In this episode of SaaS Unscripted, host Nick van Eeten interviews Florian Gendrault — founder and CEO of YourCampus (since rebranded to Alleo), an employee benefits and compensation platform for modern employers. Florian shares how the idea started around the kitchen table, how he validated it while still employed, how he raised his first capital, the stress of fundraising through a downturn, and his plans to scale across Europe.
Nick: Welcome to another episode of SaaS Unscripted, where we interview people with an interesting career within the SaaS industry. Today I’m interviewing Florian, founder and CEO of YourCampus, one of the hottest SaaS companies out there. Welcome, Florian — can you introduce yourself and your company?
Florian: Nice to meet you, Nick, nice to be here, and nice how paths can cross after many years. For the listeners, my name is Florian, founder and CEO of YourCampus. On a personal note, I’m 33 years old, I live in Amsterdam, I have a passion for sports, I love padel, and I’m finding my way now in the world of boxing. YourCampus is an employee benefits and compensation platform for modern employers — we basically allow employees to build their own benefits and compensation package on our platform, and we do that for many businesses around Europe. We’re a post-Series-A company in the scaling phase, and I’m happy to give you a bit more insight into how we got there.
Nick: I want to learn everything about that. How did you come up with the idea?
Florian: I always worked for small and mid-sized companies — between 50 and 200 employees, what’s considered an SMB. My girlfriend — ex-girlfriend by now — was working for a large company, Tommy Hilfiger / Calvin Klein, and she always came home with a bunch of interesting benefits she received as an employee: mobility plans like bikes and electric cars — and this is five years ago, so this was pretty innovative for that company — but also a lot of well-being initiatives, healthy food. I think Tommy Hilfiger was one of the front-runners when it came to how you treat your employees well. I was always working at smaller organizations where I never had access to an interesting package — it was always a base salary and maybe some equity, but beyond that there was very little. And larger and smaller organizations are sometimes competing for the same talent. So I thought: how can you make it accessible for these small and mid-sized organizations to organize a competitive benefits package similar to what corporates are offering? That’s where the idea started, about five years ago.
Nick: I remember the time — I think you pitched it at the kitchen table; I was very excited before day one. But what happened since then — when did you validate it, when did you start?
Florian: Some people with ideas are pretty protective of them, afraid others will copy them. I spoke a lot about it — with friends, colleagues, people around me — and it was a way for me to tell that people get enthusiastic about the concept. Just for context: we offer a benefits platform where everyone can choose which package makes sense for them — there’s a lot of flexibility — and anyone you speak with says that makes sense: that I can choose what fits at this stage in my life, in terms of time off, pension contributions, well-being, how I travel to work. Everyone was always enthusiastic about it, and I always had the dream to start my own company at one point. After my time at Usabilla, I started working at Hiber, which was a really cool company and a nice career opportunity, also in terms of income security — I had a good salary, I’d bought a house. So at that time of my life you think: starting your company is cool, but I have all my security, my expenses and my house. So it was a side project for about two years. When Hiber didn’t grow the way it was supposed to — they had high ambitions, but in the end there were some challenges — I saw an opportunity to explore it on a more serious level, and started figuring out what I had to do to start this company. The first thing was: how can I secure a little income for the time I’m starting up? With recruitment you can start driving revenue the next month, but in SaaS that takes more time, because you have to build the product first.
Nick: Can you elaborate — you had two routes to choose from, the consultancy route or continuing at Hiber. What specific skills and network did you get out of that period?
Florian: The real network building started at the companies I worked at. The founder of Ambitious People became my first customer at YourCampus, and the CEO of Usabilla was the first angel investor who committed a ticket. When I started working at Hiber, I started working closely with Laurens — the founder of Just Eat and Treatwell — as well as Maarten, Erik and that team, who’d already founded different companies together. The opportunity at Hiber allowed me to work closely with them and learn how you grow a business from relatively early on. That experience helped me tremendously — not only to get access to capital, but also to gain experience with finding product-market fit, the whole initial process of founding a company.
