Every hour with a client is an hour not spent on the product

Our product has a competitor.

It's our clients.

Not in the market. In the calendar.

The model we chose sounds very tidy when you explain it. The agency pays the bills. Part of what it earns goes into building our own products. No investors, no round, nobody else's clock. Patient money.

I still believe in it. But I've stopped pretending it's free.

The arithmetic nobody puts on a slide

There are only so many hours in a week. That's not a deep insight. It's just the bit that matters.

Every hour I spend fixing a client's website is an hour I don't spend on the product. Every afternoon on a support issue, every evening answering emails, every "quick change" that takes three hours. All of that is time with a price tag, and the price is paid by the thing we actually want to build.

And it's not a fair fight. The client has a deadline, a problem, sometimes an angry customer. The product has… me, promising to get to it next week.

Guess who wins.

Client work always wins the argument. It's the only one in the room that's already paying.

Why I still choose it

The obvious answer would be: raise money, hire people, build the product full-time.

And I get it. It's faster. On paper, much faster.

But investors' money doesn't come alone. It comes with expectations and a calendar that isn't yours. From then on, I suspect, every decision gets measured against that calendar, not against whether the product is right.

Client money doesn't do that. It's slower, but it doesn't ask me to grow on someone else's schedule. If I get something wrong, I can fix it without explaining myself to anyone except Yeray. That's the deal with slow: it costs time, but nobody is standing over the product with a stopwatch.

I'd rather pay in hours than pay in freedom.

Paying the cost on purpose

What I'm trying to do now is stop pretending the cost doesn't exist. If the trade is real, I'd rather make it on purpose than by accident.

Some things I'm trying, imperfectly:

• Protect product time like it's a client. If it's in the calendar, it's a meeting. If it's not, it doesn't exist.
• Prefer client work that teaches us something about the product. Some projects feel like a detour. Others feel like research someone else is paying for.
• Delegate the client work that doesn't need me, so the hours that do need me can go elsewhere.

None of that makes the week longer. It just makes the trade visible.

And I think visible is enough. Most of the damage comes from the hours you didn't notice you were giving away.

So yes, every hour with a client is an hour not spent on the product.

But without those hours, there wouldn't be a product to neglect.

P.S. This post was written during product time. I'm aware of the irony.