You ship alone. There is no on-call rota, no SRE team, no change-review board. So the ops work that keeps a solo SaaS alive has to be small enough to actually happen. Here is the 2-hour Sunday ritual I recommend to solo founders — five blocks, timer on, done by dinner.
Block 1 — 20 min: Restore-from-backup drill. Not "check backups exist" — actually restore last night's backup into a scratch environment and hit one critical endpoint. Finding a broken restore on a quiet Sunday beats finding it during a launch-day outage. Full runbook: free download at https://hive80lab.gumroad.com/l/backup-drill-runbook
Block 2 — 20 min: Dead-job sweep. List every cron/scheduled job. Anything without a success log in 7 days gets investigated or deleted. Silent job death is how your data goes stale for a week unnoticed.
Block 3 — 30 min: Money-path walkthrough. Click through signup → upgrade → payment → receipt like a new customer. This is your revenue QA — the checkout you never test is the checkout that quietly leaks.
Block 4 — 20 min: Alert hygiene. Any alert that fired and was ignored twice gets tuned or killed. Alert fatigue is how the one important alert gets slept through.
Block 5 — 30 min: One improvement, shipped. Pick the smallest thing from this week's notes and ship it before the timer ends. Weekly shippers compound; quarterly planners stall.
Want the full kit — restore drill runbook, job sweep checklist, money-path QA script, alert tuning rules — one-time download, no subscription: https://hive80lab.gumroad.com/l/ops-starter-kit · Full lineup: https://hive80lab.gumroad.com/
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