
Ask HN: What contingency do you have in place for your source/apps when you die? - sphericalgames
This question is mainly aimed at self-employed, solo developers with side projects, e.t.c. where the chances of losing digital work is very high because no one else is around to pick up the pieces or make sense of what you have started &#x2F; created. Do you have any digital contingency in place for any of the work that you&#x27;ve started&#x2F;done after you have died? For example, if you don&#x27;t renew your apple developers account, the apps you have created will soon disappear from the app store and those income will be lost for your beneficiary. So, what have you done to prevent this?
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patio11
I spent a non-trivial amount of time on this when I was running my businesses.

There are, roughly, three very different rationales to have business
succession planning in place, and at the scale of a solo operator they have
very different best options available:

1) I want to avoid negatively impacting paying clients in the event of a bus
factor issue.

2) I want to avoid negatively impacting "the community" in the event of a bus
factor issue.

3) I want to ensure my heirs receive the residual value of the income stream.

#3 is by far the easiest for the typical case: buy more term life insurance
than you otherwise would. The end. Most people in this situation are, roughly,
young and healthy, and term life is a cheap commodity. If your app is throwing
off $50k per year, great, take a few hundred dollars and buy a million dollars
of 10 year term life; if you kick the bucket your heirs now have a ~$40k safe
withdraw rate. (You can get almost arbitrarily high amounts of term life if
you throw the words "business owner" around a lot.)

#1 and #2 are _a lot tougher_ because they require a combination of technical
skill, extreme interpersonal trust, non-technical professional labor
(lawyers/accountants), non-trivial liquidity, and fast action at what will be
an extremely trying time for your loved ones.

The best answer I have for this could fill a small book, but the very short
version is that you prepare an In Case Stuff Happens packet for an _extremely_
trusted technical friend who has run a business similar in character to yours,
with the understanding that if you are to kick the bucket they will (depending
on the nature of the property) either a) if it is a trivial site, put it into
"maintenance mode" or b) if it is an active business, prepare it for a quick,
orderly sale, or c) if it is in the unfortunate position of being in the
goldilocks zone between sustainable-with-trivial-work and economically-viable,
prepare it for an orderly shutdown (turn off for new users, announce
sunsetting in 12 months, etc).

For more on this topic, you'll want to consult lawyers (who unfortunately
won't have all that specific useful advice) and either people running
businesses with similar characters who have done it _multiple_ times before
(death is just another form of exit ;) ) or business brokers (who specialize
in orderly transitions and know what you'll need to have lined up).

~~~
sphericalgames
Thanks for this. Certainly food for thought here. I do have a couple of
developer friends I could hand over this stuff to on the event the worst
should happen. I guess some developers don't have that option. For me, it is
just a matter of broaching the subject with them and see which friend is best
handling the issue at hand. It is a tricky subject and I believe is it one
that is being totally overlooked and we are collectively losing a lot of work
that we are unaware of.

