Our customers are the only investors we've ever had

We've had investors since day one.

They've just never asked for shares.

Here's how I think about it.

We started Foxnice with €300 and nobody behind us. Since then, every invoice we send a client pays for a few more hours of our own products. PagoCRM, Foxnice Booking and Foxnice Restaurant weren't built with outside money: they were built with the agency's.

Seen that way, every client is a small investor. One who doesn't ask for a board seat or a chart that goes up. They just ask that what you sell them works.

It's not a waiting room

There's something people don't always say out loud. It's easy to feel a little embarrassed about service work, as if it's what you do while you wait for the "real" business to take off. Like the musician who plays weddings until the album comes out.

I don't see it that way. The agency isn't the waiting room. It's the investor.

Our customers are the only investors we've ever had, and they've never asked for anything in return except that things work.

That way of seeing it changes many small decisions.

Looking after a service client doesn't distract you from the product. It's what keeps the money coming in that pays for it. Lose their trust and the product loses its only funder.

The improvements nobody asks for (a reminder before every meeting, a process that runs itself, a faster reply) stop looking like wasted time. Every bit of friction you remove is hours that go back into the product.

And the boring tasks, like keeping servers up to date or answering before the client asks, stop being "things that have to be done" and become what holds everything else up.

Slower, but much harder to lose

If I could tell someone starting today just one thing, it would be this: you don't need an investor to build a product. You need clients who trust you and the discipline to set aside part of what they pay you.

It's slow. You move at your clients' pace, not a funding round's. That's the price of the company staying yours.

It has less glamour than a round, yes. But it's also much harder to lose. An investor can change their mind. A hundred happy clients rarely do so all at once.

A question for your business

If you run a service business and dream of having your own product, try looking at your clients differently.

Not as the work that keeps you from building your own thing. As the people paying for it.

Every delivery, every fix and every invoice is a small vote for the company you want to be: one that answers to its clients, not to a board.

So yes, we've always had investors.

We started with €300. Everything else was paid for by people who just wanted their website to work.

P.S. Our shareholder meetings are called "support tickets". Attendance is perfect.