We stopped waiting for the grant and became the grant

This month I offered a football club 3,500 € of aid.

Not from the government. From us.

I'm still not sure whether it was brave or stupid. Probably a bit of both.

The club was interested in PagoCRM, our platform to collect players' fees. They also needed a new website. And like so many clubs, they were looking at Kit Digital, the public digitalisation grant, to pay for it.

I'd gone through the grant for them. We could handle it, no problem.

But I know how that film ends. Documents. Bureaucracy. Waiting. Between applying, processing and the money actually arriving, a year can go by without anyone breaking a sweat.

A year is a whole football season. The club would keep chasing fees by hand, like a waiter running after a table that left without paying. And we'd keep waiting for a project that only existed on paper.

So I wrote them a different proposal.

A grant with no queue

Foxnice would give the club its own aid, worth 3,500 €. Immediate. No paperwork.

3,000 € of it would cover the new website. The rest would go towards PagoCRM's monthly fees. Nothing upfront. 49 € a month for hosting and maintenance from August. 79 € a month for the platform from February 2024.

The plan was to start right away and have everything ready by June or July. That way they'd collect next season's fees with the platform from day one.

And the public grant? Still theirs, for whatever else they needed. Two aids instead of one. We weren't competing with the government. We were just faster.

We met online, and a couple of days later I sent the detailed proposal for the board.

Let's be honest about the "aid"

It isn't money we hand over.

It's work we do now and hope to win back later, slowly, through monthly fees. If the club leaves early, we never see it again.

For a studio that started with 300 € and no investors, that's real risk. Every hour we put into that website is an hour no paying client is funding.

And there's a doubt I still carry. Am I teaching clients to expect free work? Is this just a discount with a nicer name?

For now, I think not. Because the discount isn't the point. Time is. We give up cash today so a club can start a whole season earlier.

When the system makes your customer wait a year, the fastest product you can sell is not waiting.

That only holds up if a few things are true. The number is concrete, because "we'll help you" means nothing and "3,500 €, of which 3,000 € is the website" is something a board can argue about. The upfront work leads to a monthly fee, because a one-off project you fund yourself is just a loss with a delay. And each payment starts when the client should start feeling the value.

Plus one more, the uncomfortable one. You decide how many of these you can carry at once. Patient money is still money.

It runs out.

Why we can do it at all

This only works because the studio pays the bills.

Our web services fund the product. That's what lets us wait months for a club's fees to start coming in. Without them, we'd be the ones queuing for a grant.

That's the trade we chose. Less money today. More control over how fast our own product grows.

We could have waited a year for the grant, side by side with the club.

Instead, we became the grant.

P.S. If anyone at the ministry is reading this: you can have the idea for free. No paperwork required.