My question is how do you get businesses to trust the continuity of a business operating by one person?
As a rule, I wouldn’t trust building anything depending on a small company - “no one ever got fired for choosing IBM”.
(I also wouldn’t trust building a project on top of a Google product. But that’s a different story)
Not as a solo entrepreneur, but I have been on both sides of a similar situation. I was working for a struggling startup where our largest customer who made up 70% of our revenue insisted on the code being put in escrow that they would get access to under certain conditions.
The condition happened - company was sold for scraps - and then they hired me as a contractor for them using the code they now had access to them. Yes everything was above board, they worked with the acquiring company to allow me to keep my work laptop and in my severance agreement the acquirer released me from non competes, etc.
Two companies later I was on the opposite side where I was one of the decision makers where we were going to extend the contract with a solo entrepreneur for a SaaS. We were going to be 70% of his revenue. I suggested we also get his code put in escrow and I was responsible for actually watching his build process once per quarter where he pulled his escrowed code out and built and ran from scratch.
The combo of data exports and open-sourcing your code is a great solution to this problem. If you vanished tomorrow customers could easily migrate to a different vendor or even self-host. That carries much less risk than betting on any early stage VC startup that might vanish overnight, even with more people involved.
To be fair, they said "many well known businesses," not necessarily large or mature organizations. They could easily be selling to startups, some of which are notable.
As a rule, I wouldn’t trust building anything depending on a small company - “no one ever got fired for choosing IBM”.
(I also wouldn’t trust building a project on top of a Google product. But that’s a different story)
Not as a solo entrepreneur, but I have been on both sides of a similar situation. I was working for a struggling startup where our largest customer who made up 70% of our revenue insisted on the code being put in escrow that they would get access to under certain conditions.
The condition happened - company was sold for scraps - and then they hired me as a contractor for them using the code they now had access to them. Yes everything was above board, they worked with the acquiring company to allow me to keep my work laptop and in my severance agreement the acquirer released me from non competes, etc.
Two companies later I was on the opposite side where I was one of the decision makers where we were going to extend the contract with a solo entrepreneur for a SaaS. We were going to be 70% of his revenue. I suggested we also get his code put in escrow and I was responsible for actually watching his build process once per quarter where he pulled his escrowed code out and built and ran from scratch.