2025, the year I questioned the model

I started the year wanting to change the model.

I'm ending it having mostly confirmed it.

Which is either wisdom or stubbornness. I'll let you decide.

Taking it apart

2025 was the year I poked at almost everything.

Could someone else sell for us? We tried a pay-for-results agency. It didn't work, and I stopped it later than I should have.

Did we need an office? We gave it up. What we kept went into a storage unit, and the work carried on without it.

Were my rules sacred? I broke the no-discount one and brought PagoCRM down to 49 €. Yeray and I decided it together, which is the only reason I trust it.

Could we keep customising everything for everyone? We stopped customising the booking engine. Packaged Foxnice Booking instead. Took PagoCRM to a second niche, cultural associations, without building a new product.

And in between, the reminders that you don't control everything: hosting outages, the blackout, and a new invoicing regulation that everybody is now talking about.

Put like that, it sounds like a lot of change. It was.

But looking back, I think most of it pointed the same way.

I questioned the model all year. The model kept giving the same answer: do less, but do it yourself.

What held up

Patient money held up. We didn't need anyone else's capital to make any of these decisions, and we didn't need anyone's permission to undo the ones that went wrong.

Products from real problems held up. The second niche didn't come from a brainstorm. It came from noticing that a problem we'd already solved for clubs looked very similar somewhere else.

Freedom before size held up too. Every time I was tempted by "more" this year, more channels, more custom work, more square metres, it ended up costing focus. Every time we chose "less", things got calmer.

What didn't

My belief that I could outsource selling without outsourcing the learning. I wrote in January that you shouldn't lend out the ears. Then I did, a bit. Lesson paid.

My idea that saying yes to custom requests was good service. I suspect it was good service for one client and a slow tax on all the others.

And my habit of being the bottleneck. I'm better than last year. Not as much better as I'd like.

What I'm taking into next year

Not a list of resolutions. I've never kept one.

Just a feeling, and I'll say it as a feeling, not a forecast. I think the company we have now is simpler than the one we had in January. Fewer places to be. Fewer exceptions. Fewer things that depend on me being awake.

That's not growth in the startup sense. It won't make anyone's list.

But a company that's simpler is a company that can wait. And a company that can wait is a company that's free.

I started the year wanting to change the model.

It turns out the model was fine. It was the extras that needed questioning.

P.S. If you're wondering whether I'll question it all again next year: obviously. That part of the model I'm not changing.