Every client invoice is a small investment in our product
We've had investors since day one. They just never asked for equity. How 300 € and client invoices paid for every product we've built.
Leer más →Let your partner pick the template
In December I sent Yeray two templates for Foxnice's new website and asked him to pick one. It sounds like nothing. It's a small decision about who decides.
The best decision I made in December was not making one.
I sent Yeray two versions of a template for Foxnice's new website and asked him which one he wanted.
He chose.
That's the whole story. And yet I think it says more about how we want to work than anything else we did all year.
A month of loose ends
December was the month of tidying the house.
One afternoon a Kit Digital verification was waiting for us, with a deadline for the next day. We wrote to our advisory firm that same afternoon with what was being asked. They gathered the documents, and the next day they submitted them and sent us the receipt. A next-day deadline from a public body is a job for experts, not for us improvising at midnight with a coffee.
Then the phones. The change we'd started in November reached its last step: porting the company's number to a new provider. Before Christmas it was done. The company number now reaches the company, wherever we are.
And in between, the new website. The one I'd proposed in October: focused on maintenance, with a landing page per service.
I had pushed that proposal. It would have been very easy to keep pushing every detail. Font, colours, the exact shade of the button. Instead, I prepared the options and handed over the choice.
A partnership where one person decides everything is just a job with extra meetings.
Who decides?
At Foxnice, design isn't a one-person job. Since 2021 we've worked with collaborators for it. So the question was never "who's the designer". It was "who decides". And deciding doesn't have to fall on whoever happens to be holding the project.
There's a version of this that doesn't count. "You choose, but I'll tell you if I like it" isn't delegating. It's supervising with extra steps. We'd agreed on the goal: a site focused on maintenance, one page per service. How it looks is a detail inside that decision. If the result fits the goal, it doesn't matter who picked it.
What it cost me was a bit of control.
Looking back at the year, I see a pattern. The advisory firm handled the verification. The new provider handled the phone line. The support inbox handled where clients write. Yeray chose the template.
I think each of those is something a founder tends to cling to, like the last slice of pizza. And I think each one works better when it doesn't depend on one person.
The business feels a little less "mine". In exchange, it's a little more of a business.
Without investors, there's no board and no management layer. It's just Yeray and me. Every decision one of us won't let go of becomes a bottleneck for the whole company. The freedom we chose only grows if both of us can decide without waiting for the other.
I could have chosen the template myself.
Asking my partner to choose it was the better decision.
P.S. If, when the new website goes live, you don't like it, you already know who chose the template. Not me.