You'd have to make the decision between that well-paid dream job, or your commitment to your own business. If we are lucky, you can negotiate an exemption based on limited hours required to maintain tarsnap, and/or some contract fulfillment period (contract to customers, which does not exist presently).

Or you could farm the maintenance out to a trusted person, give them a cut of the biz, and stay on as a passive shareholder.

I'm happy that tarsnap does well for you, but we know it will be quite a stretch for it to match your potential for income and impact at a larger company. We hope it expands to meet and exceed all of your needs, and gives you other kinds of valuable rewards.

But we wouldn't hold it against you if you had to make personal decisions that didn't fulfill all of our wishes. You don't owe us that. No one does.

If you were feeling generous, you could offer customers a 1-year product EOL notice guarantee. Barring insolvency, acts of g-d, etc, that you pledge to operate tarsnap at full service levels for at least one year after notification of product EOL. That's more than most small companies offer, and more than enough for us to get our stuff moved elsewhere. 1 year might be too much.

(I know it depends on the kind of FTE you're planning to hire, but I'm deliberately not putting a stick in the sand because I'm not trying to figure out how much you make).

That's not really something I'm looking at.

What multiple of an FTE salary are you hoping to get to in monthly rev before you hire?

I want to have enough revenue that I can hire someone without reducing my "take-home profits" to an uncomfortably low level. So 2 FTE salaries, for some definition of "FTE salary", I guess. (And yes, I do realize that the idea of "wait until you can afford to pay someone before hiring them" is horribly out of style.)

It's more likely that I'll follow yegg's example of expanding initially via contract and part-time work, though.

But you answered my question: you seem relatively conservative about this stuff.

What kind of stuff would you contract out if money wasn't an object?

Well, a single month of 2xFTE wouldn't make me run out and hire someone... I'd need to be confident that it would continue. But presuming growth or steady revenue is pretty safe in the case of Tarsnap -- most of Tarsnap's revenue comes from storage costs, and in a typical month only about 10% of data gets deleted (and most of that is from machines which are uploading and deleting roughly equal amounts, presumably as part of an archive rotation process).

you seem relatively conservative about this stuff.

Within the limits implied by the fact that I'm running a startup company: Yes, I'm quite conservative in how I do things.

What kind of stuff would you contract out if money wasn't an object?

More testing. Kivaloo development. A GUI wrapper. I might throw some money at a web designer to see if they could make something I like more than the current site (I know you hate Tarsnap's web design, but like the picodollars, it does a good job of attracting the customers I want.) At some point, user support, but probably not yet (I worry that having someone else do user support would lead to me getting out of touch with the user community).

Probably more, but those are the bits which immediately come to mind.

I understand, disagree with, and respect the strategy you have with regards to segmenting out desirable customers, but think "picodollars" is a tragically bad way of doing it. :)

Yes, but as I wrote, Tarsnap is profitable enough that I don't need to go somewhere else to get money.

But I think it's far more likely that I'd hire out of the open source community than out of the startup community.

The recent Internet Defense League makes me wonder if something similar couldn't be launched for small software companies who make it CLEARLY part of their ethos about the direction of the company. This would not necessarily be a membership kind of animal but more of a "we agree with the ideas of Small Software Developers' Principles."

Well, in many cases "free" is strongly suggestive of the "not trying to build a company, just building a portfolio in order to attract job offers" scenario. Beyond that, it's hard to say.

The recent Internet Defense League makes me wonder if something similar couldn't be launched [...]

I'm not sure what "something similar" would be here. Your favourite website is being shut down because its developers got acquihired by Google, so you should write a letter to your member of congress?

"Something similar" being companies that subscribe to an idea of "not heading towards acquihire." Substitute idea with ethos/loose organization/alliance/whatever other non-hostile word might suffice here. I'm not suggessting that by participating you elect to be lynched by a mob at the slightest whim of misunderstanding or error. It is more of a self-certify that a company has an intention of providing a service and not a portfolio to be hired in 180 days.

Your idea of self-certification is why I wrote that blog post. It's an open invitation to lynch me if Tarsnap gets acquired and shut down a few months later.