2024, the year I let go

Most years, I'd sum up by what we added.

New clients. New features. New services.

This year, the honest list is the other one. 2024 was the year I let go of things.

A year of closing doors

I didn't plan it that way. Nobody writes "let go of things" on their January goals. It sounds like giving up.

But looking back, almost every important decision this year was a goodbye.

We let go of the old company form and became an SL. Same two people, new structure. A small goodbye, but it forced us to look at everything we'd been doing out of habit.

We let go of a public programme that was paying us on paper and costing us focus in real life.

I let go, at least partly, of being the one who sells. Someone else now talks about PagoCRM to clubs.

We let go of custom development hiding inside maintenance plans. Support is support. New things get a quote.

And after ten years, I proposed we let go of trying to sell a bit of everything. We're good at WordPress maintenance. That's where we should grow.

Even working from Thailand was, in its way, letting go. Of being the person clients write to directly. Of the idea that the company needs me in a chair in Olot.

Growing isn't always adding. Sometimes it's finally putting things down.

Why letting go is harder than adding

Adding feels good. A new client, a new service, a new feature. You can announce it. It looks like progress.

Letting go feels like loss. Even when what you're dropping was hurting you. Especially then, because dropping it means admitting you held on too long.

I held on too long to a few things this year. I think most founders do. When you've built a company with nobody else's money, every source of income feels sacred. Every yes feels like safety.

It isn't. A lot of those yeses were quietly eating the one thing we can't buy more of: our time and our focus.

What's left when you let go

Here's the part I didn't expect.

The company didn't get smaller. It got clearer.

Fewer services, but ones we're good at. Fewer exceptions, but rules clients can understand. Fewer things depending on me, and more depending on how we work.

That fits the idea we've had since the beginning. Patient money, no investors, freedom before size. I used to think freedom meant being able to do more things. This year taught me it's closer to the opposite. Freedom is being able to stop doing the ones that don't matter, without asking anyone's permission.

Yeray and I didn't need a board meeting for any of these decisions. We needed to agree, and to be honest with each other. That's the whole governance of Foxnice. I wouldn't trade it.

Most years, I'd sum up by what we added.

This year, the best thing I did was carry less.

P.S. Next year I'll try to let go of writing year-end reviews. Ask me in December how that went.