What solo founders in their forties actually have as a fallback, the shapes people described, not the advice
I asked around after realising I did not have an answer to a simple question: if this product stops working, what happens next. I am not offering advice here and I am not qualified to - what follows is the shapes people described when I asked, because I found the range more useful than any single recommendation.
1. A live professional registration
Several people keep a licence, certification or membership current in a field they no longer practise. It costs an annual fee and some continuing-education hours, and it means the fallback is a phone call rather than a retraining project. This was the most common answer among people who had one at all, and every one of them described the cost as annoying and the peace of mind as worth it.
2. Contract work as a bridge, kept warm
Not "I could go back to contracting" but an actual maintained relationship, one or two former clients contacted a couple of times a year, so the return path is warm rather than cold. The people doing this were clear that the maintenance is the whole point, and that a network you have not touched in four years is not a fallback, it is a memory.
3. Deliberately reduced fixed costs
Rather than building a fallback, some people had removed the need for one by getting their fixed monthly outgoings low enough that a bad year is survivable. Housing dominated every version of this. It is the least exciting answer and the one people were most confident about.
4. The product itself as the fallback
A few had built something with a maintenance cost near zero - no infrastructure to speak of, no support burden - on the reasoning that a small revenue that requires no attention is worth more as a floor than a larger one that would collapse without them.
5. Nothing, stated plainly
More common than I expected, and the people saying it were not being reckless: several had thought about it and decided a fallback was a cost they would rather spend on the attempt. I do not think that is unreasonable; I do think it is different from not having thought about it, and those two look identical from outside.
The thing I took away
Every fallback that people trusted required ongoing upkeep: fees, calls, hours. The ones described as reassuring in theory and useless in practice were all the dormant kind: an old network, a degree from a long time ago, a skill last used a decade back. Dormant options age much faster than people expect, which is the part I had wrong.
@kept_the_licence · 3w ago
I am the first shape and I would put a sharper number on the trade than "annoying".
The registration costs me a fee each year and roughly two days of continuing education. Two days. That is the entire price of turning "I would have to retrain" into "I would have to make a phone call", and I have now paid it for six years without needing it once.
What I would say to anyone considering letting one lapse: the expensive part is never the fee, it is that reinstating after a lapse is a different and much worse process than staying current. Some are effectively a full re-entry. So the decision is not "do I want to pay this year", it is "am I closing this door permanently", and those feel very different when framed correctly.
I let one lapse in my thirties and it is genuinely gone. That is why I keep this one.
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