After ten years I proposed we stop selling everything

It took me ten years to write a very short email.

The idea in it: stop trying to sell everything.

Foxnice started in 2014 with 300 €. Over the years we've offered many different services. I think some earn their place and some don't. And all of them ask for time.

A long menu feels like safety. Every new service is one more thing to sell, one more way to make the month work. For a long time, saying no to a type of work felt like saying no to money.

It's like a restaurant with a forty-page menu. Impressive. Until you notice the paella and the sushi come out of the same freezer.

The email

On October 21st I wrote to Yeray. After ten years, it's clear to me that WordPress maintenance is something almost every business needs, and something we master. So that's where we should grow.

The plan I proposed was short:

• Reorder and redefine our services, removing the ones that don't add value.
• Improve the message: a new website with a page and a landing for each service.
• Back it with email campaigns and Google Ads pointing to those landings.

It would take several days of intensive work, free from everything else. So I asked Yeray when we could do it. He answered the same day: no fixed date yet, but he expected us to be freer around mid-November.

I liked that answer more than a "let's do it tomorrow". A change like this needs days of focus from both of us. Better to wait for them than to do it halfway.

Ten years teaches you what you can do. The next step is deciding what you'll stop doing.

Clearing the ground

A few things that month were already pointing the same way.

We were setting up a new ticket platform, connected to a dedicated client mailbox. Every request in one place, instead of scattered across emails.

And we started cloning our current website to an "old" subdomain, so we'd keep a copy before changing anything. The cloning tool didn't cooperate, and it took a couple of days and some help from our hosting provider. You don't knock a house down before checking what's inside.

The email was short. The thinking behind it wasn't.

What's hard to see is the cost of saying yes to everything. Every service needs its own knowledge, its own tools, its own support. The more things you sell, the harder it is to be excellent at any of them.

And the hard part isn't choosing maintenance. That one's obvious. The hard part is accepting that some things we've offered for years may not be worth keeping. A small profit that eats your focus is a loss you just haven't counted yet.

With no investors, our services fund our products. That only works if the services are efficient, repeatable and profitable. A long list of services looks like growth. Often it's just more ways to be busy.

Freedom before size. Selling fewer things is part of that.

For ten years we've offered a bit of everything.

Now we're choosing what we want to be known for.

P.S. Ten years for a five-line email. At this pace, the new website will be a haiku.