>>>>I will make a note of contacting you (off-line) when the time comes that I won't be able to support my vertical.
>>>
>>>A bad point in time to start looking. Do it at least 3 years in advance as to not have to bargain under pressure and have more options to make transition a tandem work effort.
>>
>>All depends how many customers I will still have by the "point" when I need to find a replacement.
>
>Actually, your replacement may need several months just to get to know the way you did things, where's what in the code, what's the app doing etc. Specially in a vertical, which may get very rich in features. The last one like that took me years to get to most of the stuff, and there are still areas in it which I never visited, let alone touched. And working with a partner may get you not just ideas on how to improve the app and keep up with the times, but may actually bring more customers. So I'd take Tamar's 3 years seriously.
The key is the "partner" which is quite different from an "employee."
"The creative process is nothing but a series of crises." Isaac Bashevis Singer
"My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all." Oscar Wilde
"If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too." W.Somerset Maugham
