experience working for a startup is that the founders were well connected and got one big contract from a health care system and expanded from there.

They also got investment from their customer and their customer opened doors.

> We made the guy offer us a self hosted version and escrow his code with a third party that we would have the rights to depending on certain events.

The guy agreed to this? Damn

There was a lot of legalese. But it boiled down to if he stopped working on it or got a hit by a bus.

Let me add on…we didn’t have exclusive rights to it nor could we redistribute the code or use it as the basis of an external product.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com