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 →To be an entrepreneur is to keep deciding
Starting a company is the easy decision. The job is the ten thousand that come after it, most of them small, many of them boring, a few of them far too late at night.
Nobody tells you that starting a company is the easy decision.
It's the next ten thousand that are the job.
When I registered as self-employed in Olot in the spring of 2013, I didn't even have a trade name ready. On the form I described the activity as "software as a service". It sounded like a decision. It was really a wish with a tax number.
The decisions came afterwards. One at a time. Most of them small, many of them boring, a few of them far too late at night.
The decisions that actually made us
If I look back, the moments that shaped Foxnice weren't launches. They were choices that sounded minor at the time.
Starting in 2014 with Yeray, 300 euros and nobody else's money. Not a strategy. There was nobody to ask. But it set the rule for everything that came after: clients pay for the company, and the company answers to them.
Going from two freelancers to a partnership, and then to a limited company. Paperwork, mostly. But each step was us saying out loud that this wasn't temporary.
Walking away from the Kit Digital. On paper it was money. In practice it was costing us focus, and focus is the one thing a small company can't buy back.
Deciding, with Yeray, that maintenance support doesn't include custom development. One sentence. It probably saved us from building a second company by accident.
Leaving the office. Putting things in a storage unit and discovering that a company isn't a place.
And breaking our own rule on discounts, more than once, most visibly with PagoCRM at 49 euros. Rules are for when you're tired. Breaking them is for when you're sure.
None of these were dramatic. That's the point.
A company isn't built by one big decision. It's built by refusing to stop making small ones.
The decisions that made me
Some decisions build the company. Others build the person running it.
Learning at night, alone, with free courses, because nobody at home ran a business and there was nobody to copy. That one I made at twelve without knowing it was a decision.
Staying small on purpose. Choosing freedom before size, again and again, even when growing would have been easier to explain at dinner.
Letting Yeray be the counterweight. I'm the one who speeds up; he's the one who asks whether we should. Having a partner who can tell you you're wrong is a decision too. You make it every time you listen instead of arguing back.
And working from Thailand. Not as a holiday. As a test of whether everything we'd built actually worked without me sitting on top of it.
What I've learned about deciding
Very little that fits on a poster.
Late-night decisions should wait for the morning. Money decisions should be ones I can explain. Product decisions should start from a client's problem, not my enthusiasm. And the decision not to decide is still a decision, usually a bad one.
This is the last piece in a series I've been writing about what it's been like to build a company without investors. I thought it would end with some conclusion.
It doesn't. Tomorrow there'll be another email asking for a decision.
That's what being an entrepreneur turned out to be. Not starting something.
Deciding again. And again. Preferably before midnight.
P.S. If this series had a moral, it would probably be "go to bed". I decided against it.