I lost both of my developers in one week 😅

Seriously, true story. And it almost buried my business.

Both of my engineers, the guys who built the WarTable from the ground up... Gone. Same week I started a 37-day roadshow for our new product - to get in the hands of as many customer and investors as possible. Overnight, everything came screeching to a halt.

No one else knew where the credentials lived. No one else had touched the codebase. I was the final line — and in this particular skill, not a solid line.

So I jumped in right away. Downloaded Claude Code and our repository as fast as I could. Researching. Learning. Patching whatever I could reach.

It somewhat worked, but clearly my technical learning curve was longer than our financial runway.

Luckily, we had just hired a stellar team member who turned out to be a well-networked, well-respected professional with a qualified prospect for the position - and she connected us to their replacement.

Soon enough, he was running the deep work while I was pushing PRs and staging new feature requests for his review. After roughly 2-weeks, we were in sync.

...and now with MORE technical prowess and firepower than before. Less Risk. Better communication between front and back of house.

It was a genuine overall upgrade.

Moral of the story: Our biggest threat, as rough as it was, became one of our greatest assets - (ie: the founder is now semi-technical and the product will never "die" if we lose a developer.)

Here's what I'd tell any founder before this happens to you:

Write down who can access what, today, not "someday"
Name a backup decision-maker for every function, not just the technical stuff
Store credentials somewhere more than one person can reach
Ask yourself: "if I vanished for a month, what breaks first?"

That last question is the only one that actually matters.|

What's the one thing in your business that only YOU know how to do?

📚 Worth your time: Bus Factor — Martin Fowler's Bliki Short read that names the exact fear I lived through: your "bus factor" is how many people could disappear before your project stalls out — and for most solo founders, that number is one. https://martinfowler.com/bliki/BusFactor.html

5 comments

I lost both of my developers in one week 😅