I wrote "software as a service" on a tax form and took years to build it

In spring 2013, I was more optimistic than accurate.

And I put it in writing.

I was registering as self-employed in Olot. There's a box where you describe your activity. I didn't have a trade name ready. I didn't have a logo. I didn't have, strictly speaking, a product.

I wrote "software as a service".

It looked very good on the form.

The product in my head

I knew exactly what I wanted to be. Someone who builds software that people pay for every month. Not one website at a time. Not one invoice per project. A product. Something that works while you sleep.

It's a lovely idea. A lot of developers have it. I suspect a lot of them also write it down somewhere, as if writing it made it closer.

It doesn't.

What actually happened in the following years was much less elegant. Websites. Maintenance. Fixing things for clients. Learning, slowly, what a business is. Then Foxnice, with Yeray, in 2014, with almost no money and no investors.

An agency. The thing I hadn't written on the form.

The form said software as a service. The bank account said service. For years, the bank account was right.

The agency that paid for the dream

For a long time I saw that as a detour. The real plan was the product. The agency was what I did while waiting.

I've changed my mind.

The agency wasn't the detour. It was the road. Every client taught us something we couldn't have learned on our own. Every problem that came up again and again was a hint. And the money from services was patient. It didn't ask us to ship a product by a certain date. It just let us keep going.

I now think the best products don't come from an idea on a napkin. They come from problems you've seen repeat with real clients. You only see those if you've been there, doing the unglamorous work.

In 2013, I didn't yet have those problems in front of me. I had a box on a form and a lot of enthusiasm. No wonder the product didn't appear.

Seven years later

This year, some of what we build is starting to look like a product. Things that come from what clients kept asking us for. Not a napkin. A pattern.

It's early. It's small. It's still paid for by the agency.

And that's fine. I'd rather build it slowly, with clients' money, than quickly, with someone else's money and their clock.

So yes. In 2013 I wrote "software as a service" in a box on a form.

It just took me seven years to realise that the "service" part was doing all the work.

P.S. These days, when I fill in a box, I describe what I do, not what I'd like to do. Less poetic. Much shorter.