Nick: So having the right people in your journey was a good tip.
Florian: I was giving a presentation a couple of weeks ago around the learnings from starting my own company, and I think the main thing for anyone thinking about starting a company is: reputation is everything. Each meeting you have, each employer, every colleague — just make sure you always leave a good impression and try the best you can, because in the end you can use those relationships at a later stage. People you can partner with, acquire as a customer, or have invest in your business. Keeping up a good reputation has helped me a lot with finding capital and finding people, which are the key ingredients to start a business.
“Reputation is everything. Each meeting, each employer, every colleague — make sure you always leave a good impression.”
Nick: What was the moment you went all in with YourCampus?
Florian: It started when Hiber had a more difficult time, and this idea kept coming back — every other month. At one point I decided to spend my Saturdays as a side project, working with two friends on it. Instead of just talking about it with random people, I also started talking with compensation and benefits experts and HR decision makers, and again the concept got validated a lot. In my last six months at Hiber, I started consulting with a coach — I found her via someone, her name is Robin — and I did four coaching sessions to explore where my drivers are and where I get energy from. It turned out I had the right drivers to start my own business. On the financial side, my parents live in Utrecht and had a spare apartment on the top floor where my sister used to live. I asked my mother if I could live there for a couple of months, and I rented out my apartment in Amsterdam to reduce my expenses. That allowed me to spend the first couple of months full-time on what, in my case, was fundraising.
Nick: How did that first period go — living with your parents, renting out your apartment, fundraising? Where do you start?
Florian: I was working with Maarten on this project, and with Floris. Maarten is also a founder himself and has a great network of investors, and Laurens, who was the managing director and founder of Hiber, started his own early-stage investment fund, Dutch Founders Fund. It was a pretty informal process: Maarten said let’s prepare a pitch deck and go to Dutch Founders Fund to explain the opportunity. You have all these fancy graphs with hockey-stick effects, and you have no clue if that’s realistic, but the whole concept of employee benefits — a marketplace model with a fintech component, because there’s money, wallets being created, money being spent on the marketplace — a mix between fintech and HR/marketplaces — resonated really well with Laurens and the investment team. I actually didn’t do a very broad fundraise back then; they said, we’re willing to put down the first 250k, but we think you need at least 500 to start. So my assignment was to find another 250k elsewhere, and that’s where my old employers and friends and family came in. What they always say is true — Dutch Founders Fund saw an opportunity in the market and the business, but also they knew me quite well, and that helped a lot. Friends and family invest in you, initially. Reputation again — they know I’ll do everything I can to make it a success, and that I had a personal ambition to.
Nick: Why 500k — what do you need 500k for?
Florian: Looking back, 500k is enough to start but not enough — in the end you maybe want to raise for 12 to 18 months in that first stage. I used the first 500k to expand the co-founding team, because my experience was mostly commercial, but if you start a company you also really need a strong product profile. So I used it to pay out our own low management fee so we could focus on this full-time, rented a small office with six desks, and used it to get the product out in the market and get the first paying customers — the typical pre-seed tasks to make sure it could be a viable business.
Nick: But you were planning to go big from the get-go?
Florian: From the start I believed this can become very big. However, back then there wasn’t something similar in the Dutch market, so there weren’t a lot of references to look at. In the UK and French markets there was some activity around benefit platforms, and there you could tell they were able to build a valuable business. But it’s hard to compare regions in compensation and benefits — in the UK health insurance is a huge topic, in France it’s lunch, in the Netherlands it’s a whole different industry. But if you go in with venture capital, you indirectly speak out your ambition that you want to make this a big business, and there’s no way back.
Nick: Can you give some insight into your typical week — how many hours, what intensity?
