I offered to pay so PagoCRM could get its first customer

Some companies spend millions acquiring customers.

I offered to pay 550 € to get one.

Here's what happened.

In May I made the first real offer for a tool to collect club membership fees. The one that would become PagoCRM.

It was easy to explain. Members sign up through a link and connect their card for recurring payments. The club sees who has paid and who hasn't. No spreadsheets. No chasing people one by one like a debt collector in a tracksuit.

The first club I offered it to was a non-profit. And that changed the maths.

The normal price for the platform was 49 € a month. For that club I offered 20 € a month, plus 25 € a year for the domain.

And Foxnice would cover the rest: 550 € of setup and 45 € a year for the security certificate.

A few days later the club replied that it looked good and that they'd take it to their board.

On paper, a terrible deal

You don't need to be an accountant to see it. We were charging less than half our own price and paying the setup out of our own pocket. Any spreadsheet would tell you we were buying a customer.

And yes. That's exactly what I was doing.

I was paying for something I couldn't get any other way: a real club using the product, with real members and real money. Everything else is pretty demos nobody cares about.

Your first customer isn't revenue; it's the proof you pay for so the next ones believe you.

I did try to do it with my eyes open, though. I knew the real price first, the 49 €. A discount only means something if there's a price to discount from. And the gift was written into the offer, in plain sight. That kept the monthly fee honest, and nobody could mistake the discount for the rate.

Because the risk is real. A discount that big can anchor the price. The first customer can end up as the yardstick for everyone else. Like that friend whose laptop you fixed for free once and who now calls you every time the WiFi drops.

Before all that, by the way, we did something nobody posts about: the week before, we migrated our main server to SSD storage. If we were going to ask a club to trust us with its members' fees, the ground had to be solid first. You don't put your first guest on a balcony that creaks.

Why we could afford it

Foxnice started in 2014 with 300 € and no investors. We've never had a funding round to spend on customer acquisition.

What we have is client work that pays the bills. The services pay, and part of what they pay goes into the product. Patient money.

550 € is nothing for a funded startup. For us it's real money. Offering it to one club was a conscious bet, not a marketing line item.

Now it's time to watch. Whether the board says yes. Whether the club uses it every month. Whether members pay more easily. Whether the people running the club stop chasing payments.

If all that happens, those 550 € will have been the cheapest research we ever did.

Some companies buy customers with millions.

I was trying to buy a single sentence: a club already uses this.

P.S. If you ever see someone offering to pay for you to use their product, it isn't always desperation. Sometimes it's strategy. Sometimes it's both.