Speaking of getting hit by a bus, a friend and I are considering a consulting service that could help mitigate bus factor risk - would love any feedback on this idea.
We've both noticed that for nontechnical owners of small businesses that have a heavy software component, that owner is completely at the mercy of their lead developer. If that person leaves or "gets hit by a bus" their company might just die, especially since they don't really know what a Github is or how to log into anything. My friend is such a nontechnical person and hired someone to build his SaaS app. He has felt this risk himself but we wonder if he's just particularly perceptive.
The service would be, for a retainer fee per month a developer sits in on your planning calls, looks over all code committed to your repo, and over time documents how everything works and stores that documentation in a system outside of the company (maybe an external wiki or something). Then if your lead developer leaves, we'd help you find a new one and then train them on the codebase using the documentation created.
Over on the Let's Encrypt Community Forum we get quite a few inquiries from people who say "I'm the site owner and my developer [disappeared|quit|was only hired for a one-time setup task] and my certificate expired; how do I renew it?".
I assume this is a really common pattern for web sites in general. :-(
I don't imagine that this segment would be interested in paying for "continuity insurance", but they might grudgingly hire someone for "tech rescue". I guess that's a very different kind of service; I'm not sure if there's anything in between the two.
> I don't imagine that this segment would be interested in paying for "continuity insurance", but they might grudgingly hire someone for "tech rescue". I guess that's a very different kind of service; I'm not sure if there's anything in between the two.
Very sadly I find myself agreeing with your assessment in general. However I was once seeking almost exactly this service, and I have to say I struggled to find what I wanted.
You should start with convincing people that it is a non-negligible risk and then sell an apt mitigation. Nobody expects to die suddenly, and with a technical co-founder you don't expect them to leave the company to die, either. Depending on the actual risk (which I'm guessing is low), it seems much more efficient to have an insurance that will pay for costs incurred due to their untimely death/departure: pay for a replacement dev (for a reasonable amount of time so they can get to know the product), perhaps hiring costs, perhaps missed income for the company... Like with contents' insurance, I expect there would be a configurable amount that is paid out for all of these things, where lower amounts mean a lower premium.
Having a developer continuously kept up to date might only be affordable for larger companies, which might as well have someone doing that internally. I also don't think a single person can memorize enough about multiple startups to be worth it: either they hear about each customer's tech stack at least once every month (that already seems quite little, but is already relatively expensive so far as insurance-type services go), or they won't be worth more than written documentation.
We've both noticed that for nontechnical owners of small businesses that have a heavy software component, that owner is completely at the mercy of their lead developer. If that person leaves or "gets hit by a bus" their company might just die, especially since they don't really know what a Github is or how to log into anything. My friend is such a nontechnical person and hired someone to build his SaaS app. He has felt this risk himself but we wonder if he's just particularly perceptive.
The service would be, for a retainer fee per month a developer sits in on your planning calls, looks over all code committed to your repo, and over time documents how everything works and stores that documentation in a system outside of the company (maybe an external wiki or something). Then if your lead developer leaves, we'd help you find a new one and then train them on the codebase using the documentation created.