A hard lesson I learned after several times getting burned in my time long ago doing indie stuff is “never depend on a single company without a backup plan”. S

A hard lesson I learned after several times getting burned in my time long ago doing indie stuff is “never depend on a single company without a backup plan”. Sometimes this can be pretty difficult to even see. If you were a Mac shareware dev depending on VersionTracker and MacUpdate to drive downloads, with no actual marketing budget, you might not have noticed that you were implicitly relying on Apple not creating an App Store which would turn the entire ecosystem upside down. This is one of the reasons that it’s so tough to make a business work at a small scale. In some ways, you have more flexibility than a big company, but the lack of capital means that certain events that a larger company would shrug off can totally upend everything you’re doing.