Yeray and I set out to stop being two freelancers

The hardest part of turning two freelancers into one company isn't the paperwork.

It's the questions you've spent years not asking.

For years, Foxnice has been two freelancers working as one studio. Yeray and me. Two registrations, two sets of obligations, one shared idea of what we were building.

It worked. But it was starting to feel too small for what we wanted to build. Like a flat share that's lovely until you want to buy a sofa together.

So in mid-October we got in touch with an advisory firm to look at moving to a limited company. The first attempts at a call went nowhere. It was the end of the quarter, and her phone didn't stop ringing. I sent her a list of slots for the week and let her choose. Not urgent, I said, but we want to start tying it together.

We settled on a Thursday at noon. At her office, not ours.

That should have been the easy bit. And it was.

What we'd always left unsaid

I think I'd been putting this off.

Not because of the forms. Because becoming a company means writing down things that, between two partners, had always been understood without saying.

Who decides what. What happens if one of us wants to stop. What we do with money that comes in during a good year. How we value the time each of us puts in.

When you're two freelancers, you can leave those questions floating for years. A company doesn't let you.

And I was a little afraid that saying them out loud would turn them into problems. As if a question were contagious.

A company doesn't create the hard conversations between partners. It just stops you from avoiding them.

The one about leaving is the worst. It's uncomfortable to discuss on the first day. It's much worse to discuss on the last. Same with money: agree on the rule before there's money on the table, not when it's already there looking at you both.

And the most basic one of all. Are we building a studio that pays the bills, or a base to build our own products? Both are fine. Disagreeing without knowing it isn't.

A container for patient money

We started Foxnice with 300 € and no investors. Everything we have was paid for by client work, slowly.

That slowness is a choice. We call it patient money: services fund the products, and freedom comes before size.

But patient money needs a container. Two separate freelancers can't easily hold shared savings, or own a shared product, or plan years ahead as one thing.

A company can. Not because it's bigger. Because it's clearer.

The advisor will handle the forms, the steps and the deadlines. That's her job. Ours is different: to walk into that office already agreeing on what we're about to make official.

On paper, we're about to go from two freelancers to one company.

In practice, it started when we said out loud what we'd always assumed.

P.S. If you have a business partner and you've never talked about how you'll disagree, I have bad news. You'll find out anyway.