▲ ▼ SLA for side projects and solopreneurs
B2B side projects, solopreneurs who build products and services for businesses suffer from chicken-and-egg problem of not being able to provide guarantees on the availability of a service as there are not enough customers; Meanwhile business customers refrain from engaging with side projects and solopreneurs as they might cease to exist abruptly.
e.g. Check this service which creates social images for websites and articles with just the URL. This solves an important problem of having to create social images manually for every blog post of a business website. But if this services goes down, so does all the social images.
We need to find a solution to offer Service Level Agreements to business customers by solopreneurs and side project creators without compromising any side.
I think this problem needs to be solved if we want more B2B side projects to grow into actual profitable startups.
I once had such a project, for which I wasn't able to get any clients. I sold it for a meagre sum to a friend's company which is making lot of money with it, the company didn't do anything special with it, the difference was that they were incorporated and were in existence for couple of years; so they were able to get clients for it.
As a side project creator, I cannot be incorporated just for selling it to business customers. An agreeable service-level agreement(SLA) would could solve this.
How do you think such an SLA should be implemented?
Like for any chicken-and-egg problem, the first step is likely is to reduce the size of the market for working out a solution. We need to have find a small market where businesses would accept a SLA from a side project, a way for side project builders to offer SLA and adhere to it.