2021, the year I stopped thinking in projects

In 2020, the question was simple.

Will we make it?

In 2021, the question got worse. Because we did make it, and now I had to ask something much more uncomfortable.

What are we actually building?

The year in one sentence

If I had to sum up 2021, I'd say it was the year I stopped counting projects and started counting problems.

On paper, not that much changed. Still a small studio, still funded by clients, still without investors. The services still paid the bills.

But look at what those services turned into. A booking engine. The first clubs collecting fees with something we built. A clearer focus on WordPress maintenance and cloud apps instead of whatever came through the door. Design handed over to people better at it than me.

None of that was a single decision. It was dozens of small ones, all pointing the same way. Fewer one-offs. More things that work for the next client too.

A project ends when you deliver it. A product starts when you do. This was the year I learned to tell them apart before I started, not after.

What I got wrong

A year-end post without mistakes is an ad, so here are a few.

I took too long to see the obvious. Problems I'd solved several times were sitting there, dressed up as new jobs. I kept billing them by the hour because it felt safer. It was safer. It was also slower.

I also built things nobody asked for. When a real club finally got inside one of our tools, some of what we'd imagined from the outside had to go. That stung. It was also, I think, one of the most useful things that happened all year.

And I kept too much in my head. Delegating design showed me how hard it is to explain something you've only ever done yourself. I'm still working on that one.

What I got right, I think

We didn't chase money we'd have to answer for.

It would have been easy to tell ourselves that products need funding, that we should move faster, that this was the moment. Instead, we let the services pay for the product, one billed hour at a time. Slower, yes. But every mistake this year was ours to make, and ours to fix, without a meeting to explain it.

That's the deal Yeray and I signed up for with 300 euros in 2014. Patient money. Freedom before size.

I still think it's the right one.

What's next

I'm not going to make predictions. The last two years have been pretty clear about what happens to predictions.

What I can say is how I'll look at the next year. Every new job gets the same question before I start: have I built this before? And if the answer keeps being yes, it's no longer a project.

It's a product I haven't finished yet.

In 2020, I was proud we survived.

In 2021, I'm proud we started building something that will still be useful after the invoice is paid.

P.S. I promised myself this would be a short year-end post. That's the first prediction of 2022 to fail, and it's still December.