SaaS solo-founders: are you on call 24/7/365? Can you ever go off-grid or are you always tied to pager duty?
Like a lot of people here I’m lusting after the day where I can do my own thing. But something that’s making me hesitate, just a bit, is the thought of never being able to unplug...
...because if you’re the sole technical founder, and you want to stay small, that’s kinda the deal, right? You’re always on call in case your app falls over or gets ddos’d or something.
So, solo founder indie hackers: let’s say you wanna go on vacation for 2 weeks, and you want to truly unplug. How do you make that work?
Even if you have a boring CRUD app hosted on Heroku, someone still has to be on the hook just in case something really bad happens, right?
So do you hire a freelancer to watch the shop? Find some kind of outsourced tech support company? Or do you just accept you’ll always be chained to your phone from now on?
Except for a few months between projects, I've been on call 24/7/365 for the past 11 years or so. Even if you hire people, as the owner of the company, the buck stops at you. Your developer, your freelancer, your devops person could face a problem they can't resolve and if you are not there, then that's it. There's no avoiding being on-call 24/7/365.
For example... everything could be well, but you have a spike in traffic that causes resource consumption beyond your budget and you are the only one that can make the decision to spend money because it's a great opportunity, or go into maintenance mode because the traffic is worthless.
That doesn't mean you can't go off the grid. As I grew and I became better at this, I had better and better ways of handling incidents, with people and systems, that meant things rarely get escalated to me. But going off the grid always carries the risk, you accept it like any other risk.
BTW, this is true for all business owners and not just technical ones. Something can go wrong at any point and all employees can say "I did my best". The only person who doesn't say that is the business owner.
Yeah, I believe one can't completely unplug if they have to run a business. But if the company generates revenue and there are a few to take care of every aspect of business,it might work.
As a (any, small, medium, large)business owner, you're the one responsible for your clients. If it's just you, then "Pager duty" it is😁, if you've got a sharp team of 50 doing your thing, then sure, take a break and relax, your team has got your back.
Personally, I like to be involved. I'm thinking about this as a customer though, because if the owner/founder replies to a message, then you "could" be in good hands.
No one else will care for your baby as much as you do.