freelancingI am a freelancing web developer.
Generally I take responsibility for my projects after giving to the client only if those are in my servers. I can’t responsibility about others servers.
Three persons till now asked that “what happens to my project if you will die someday”?
I know that it is a valid question, but how I answer that without losing the client?
Customers are making an investment when choosing a product way beyond the cost. The product is included in the way they do business - it is embedded in policy and procedures, may be integrated with other systems, etc. Whether you are a solo proprietor, or you are just seen as one because you are the sole face of your business, this question can come up quite often.
Even without the question coming from customers, it is a question you need to answer. And have a written plan for. What is the future of your product without you? Who can access the source code? Emails? Support software? Hosting plan? Domain Registrar? Payment gateways? Bank accounts?
If you haven’t already done so, spend some time writing down all the aspects of your business, the tools you use, the logins used for each, the vendors, etc. Over a few days you will think of more and more information that should be in this plan. You are not sharing this plan with anyone at the moment, but you are focusing on gathering all the relevant information for someone to run the business without you. (This is also valuable information in the event that you want to sell your business - not just if you get hit by a bus!)
During this time you may have someone in mind that you would pass the business (or parts thereof) on to. If that’s the case, you can talk it through with them. Set up an agreement.
If you don’t have anyone, you can set up an Escrow agreement. You provide a complete, up to date copy of any source code, together with documentation and details of the hosting contract, etc which is lodged with an agent who keeps it all secure.
Should anything happen to you, the agent will release it to a nominated company (who has agreed to take over your business) or directly to your customers. They can then get someone else to manage it (or manage it in-hosue).
Once you have a plan, you will be able to answer with confidence any questions you get from customers. They may be satisfied just knowing that it is a scenario you have considered and have prepared for. Or, in order to satisfy their own risk management policy, they may require the details of the escrow agent to be included in their agreement with you.
I’ve been in your shoes and I expect that if you were to answer honestly right now, your answer would be “you’re up the creek, no paddle”. So, if you are going to stay in the business of operating applications for your customers, you need to do, at least, what kerrin says (get a plan, cover your bases, etc.)
I would encourage you to evaluate whether you can or want to be in the service operator business.
Delivering work-for-hire in the form of code delivered to customers to be run in their shop by their people is manageable as a one-person operation but, providing a reliable service that people depend on to run their day-to-day businesses requires a level of support that is seldom handled well by one-person. It’s also a bit dangerous taking this type of work (service operator) because even if you don’t get hit by a bus, you will probably get sick or want to take a vacation or some other life-event eventually intervenes and when that happens, your service delivery will suffer and your customers will be unhappy.
If you want to remain in the service delivery game, I would recommend doing all the things that kerrin recommended and I would recommend finding a partner so you’re not single-threaded people-wise.
Alternatively, I would recommend you spend the energy to work with your clients to attempt to transition application ownership to their team and use your extra cycles to write more code.
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