Good article. My comment might be off topic in which case, please ignore.
If you have a one-person SaaS company, how do you get past customers’ resistance to a single point of failure, namely you?
Do you pretend you’re not just one person? Do you only have customers who could handle losing the service when you, say, run away to meditate on the mountaintop? (Or get run over by a beer truck, or whatever.) Is there some non-obvious solution?
And — back on topic — is the architecture part of that sales pitch? “I’m just one dude, but look how simple this is, it can run itself if I am devoured by mice!”
This is a great question. It never ever comes up during the sales process, I don't go out of the way to show them my (lack of) org chart.
If you do customization for larger customers (and you should), like boiling a frog, one day you become mission critical to their business. Once they recognize that, then they will start asking questions. Now they're kinda stuck with you. You did charge enough money, right?
At that point you must appease them with a plan. Have their code and database on a dedicated server instance. Have them pay for it and own the account (you just saved money). Make sure you're using their domain they control. Give them access to the source code. It's on the server, so that's easy. Write up a doc with how to access everything and all the frameworks and tools you use. After this, they will never bring it up again.
Worst case scenario, sell them the software outright. Price it much higher than you think they will pay. Then double that. Trust me, I've done this a few times.
I've made a living running one-person SaaS sites for over 20 years, many of them in the same space as OP (analytics stuff). I can't recall a customer ever asking how many employees there are. It just doesn't come up. I don't think small business customers care. Maybe it matters for more enterprise salesy type businesses.
I'm in a very similar situation - I've ran a one-person, B2B SaaS for 20 years, and not once has anyone asked how many employees we are. I sell a lot in the EU defence sector, and even there is has never come up. Sometimes customers ask about product end-of-life policies, but they are always satisfied with my responses.
I run a b2b saas that is used daily by some fortune500s. I have been going through rigorous vetting processes but have only once been asked about this. I lied and told them it is no problem. I usually pretend my company is larger than it is (me).
It gives me a headache now and then, and am now in the process to get someone else onboard.
I've had some cases of customers asking "what happens if your company dies" for cloud services even knowing the company I work for is +30 employees, so not just for "one person company", some people seems to care about what happens to their data / service. I'm just wondering if that comes from conferences or talks that points out that a lot more/less.
If you have a one-person SaaS company, how do you get past customers’ resistance to a single point of failure, namely you?
Do you pretend you’re not just one person? Do you only have customers who could handle losing the service when you, say, run away to meditate on the mountaintop? (Or get run over by a beer truck, or whatever.) Is there some non-obvious solution?
And — back on topic — is the architecture part of that sales pitch? “I’m just one dude, but look how simple this is, it can run itself if I am devoured by mice!”