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 →Ten years of Foxnice: what I'd keep and what I'd throw away
Foxnice turns ten. A good moment to open the boxes in the storage room and decide what stays and what goes.
Ten years is a good moment to tidy the storage room.
You open the boxes. Some things you're happy to find. Others you can't believe you kept.
Foxnice turns ten this year. So here's my box.
What I'd keep
Starting small. We started in 2014 with 300 € and nobody else's money. At the time it didn't feel like a strategy. It felt like the only option, because it was. Ten years later, I'd choose it again on purpose. Starting small taught us to charge from day one and to spend only what we'd earned. That habit is worth more than any round.
Yeray. More than twenty years as friends, ten as partners. From two freelancers to a partnership, and this year to an SL. He's my counterweight. When I get carried away, he's the one who slows things down and asks the obvious question. Every founder should have someone like that. Few are lucky enough to have been organising things with him since they were fourteen.
Learning by doing. I built my first website at twelve, with free online courses, at night. Nobody at home ran a business. I've never stopped learning that way: on the job, with something real at stake. I'd keep that, even though it's slower.
Maintenance. Boring, quiet, monthly. The money nobody notices, and the money that pays for our own products. If I could only keep one thing from these ten years, it might be this.
Ten years doesn't teach you what to do. It teaches you what you'd have stopped doing sooner.
What I'd throw away
Saying yes to everything. For years, every new service felt like safety. One more thing to sell. I think it was the opposite. Every yes cost focus, and focus is the one thing a two-person company can't buy more of.
Staying too long. More than once, the signs that something wasn't working were there well before I acted. I stayed because leaving meant admitting it had been a bad deal. I'd throw that pride away first.
Measuring the week in hours. Too many emails in the early hours. Too much confusing being busy with moving forward.
The favours with no name. Small extras that turned into expectations because we never said they were extras. Nobody's fault but ours.
What I'm not sure about
Some things I can't place in either box yet.
Starting without a website of our own, back when Yeray asked whether we could sell webs without having one. Signing up as a freelancer in 2013 and describing the activity as "software as a service" before I really knew what we'd sell. They look a bit naive from here. They also got us moving. I'll leave them in the box for another ten years.
The one thing that didn't change
Looking at both lists, I notice something. Almost everything I'd keep is about patience. Almost everything I'd throw away is about hurry.
That's probably the whole decade in one line. Patient money, a business that grows at the speed of its clients, freedom before size. We said it at the start without quite knowing what it meant. Now I think I do.
Ten years is a good moment to tidy the storage room.
The trick is not to fill it again.
P.S. The 300 € aren't in any box. They were spent a long time ago. Wisely, I like to think.