Florian: It’s intense, very intense. The start of the company was the honeymoon phase, because you don’t have too much to worry about — you have some capital, you’re working with people who are almost friends. So in the beginning it wasn’t that stressful and was pretty nice. You work a shitload of hours, but you don’t think about it too much, because in our case it went pretty well early on — we got paying, happy customers and happy users pretty early. Sometimes you hear of companies who struggle for two or three years to find their first paying customers; that was a different starting phase from ours. But if you have your own business, you spend almost the whole day thinking about it, every weekend as well. I really enjoy the topic, and you have these successes along the way that fuel your energy — from being able to download the app, to getting your first customer, your 50th, your 100th. Every time it gives you a lot of energy. But I spend a lot of hours per week working.
Nick: Do you have an example of a stressful period?
Florian: The most stressful time is probably around fundraising. We did the first 500k, which expanded into a seed round of 2.7 million. We launched the business in January 2022, when it was still all great for startups — capital was relatively easy to get. Then in May the news became more negative — interest rates going up, companies which were overvalued — and that was just the moment we wanted to raise our seed round. The majority of our customers were technology companies, which had a hard time finding capital. Maybe you felt it in your business too, that recruitment was slowing down, and layoffs were happening, so we also saw a slight decline in our existing customer base in the number of employees using the platform. That’s not ideal when you start fundraising, and investment funds were very reluctant to write new tickets. So that was a very stressful period. Just now we closed our Series A round — I’m not going to talk too much about it yet, because you’ll see the news soon — and that again is a stressful period, because the fundraising process is a full-time job for months, and at the same time they want to see results. That’s probably the most intense thing I’ve done, now a couple of times in my career.
Nick: How do you deal with it?
Florian: I’m a guy who does things quite extreme. I’ve had times where I just wanted to go for a few drinks on a Friday night, which was probably not the best idea, but a nice way to not think about it for a little bit. I wouldn’t advise that to anyone — you need to recover from it, it’s probably the stupidest thing you can do. Looking back at the last couple of intense months, I started drinking less and focusing a lot on my personal health. Last year I did an Ironman, which was a good reason to become fit, and now in May I’m going to participate in a boxing match, so I started to live quite healthy. It’s the basics: don’t drink a lot, sleep well, and if I go out for dinner I’m not going out after 11. Stress is really about energy management — making sure you have enough energy to deal with complex situations, because complex situations will always be there. You need to be able to handle them, and that’s only possible if you feel well and have your health as a priority.
“Stress is really about energy management — making sure you have enough energy to deal with complex situations, because they’ll always be there.”
Nick: There will be a lot of aspiring entrepreneurs listening, maybe in SaaS or even SaaS sales. What skills or experience are you still using today?
Florian: You can be a founder no matter your background, as long as you surround yourself with people who are complementary. If you’re a real product founder, make sure you have a strong commercial profile next to you. In my case, my strength is the commercial aspect, so I focus a lot on that. On the financial, customer-success and product sides I’m involved, but it’s not my end responsibility — I’m not in the driving seat there. That’s important, coming back to energy: you do something you like and that you’re good at on a day-to-day basis. The role I have today is really about driving overall culture, motivation and engagement — a people aspect. I’m good at connecting with people and finding good new people, so the recruitment part is an important aspect I still focus on a lot. Other than that, I focus a lot on driving growth and doing the hard work on the sales side, assisting the team.
Nick: What makes you so good in sales?
Florian: Every founder has to believe in their business and tell a story well around it — it always helps if it’s your own business. But what makes me good in sales is that I actually enjoy it a lot — reaching out, going to meetings, spending time on a deal, getting to know the customer well — and I’m pretty competitive. I think everyone should have at least a couple of years of experience in sales before starting their own business, because in the end a lot of things are sales: fundraising is sales, selling your company to people to come work for it is sales. A genuine interest and a healthy competitiveness help me a lot.
Nick: What’s your vision for YourCampus moving forward?
