PagoCRM went live at an athletics club

For months we called it "the tool".

Like calling your dog "the dog" because naming it feels like too much commitment.

In October it started being PagoCRM. Not in a branding meeting. At an athletics club.

Here's what happened.

I wrote to the club to tell them their fee collection platform was up and running. Members could sign up from the website and choose a plan.

The first plan was as simple as it gets: collaborating member, 20 € a year. People who want to support the club without having to run.

It's a small number, I know. But it was the first time a club had its own platform, built by us, ready for its members.

Collecting is easy. Knowing whose it is, less so

And then came the part nobody sees: reconciliation.

Money arrives in an account. Someone has to know what each movement is and who it belongs to. So in those days we tested a free open-banking API that reads bank movements, so that matching could happen automatically.

The API was easy to use. The problem was something else: the transfer concept didn't always come through.

And without the concept, a movement is just an amount and a date. Like finding a 20 note in your coat pocket. Nice, sure. But no idea where it came from.

That taught me something about our own product. Collecting money is one problem. Knowing whose money it is, is another. And I think the second one is where treasurers really suffer.

The day the logo showed up

The club was starting its membership campaign, and that same day Yeray wrote that it would be great to have the PagoCRM logo on it.

And then the penny dropped.

The tool had a name, a logo, and a reason to appear next to a real club. That same week we also prepared the first test invoices.

I'll admit it: for a long time I treated it as a side project. Something the agency paid for and that got built in the gaps between client work.

I think part of me avoided giving it a proper identity because that meant committing. If it had a name, it could fail with a name. Full name and surname.

It was fear dressed up as modesty.

The club couldn't have cared less whether we felt ready. They needed to collect fees, and our tool was there to do it.

A product gets its real name the day it shows up next to a customer's.

With one club live, the question changed on its own: how do we reach the next ones?

A few days later I asked a lead generation agency for a price to call clubs on our behalf. Just a question, not a decision. But it was the first time I thought about selling PagoCRM, not just building it.

PagoCRM was paid for by Foxnice's client work. No investors, no launch budget, no dedicated team. It's slow. But it means the product exists because a club needed it, not because we needed an investor pitch.

For months it was "the tool".

An athletics club gave it a reason to have a name.

P.S. If you have a project you still call "the tool", ask yourself what you're afraid of.