Starting a new business is always a difficult task. With that in mind, from time to time, I will go on a tangent where I talk about an issue that is on my mind. I want these to be open discussion pieces, so, please feel to comment and add to the conversation. Here is the first installment of the Start-Up Chronicles.

Today, I am talking about single points of failure. In case you are not familiar, a single point failure is when one part of a system (or business), when it stops working, can cause the entire system to stop working. When I worked with rockets, this would be something like an engine nozzle. If an engine nozzle cracked, there was a very good chance that the engine would fail, which would cause the rocket to fail (think: Kaboom!). On a blog, like this one, it is having only one regular writer (me). This past week, I probably did five different things to improve this site, but I never found the time to post a new article. This is bad. Writing articles was on my mind, it just did not seem like as big a priority as the immediate issues I was dealing. With people coming to the site regularly, there needs to be regular content, and I failed. Without regular content, everything I have done to promote the site is wasted.

There are many ways to prevent single points of failure. The easiest way is with redundancy. If you can afford to have two of something, then you should do it. For my blog, the easiest way is to hire another writer to ensure there is a regular stream of content. Something that I should have done when I launched. If you know someone interested in writing for me, have s/he contact me at derrick@fantasyethos.com.

Now, if we are talking about my rocket engine nozzle example before, sometimes redundancy is not practical. You probably are not going to have a second engine nozzle. In this case, what you need to do is make sure that nozzle never gets damaged. Everyone who comes near it is trained on how to move near it. The nozzle is inspected for damage every time it is moved. Maintaining the integrity of that nozzle is of the utmost priority for everyone. In terms of this site, until I am able to get someone else producing content, this might mean stockpiling articles so that if I am unable to write a new article that day, I will still have something to run.

Unfortunately, every business will have its share of single points of failure. I want this site to be something big, I know this site will be something big, and how I overcome and mitigate these single points of failure will be essential to the long term health of the site.