the Business
We are the vendor the guide warns them about.
There’s a whole literature teaching small businesses how to de-risk a small software vendor: what to own, what to demand in writing, what happens if the vendor vanishes. Read it honestly and the mirror is unavoidable — a student team that graduates in December is exactly that vendor.
So the standard is not “trust our students.”It’s “hold us to the same bar you’d hold any vendor.”
The rest of this class is that bar — three owner questions, answered about ourselves, in writing.
“If you disappear tomorrow, what do I own?”
Lives in the partner’s repo and org from day one — students are contributors, never owners.
Hosting, domain, API keys — on the partner’s accounts and the partner’s card, even while we do the work.
Admin passwords live in the partner’s password manager; students hold named, revocable accounts — one click and we’re out.
Exist, and the partner has tested restoring them — with us, mid-engagement, not in the last week. A backup nobody has restored is a rumor.
“Should this even be custom?”
Payments · compliance · core customer data → established SaaS. Full stop. If breaking it would break the business, they buy boring software with a support line — and we say so, in writing, even when we could build it.
Internal utilities · glue between systems that don’t talk · the 20% of features no vendor will ever build for them. Small, specific, agent-built, owner-owned — the exact shape you scoped in class 13.
“Will this outlive you?”
Not a farewell PDF — a runbook that lives where the work lives, updated as the tool changes, written for the person who’ll actually open it in March. The runbook is graded.
Embedded, do-it-together handoff retains 70–90%; a one-time training session retains 20–40%. So every system gets a named client-side owner in week one, and the last weeks are worked next to them — not presented at them.
Vendor-owned infrastructure, dependence by design — the guru economy. We are visibly the opposite. And after December: the runbook + the named owner run it, a January check-in is already scheduled, and a next cohort can pick up a new scope — continuation is a fresh engagement, never a dependency.Next class: the five partners walk in.
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