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 →Twelve years of patient money
We started with 300 euros in 2014 and have never had anyone else's money since. Patience didn't buy us time. It bought us the right to decide what our time was for.
Twelve years ago we had 300 euros.
We've never had a single euro of anyone else's since.
It's not a boast. Back in 2014 nobody was queuing up to give Yeray and me money. I didn't have contacts. I didn't have anyone to ask. Patient money wasn't a philosophy yet. It was the only money there was.
The philosophy came later. Mostly from thinking about what the other kind does to a company.
What patience actually buys
People think patient money buys time. It doesn't, exactly. Everybody has the same number of days.
What it buys is who decides what those days are for.
A funding round doesn't buy you time. It gives you a clock. From that moment, every month has a target, and the target wasn't set by your clients. It was set by someone who needs a return in a certain number of years.
Client money doesn't come with a clock. It comes with a deadline, which is different. The deadline is "do what you promised". The clock is "grow, whatever it takes". I can live with the first. The second, I suspect, has eaten more than one perfectly healthy company.
Patient money doesn't make you faster. It lets you be wrong without asking anyone's permission.
In twelve years we've been wrong plenty. We've tried things that didn't work, said yes when we should have said no, and taken detours that looked like shortcuts. Every one of those mistakes was ours to make and ours to fix. Nobody called a board meeting. Nobody asked us to explain the slide.
That's what patience bought. Not success. The right to learn at our own pace.
What patience costs
I'd be lying if I said it was free.
It's slow. Products paid for by client work take longer to build, because every hour with a client is an hour that doesn't go to the product. PagoCRM, Foxnice Booking, Foxnice Restaurant: all of them grew in the gaps between projects. A funded competitor could have built any of them faster.
It's unglamorous. A small, profitable company doesn't count in the startup world. Nobody writes about you. There's no announcement, no team photo with a cheque. Just invoices paid at 30 days, which, for the record, are the best investors I've ever had.
And it's lonely in a specific way. There's nobody to blame. When something goes wrong, the mirror is the only one in the meeting.
Would I do it again?
Every time. Not because it's the right model for everyone. Some ideas genuinely need a lot of money before they make any. Ours never did.
What we needed was clients with problems they'd pay to solve, and the patience to turn the problems we'd solved twice into products. That's been the whole recipe. It isn't secret. It's just slow enough that most people don't bother.
Twelve years in, the company has had three legal forms, an office and then no office, and a founder in a different time zone. The one thing that hasn't changed is who it answers to.
Its clients. And the two of us.
Not bad for 300 euros.
P.S. I don't know exactly what happened to those 300 euros. I like to think they're still in there somewhere, working.