Every client invoice is a small investment in our product

We've had investors since day one.

They just never asked for equity.

We started Foxnice with 300 € and no investors. 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 their own money. They were built with the agency's.

And if you want to see what that money looks like up close, look at one ordinary morning in October.

A morning that pays for a product

Critical PHP vulnerabilities had gone public the day before. People were calling them "PHP2Shell". The official fix was due that afternoon at four.

That morning I wrote to our hosting provider. Could they update our servers as soon as the patch was out? And branch by branch: what about the versions being patched that same day, and the old ones that no longer get official support?

They answered within minutes. They weren't waiting for the patch. They were already working on mitigations to block the ways the flaw could be triggered.

A little after two, they confirmed it: mitigation active on all servers. Before the official patch was even out. The next morning came the follow-up: PHP updated on all servers.

That's the point. You ask the provider the right questions before a client has to ask you.

That same day we finished setting up a mass-mailing service and handed our large healthcare client their new newsletter platform for review. Their answer the next morning was fair: what they wanted to see now was the final result, not the platform.

Ordinary agency work. The kind that pays the bills. And the products.

The waiting room that isn't

Here's what I don't always say out loud. It's easy to feel a bit embarrassed about agency work. As if it were the thing you do while waiting for the "real" business to take off. Like a 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 clients are the only investors we've ever had, and they never asked for equity.

A morning chasing a fix for a critical vulnerability isn't a distraction from the product. It's what keeps the money coming in. Lose the clients' trust and the product loses its only backer.

The rest of the month was made of smaller things.

I started getting a daily email with my agenda, and a "meeting in 30 minutes" reminder before each appointment, from our own system. Nobody asked for it. It doesn't sell. But every bit of friction it removes goes back into the product.

A telecom provider's panel blocked me by IP. Security working exactly as designed. Against me. I took it as a compliment.

And I applied to that same operator's partner programme. The idea: offer white-label IP telephony to our clients. Before anything else, I asked about the API, a sandbox and the margins. Agency money is slow money. It shouldn't be spent fast.

Slower, and much harder to lose

If I had to tell someone starting today one thing, it'd 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.

It's slow. You build on your clients' timeline, not a fundraising one. That's the price of keeping the company yours.

It's less glamorous than a funding round. It's also much harder to lose.

Every fix, every delivery, every invoice is a small vote for the company we want to become. One that answers to clients, not to a board.

So yes, we've always had investors.

We started with 300 €. Everything since then has been paid for by people who just wanted their website to work.

P.S. Our board meetings are called "support tickets". Attendance is excellent.