Lesson 11 of 12
A one-person company cannot raise $10 million. It cannot hire 50 engineers. It cannot sponsor a conference.
But it can do something larger companies cannot: stay in the game for years at low cost.
Risk management, for a one-person company, is mostly about one thing: not forcing yourself to quit before the experiment has had time to prove itself.
| Risk | What it looks like | Mitigation |
|---|---|---|
| Platform risk | Google algorithm change kills SEO traffic overnight | Diversify across 2 traffic channels. Build an email list. |
| Domain risk | Domain expires. You forget to renew. You lose the asset. | Auto-renew all important domains. Check renewal dates quarterly. |
| Cost risk | Subscriptions creep up. Tools add up. Monthly costs exceed monthly revenue. | Audit tools every 3 months. Kill anything unused. |
| Single-revenue risk | One product generates all income. That product breaks or goes irrelevant. | Build at least two income streams before optimizing either one heavily. |
| Founder risk | You burn out. You stop. The whole company stops. | Keep the workload sustainable. Document SOPs so you can pause and resume. |
Most OPC experiments cost under $20 per month to run: a domain and shared hosting. That is a very cheap price for a running experiment.
Keep costs low. Keep experiments running longer than feels comfortable. Most things that eventually work do so later than expected.
"One of the OPC's greatest advantages is staying in the game long enough."