Never trust a decision you made at 1:23 a.m.

At 1:23 in the morning I was sure.

By mid-morning I was glad I'd asked.

I was going through the teams of one of the clubs using PagoCRM. One team didn't look right. Two monthly fees, February and March, had the same charge date.

Two dates. That was the whole problem.

So I drafted a message for the club. If it's correct, do nothing. If it isn't, here's what to do: delete all the registrations for that team, delete the fee template, create a new one, assign the players again.

Clean. Thorough. Burn it down and start over.

It's the kind of fix that looks brilliant at 1:23. Like deciding to reorganise the whole wardrobe because one sock is in the wrong drawer.

Luckily, I didn't send it to the club. I sent it to Yeray first, with one line on top: can you check if this is right, or if we need to tell them?

The smallest change wins

His answer came a few hours later.

He'd just change the date on the players' fees for that team. Some fees had already been charged. Changing the date was the cleanest option, without deleting everything and adding it back.

And then the question that mattered: was there a reason I wanted to delete all the players, rebuild the template and add them back?

There wasn't.

At that hour my brain had gone straight to "reset everything". It's the move that feels safest when you're tired. It's rarely the best one.

I told him his way was right. We agreed it looked like an error and that the club should be told. They had also sent us a ticket.

Night is for finding, not for deciding

This time it cost nothing. Because I asked before sending.

But I know what it could have cost. Deleting registrations on a team where some families had already paid. Asking the club to redo a whole team by hand. All for something that was really just two dates.

Confession: I often work late. It's quiet. Nobody calls. I find things.

But finding a problem and deciding the fix are two different jobs. At night I'm good at the first one. Not the second.

Find problems at night. Decide fixes in daylight.

So now the night version of me is allowed to write, not to send. Anything that touches a client's data gets read by one more person first, and for us that's Yeray. Before any fix, I check what can't be undone: fees already charged, emails already sent. If one field is wrong, you change one field. "Delete and redo" is the last option, not the first.

And it doesn't matter who found the problem. The best fix is the one we use.

That same month, the platform moved to its own domain, with a separate development environment. Same lesson, written in code. Try things somewhere safe first. Only then touch what clubs actually use.

Two people, no board

Foxnice is two founders and no investors. There's no board to review our decisions.

So we review each other. It's the cheapest quality control I know. And it works best when neither of us needs to be right.

At 1:23 I had a plan.

In daylight, Yeray had a better one.

P.S. The message was very well written, by the way. Which is exactly what makes 1:23 a.m. so dangerous.