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 →The rules I run Foxnice by, written down for the first time
For nearly ten years I've run Foxnice by rules that only existed in my head. Before we become a limited company, I thought I'd better write them down. Including the ones I've broken.
For almost ten years I've run a company by rules nobody has ever read.
Not even me.
They lived in my head, which is a terrible place to keep anything important.
Why now
We're in the middle of turning Foxnice into a limited company. Lots of paperwork about what the company is. Very little about how it behaves.
And it struck me that the most important rules of Foxnice aren't in any document. They're in decisions. In things we said no to. In emails sent at strange hours.
So here they are. Not a framework. Just what I actually do, most of the time.
The rules
Service money is patient money. Money from clients has no rush. Money from investors arrives with a clock. So we grow with what clients pay us, and that's the speed we get.
Your best investor is a client who pays at 30 days. No pitch, no board, no dilution. They pay for something useful, and that money funds what we build next.
Every discount comes back as scope. In my experience, a client who got a lower price rarely asks for less work. Usually more. So we don't do discounts.
(I've broken this one. Last year, with our first offer for collecting club fees. And this year's aid for a club came pretty close. I'd defend both. But a rule you break needs to be written down even more, so at least you know you're breaking it.)
Products come from repeated problems, not napkins. If several clients ask us for the same thing, that might be a product. If I had a brilliant idea in the shower, it's probably just a shower.
If nobody owns it, it shouldn't exist. A server, a test site, a forgotten account. Every thing has a name next to it, or it gets deleted. We learned that one the expensive way in January.
Big decisions need two people. I'm the one who goes fast. Yeray is the one who asks whether we should. Anything that touches a client gets both, even when I'm sure. Especially when I'm sure.
Freedom before size. We're not trying to be the biggest. Every decision gets checked against one question: does this make us freer, or just bigger?
A rule that only lives in your head isn't a rule. It's a mood.
What writing them down did
Two things surprised me.
First, how few there are. I expected twenty. There are seven, and they all come back to the same idea: don't let anyone else hold the clock.
Second, how often I don't follow them. Writing them down is a bit like stepping on the scales after the holidays. You knew. You just hadn't seen the number.
I'm not going to frame them. They'll change. Some will probably turn out to be wrong, and I'll find out the way I always find things out: by breaking them and paying for it.
But at least now, when that happens, there'll be something written to cross out.
For nearly ten years the rules were in my head.
Now they're in a blog post. Slightly more public. Slightly harder to pretend I never had them.
P.S. Seven rules and one already has a footnote. I'm calling that honesty, not a bad start.