I Saw a Headline Last Week and My Palms Got Sweaty

Google snapped up all the passenger data from a bankrupt airline (Spirit) at a court auction last week. I stared at my screen: if my little business folded tomorrow, where would my customer list end up? I had never seriously thought about this.

The news feels distant from us indie operators, but it hides something uncomfortable: the customer data we're sitting on might be way more valuable than we think. Valuable is fine — but can you actually control where it goes?

Why Did Google Buy It? And What's It Got to Do With Us?

I dug into it. Spirit went bankrupt, the court auctioned the data, Google swooped in. What they wanted was "real user behavior trails" — passenger names, booking histories, travel preferences. For training AI models, this is a hundred times cleaner than scraped web data.

This shook me awake. A friend of mine, Lin-jie, runs a private-domain consulting gig. We were at a café two days ago, and she told me her laptop holds WeChat contacts and purchase records for over 8,000 customers. She never thought of it as an asset — not "a file on my laptop," but "something someone would pay real money for."

If you're also stashing customer info in Excel, Notion, or even WeChat favorites, you're sitting on invisible assets. That's not bad — but you should know it.

Three Things You Can Do Today

I made this exact mistake before: dumped every customer into a single Excel file named "客户通讯录 v3-最新.xlsx" (Customer Contacts v3-Latest.xlsx). Later I hit three traps:

  • No backup — my laptop died once and I almost lost everything (luckily I had auto-backup on)
  • File wasn't encrypted — I've lost that USB drive twice and didn't dare tell anyone
  • I never thought about "if I stop running this, how do I hand off the data?"

Looking back, here's what I should have done:

  1. Inventory: spend 30 minutes listing every customer file on your computer and cloud drive. I just use Mac Finder to search .xlsx and .csv; on Windows, file search works the same way
  2. Backup: spend $0, use a free cloud drive (I use iCloud, 5GB is enough for a small team) + one USB drive, double backup
  3. Leave a note: drop a README.txt in the folder saying "who owns this data, who can use it, what happens if the business shuts down." I only figured this out recently, but it takes 10 minutes

Technical bar: know how to use folders and Notepad. Zero tech jargon needed. Replication cost: $0 + 40 minutes.

Advice by Stage

If you're just starting out (0-10 customers): skipping cleanup is fine right now. Few customers, the loss from a data wipe is manageable. But build the habit of "every Friday, 10 minutes, do a backup" — that habit matters more than cleanup. I didn't have this habit when I started, and I had to backfill it later.

If you have 1-2 steady clients/projects: spend one afternoon doing a full inventory + backup + encryption. Your customer list is starting to be worth real money, and losing it once will make you cry. My friend Lin-jie heard this news and went home that same day to put a password on her hard drive.

If you're scaling (10+ customers/month): seriously think about a "data handoff plan." If you stop one day (pivot, break, accident), how does the customer data transfer to whoever takes over? I'm not trying to scare you — it's a form of accountability to your customers. As I write this advice, I'll admit I haven't fully done this myself. Working on it.