Bootstrapped SaaS founders sit in a unique spot: the product runs itself (mostly), but support tickets, billing issues, and outages don't. Here's how indie hackers and micro-SaaS founders take real vacation.
Three layers: (1) status page + uptime monitoring routes outages to PagerDuty (or similar) → covering engineer or auto-restart scripts, (2) support ticket triage routes to a fractional VA for non-engineering questions, (3) billing/payment issues route to Stripe/Paddle's automated retry + a designated billing helper. Most micro-SaaS founders can take 2-week vacations once these three are wired up.
Set up uptime monitoring (Pingdom, UptimeRobot, BetterStack) → PagerDuty/Opsgenie. On-call routes to:
Route by type:
Stripe/Paddle's automated retry handles ~80% of failed charges. The other 20% (manual intervention required) routes to a designated billing helper or queues for return.
Pre-vacation: handle any pending refunds, disputes, or unusual billing situations. Don't leave any open.
Status page banner: 'Founder on vacation [dates], fractional support team handling tickets, response times slightly extended.'
Email signature update: 'Out of office [dates], [VA name] handling support: [email].'
Billing to billing-helper, technical to engineer, general to VA. 14 days free.
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