Can you actually fire your developer?
Forget judging the code — you can't, and pretending you can just makes you easy to manage. Here's the one question that tells you how much you've really handed over, and the setup that keeps the answer yes.
Most of the advice aimed at non-technical founders is about judging the work. Is this good code? Is this the right stack? Is two weeks a fair estimate? And look — you can’t evaluate any of that. I say this as the guy who gets hired to evaluate it. Pretending you can just makes you easier to manage, and the people managing you know it.
Here’s a question you can answer, and it tells you more than any code review I could run:
If this person vanished tomorrow, could someone else take over, and how long before the business felt it?
That’s the exit test. It has nothing to do with code quality. It’s about whether you’re still the one who decides. And it’s uncomfortable, because for a lot of businesses the honest answer is “no, and we’d feel it in about an hour.”
What a failing grade looks like
You fail the exit test when the critical stuff lives in one person’s head or one person’s accounts. I find this constantly:
- The domain is registered to their personal email.
- The server is on their hosting account, on their credit card.
- Deploys happen from their laptop, by a process only they know.
- The API keys, the DNS, the payment integration — all behind logins nobody else has.
And here’s the thing: none of this requires bad intent. Zero. It’s just what accumulates when one competent person sets everything up efficiently and nobody ever asks the boring questions. But the result is the same. You didn’t hire a developer. You married one.
The setup that keeps the answer “yes”
The fix is boring and structural, and you can demand it without understanding a single line of code. One principle: your developer should be able to do all their work without owning anything.
Take the front door — your domain and DNS:
- You own the registrar account and the DNS. Your email, your card, your login. Non-negotiable.
- The developer gets delegated access to change what they need. A room key, not the deed to the house.
- When it ends, you revoke the key. Nothing goes down. The site stays up. The next person gets their own key.
That’s the difference between handing a contractor the front door and handing them a room key. Cloudflare and every serious registrar support exactly this, scoped and revocable, and almost nobody uses it — because the default is to just send the password and move on.
The one page that makes it real
The tool that makes you pass this test isn’t software. It’s a one-page list: every account the business runs on, who owns it, who has access, and what breaks if you pull that access. Domain. Host. Email. Payments. Analytics. Each row has an owner, and that owner is you, or the company — never a contractor’s personal login.
Write that page today. You’ll find the holes immediately, because some rows won’t have an answer. That blank space is your exit cost, staring right back at you.
You don’t have to become technical to pass this. You have to insist on owning the things and letting other people hold keys. That’s not engineering. That’s just refusing to be trapped.