Platform risks everywhere, part 2

First Twitter, then Stripe, now Heroku:

My @heroku account has been deleted, bringing down all my applications. No message, no email. Has anyone ever had this happen to them?? …Quite the audacity to not send a single email either. – @dannypostmaa

Platform risks everywhere. I feel like I don’t know these platforms anymore…

Some might object that these rug pulls are just remote, theoretical possibilities. But that’s the thing. We don’t know for sure how high the exposure is for us because that’s the nature of black swan events. It’s belong to unknown unknowns, not known unknowns.

But with monthly stories like this on Hacker News [1] [2], and stories of Paypal randomly freezing funds, hosting platforms shutting down servers, it’s not a stretch to think it can’t happen to anyone, even smaller players like us indie solopreneurs.

What’s the solution then?

• Backup backup backup
• Get insurance coverage
• Diversify

Multi-cloud, multi-payment processor, multi-income streams.

Host not just on Heroku, but at least have back-ups or secondary instances running on Render, MongoDB Atlas, AWS. Offer not just Stripe but PayPal, PayPal credit card, ChargeBee, CoinBase, Amazon Payments, Alipay, crypto. Offer payments outside of major credit card networks and payment platforms, like services provided by local banks.

Double or triple work be damned.

Crazy I know. Especially for indies and startups who don’t even have the time and bandwidth to be spread out across so many platforms. But short cuts don’t sidestep reality. And that’s the reality of financial and payments industry. Something to think about. And for the edge cases where you can’t multi- your way out off, there’s commercial insurance to consider for coverage.

And these incidents totally reminded me of being diversified in ways that platforms can’t touch you. Because these platforms aren’t services that we can switch away easily. These are the shovel platforms in the gold rush, fundamental internet infrastructure services that you can’t run away from if you’re a digital business.

That’s why I’m even more grateful for my consulting work with local government organisations now! That income stream is outside of credit card networks, payment platforms, and not even really on the internet. Government payments to vendors will never be blocked by banks. Bunker-level hedge against platform risks there.

The one question that I’ll leave fellow indie solopreneurs with to ponder (including myself):

What’s stopping a critical infrastructure/platform that your business depend on to randomly terminate your account? How prepared are you for that unknown unknown?