What happens to a one-person SaaS if you're ill?

If it's built to run on its own, it carries on, until something goes wrong and nobody is there to notice. Mine ran for a fortnight of flu with nobody looking at them at all, mostly by luck. Now every product has one page, written while I'm well, so somebody else could keep it safe.

The flu fortnight

In the winter of my eighth year I had flu for a fortnight and opened nothing. I lay on the sofa under a blanket that smelt of cough sweets, and for the first time since I'd gone out on my own, 5 products ran for 2 weeks with nobody watching.

The loops ran. Every night the jobs took their work from the queues, did it, checked it, stored it and sent the emails. The daily ceilings held. The backups went on. 2 customer emails waited more than a week, and both people were kind about the wait. Nothing broke.

I'd like to say it proved how well the products were built. Mostly it proved how lucky I'd been with the fortnight. A provider outage, a retry loop, a customer whose scanner went mad: any of them, in those 2 weeks, and nobody would have noticed.

The "if I'm away" page

When I was back on my feet I wrote one page for each product, with 6 lines:

• Where it lives. The server, the domain, the payment account, the email provider. Names, and where to find the logins, never the logins themselves.
• What runs on its own. The jobs, how often, and what a normal night looks like.
• What needs a person. The things no job does.
• The command that stops it. One command, written out.
• How to reach its customers. Where the list is, and how to send them one message.
• What to tell them. 3 sentences, already written, for a delay of a week or more.

Then tell one person where the pages are.

Ask yourself tonight

If you were ill for a fortnight from tomorrow, which of your products would notice first? Write that one's page first.

The Second Product has the chapter.