Freedom has a price, and I pay it in focus

Nobody tells me what to do.

It's the best thing about running a company without investors.

It's also the worst.

The menu with no prices

When you have investors, someone else helps decide what matters. There's a plan, a target, a board meeting where somebody asks why you spent three months on something that wasn't in the plan.

We've never had that. Foxnice started in 2014 with 300 € and has grown with client money ever since. Nobody has a seat at our table except Yeray and me.

That freedom is real. I wouldn't trade it.

But it comes with a strange side effect. Everything looks possible. A new product. A new niche. A new service a client asked about. A new tool worth testing. With nobody to say no, every option sits on the menu looking equally tasty.

And the menu has no prices on it.

The price shows up later. Not in money. In focus.

Investors charge you in equity. Freedom charges you in attention. Both bills are real.

What it looks like in practice

Look at this year. We tried an outside agency for prospecting. We moved out of the office. We changed PagoCRM's price. We dealt with hosting outages. We packaged Foxnice Booking. We took PagoCRM to a second niche, cultural associations. And now Verifactu is on everyone's lips.

Each of those decisions made sense on its own. I'd defend most of them.

But put them together and you see the problem. A small company has a limited amount of attention. Every new thing borrows some. And nobody sends you an invoice for it, so it's very easy to overspend.

I think that's the real risk for bootstrapped companies. Not running out of money. Running out of focus while still having money.

Paying the bill on purpose

So I try to pay the price consciously, instead of letting it pile up.

That mostly means saying no more than I'd like. No to good ideas that aren't for now. No to clients who'd pull us somewhere we don't want to go. No to the voice that says "it'll only take a week".

It never takes a week.

It also means accepting that we'll be slower than a company with funding. Client work pays for the product, and it also eats the hours the product needs. That's the deal. Slower, but with the right to make mistakes without explaining ourselves to anyone.

I've made my peace with slow. What I haven't made peace with is scattered. Slow and focused builds something. Fast and scattered just builds noise.

Why I'd still choose it

Someone could read this and think the answer is to take investment and let someone else impose the discipline.

I don't think so. I'd rather have to learn focus than rent it. Rented discipline comes with a clock, and the clock always wins. Learned discipline is slower to build, but it's yours.

Chasing size costs you your freedom. Chasing everything costs it faster.

Nobody tells me what to do.

So I have to be the one who tells me what not to.

P.S. Yeray, if you're reading this: yes, I know. I wrote it mostly for me.