Calm Under Fire: A Solo Founder’s Incident Playbook
Welcome! Today we dive into support triage and incident response SOPs for solo software businesses. You’ll learn pragmatic ways to classify severity, move from alert to action, and communicate with empathy, even without a team. Expect checklists, tiny automations, and real anecdotes crafted for one-person companies. Subscribe, share questions, and suggest scenarios you want covered; your input will shape future improvements and sharpen the playbooks you rely on during stressful moments, turning panic into steady, focused progress.
Severity That Guides Every Decision
Define SEV1 through SEV4 based on customer impact, not technical novelty. If revenue is halted for all users, it is critical; if a non-blocking admin page loads slowly, it is minor. One founder reported that this framing kept a 2 a.m. outage calm, delaying a risky backfill because it affected only a small segment and spared billing.
Single Queue, Clear Intake
Collect every alert, support message, and error report into one queue you actually live in daily. Forward system alerts, status page pings, and customer emails to a shared inbox or dedicated channel, then auto-tag by product area. This approach prevents scattered to-do lists, reduces missed signals, and lets you triage sequentially with focus instead of juggling half-seen notifications across fragmented tools.
Definition of Done for Incidents
Avoid zombie incidents by defining done as more than “service seems fine.” Include stable metrics, customer communication sent or scheduled, a concrete follow-up issue, and a brief note on cause and prevention. Even a five-line summary saves future you from painful rediscovery, and it reassures paying users that you close loops thoughtfully, not hurriedly.
From Alert to Action in Minutes
Speed without panic is the goal. The first hour shapes outcomes, so script the first five minutes, the first ten, and the first thirty. Decide quickly: is this truly urgent, customer-visible, revenue-impacting? Establish time-boxed checks, rollback criteria, and a default communication cadence. By resolving uncertainty fast, you reduce cognitive load and protect momentum, even when you are the only engineer, support agent, and communicator available.
First Five Minutes Checklist
Confirm the signal is real, identify blast radius, and check a known-good dashboard for baseline comparisons. If revenue or data integrity may be threatened, flip to containment immediately. Capture two sentences of notes as you go. That tiny discipline powers later clarity, helps customer messaging, and prevents chasing ghosts when a noisy monitor falsely screams during normal daily batch processing.
Ten-Minute Stabilization Tactics
Prefer reversible actions: scale replicas, disable a noisy job, or roll back the last deploy if correlated. Re-run health checks you trust, and snapshot critical logs before they rotate. If you lack certainty, choose the smallest safe lever that buys time. Many solo founders report that one carefully chosen rollback within ten minutes preserved uptime and protected data while deeper diagnosis continued calmly.
Tools That Work While You Sleep
Your stack should be light, observable, and boring in the best way. Favor uptime pings, health endpoints, and one synthetic transaction through your critical path. Use structured logs, simple dashboards, and a dead man’s switch for cron reliability. Keep your runbooks alongside code, and automate only what repeatedly saves time. Reliable, comprehensible tools let you wake to signals that already hint at diagnosis, not enigmatic noise at 3 a.m.
Talking With Customers When Things Break
Trust grows when communication is honest, timely, and empathetic. Use a public status page or pinned updates, and avoid jargon that hides uncertainty. Acknowledge frustration, provide workarounds, and never overpromise recovery times. Keep templates ready, but personalize key details. The right words prevent churn, calm tense conversations, and turn difficult moments into demonstrations of reliability, which is priceless for small, founder-led products competing with larger teams.
After the Fire: Learning That Sticks
Recovery is not complete until learning becomes durable change. Keep post-incident reviews blameless, tight, and actionable. Capture the trigger, impact, detection path, decision points, and one or two preventative improvements. Schedule the review within forty-eight hours, while context is vivid. The goal is compounding resilience, not performative documents. Small, consistent improvements reduce future incident volume and severity, freeing your attention for growth-oriented work you enjoy.
Incident Review in Thirty Minutes
Use a simple outline: timeline, what surprised you, what worked, what failed, and the smallest change that would have prevented or shortened the incident. Record metrics and screenshots, then link to related tickets. Time-box to preserve momentum. This format respects your bandwidth, yet reliably turns chaotic experiences into practical improvements worth revisiting during quarterly planning sessions.
Choosing One Repair and One Guardrail
Resist long wish lists. Pick one corrective fix and one preventive guardrail, then commit. For example, repair a brittle query and add a dashboard alert for slow responses. Track both to completion and celebrate closure publicly. This tight loop compounds confidence, makes progress visible to customers, and avoids the demoralizing sprawl of ambitious but perpetually unfinished improvement backlogs.
Metrics That Matter for a Company of One
Measure mean time to acknowledge, mean time to resolve, incident count by severity, and percent of incidents with a completed review. Skip vanity dashboards. A tiny set of numbers, trended monthly, reveals whether you are stabilizing. Founders often discover that faster acknowledgment alone lowers churn, because uncertainty disappears even before technical restoration fully completes in the background.
Community Signal Loop and Ongoing Practice
Invite power users to describe unusual workflows and integrations. Turn their notes into test scenarios and preflight checks. People love contributing when they see their input reduce friction. Offering a small credit or public thanks encourages participation, and it creates a sustainable pipeline of real-world cases your monitoring and SOPs would otherwise miss until an inconvenient, high-pressure moment.
Post brief summaries of what went wrong, how you fixed it, and one improvement shipped afterward. Transparency builds credibility and attracts thoughtful customers who value reliability. Ask readers which part helped most and what remains unclear. Their replies guide your next iteration, ensuring that improvements target actual pain rather than assumptions formed during a stressful incident you would rather forget.
Protect time for a daily triage sweep, a weekly review of flagged issues, and a monthly mini-drill using a past incident. Keep every session short and focused, with clear outcomes. This cadence embeds readiness into normal operations, so when alarms ring, you are practicing familiar moves instead of improvising under pressure that magnifies small mistakes into prolonged outages.
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