Florian: We’re in a very interesting stage — the company basically exited the real startup stage, and we’re going to scale up from now on. We’ve spent a lot of time identifying our growth markets and ideal customer profiles — for whom we’re going to build the product and where we see most growth — and preparing everything in the background to serve those markets well. We have the right people in place, the capital, the product. Another interesting aspect is the brand — next month there will be a big update on the branding. From there we’re going full-on into execution mode. The vision is to build an all-in-one platform for compensation and benefits, because it’s too scattered today for HR and compensation teams, with a lot of different providers, payrolling systems, and data living in different places. That frustrates employers and employees. We made the move to Germany, so we’re going to invest a lot there. Our goal for the coming 24 to 36 months is to have a market-leading position in those two markets — together the strongest economy in Europe — and from there we see a good opportunity to take over Europe.
Nick: That sounds like big, bold plans. What will be the biggest challenge to get there?
Florian: In the Netherlands it’s really an execution game today — we have everything in place. There are challenges along the road, but we’ve learned a lot in the past two-plus years on the market and implemented those learnings. For example, we did interviews with our existing customers but also prospects who decided not to work with us, to analyze why they convert and why they don’t. We invested pretty early in a business intelligence team that does a lot of analysis on retention, acquisition and everything we track in the CRM. So in the Netherlands it’s about execution — keeping the momentum, making sure customers stay happy. We have very strong retention metrics, and we just need to keep them up. Germany is a new geography, and you have to go through the whole learning curve again — picking a market and an ICP, building your product, executing. In the beginning you need to be opportunistic, but at one point you also need to dare to pick an industry where you want to grow, because you can’t optimize your product for five industries at the same time. The main challenge will be to keep the energy high and keep solving the complex challenges we’ll face along the road.
Nick: Your focus is now commercial and building the team. How do you make sure the team keeps momentum and the culture is good?
Florian: It always comes down to people — who builds the product, who serves the customer, who acquires the customer. So it starts on the recruitment side: we like to spend a bit more time with people than an average company does. Even though you can’t really get to know someone in three or four conversations, we try to have multiple people in the organization speak with someone to make sure there’s a good cultural fit.
Nick: How do you assess culture?
Florian: We’re still figuring out how to do that best, to be honest. We’ve defined three core values. The first we call “your company” — you treat the company like it’s your own. The second is “your growth” — we have ambitious goals to grow, but we can only do that with people who have that same ambition to grow personally, because as the company grows fast, people’s responsibilities grow, so they need to develop themselves. The third is “your ride” — that you enjoy the ride and get energy from it, and contribute that to other people. Some things are gut feeling in interviews; some things we’ve defined as a selection of questions to figure out how people deal with responsibility and ownership. We just hired our first in-house recruiter, so we’re professionalizing this and bringing it to the next level.
Nick: And how do you make sure everyone implements that — the performance reviews?
Florian: That’s mainly in the management team. We use an HRIS system that automates it — when new performance reviews are coming up, everyone receives their manager-employee review. It’s part of a quarterly cycle, and also part of the regular salary review, so it’s an important thing that it happens. Honestly, it’s not really an issue — people actually like to spend a bit of time reviewing and setting new goals.
Nick: I think we can talk for hours, Florian, but it’s better to call it a day, otherwise we’ll be talking tomorrow as well. Is there anything — any tips for listeners who want to start a company — that we haven’t covered yet?
Florian: For people thinking about starting a business: think carefully about what kind of business you want to build, and then decide what you need to achieve that. It feels weird sometimes — “where do you want this to be in three to five years?” — but it’s a very important question. If you want to build a big business, you want ambitious investors on board, like venture capital. But I also speak with people whose driver is, “I just like the freedom, and I think I can make more money than working somewhere else if I have my own business.” Both things are very true, and you can also reach those without external capital. So think about what your driver is and why you want to do it, because there are so many businesses you can build where you can make a good living with a 10-to-20-person services company that maybe isn’t even technology. Looking backwards, I’m really happy with the choices I’ve made — but I’ve been a bit lucky too; I didn’t make these choices because I was so conscious about the impact. It’s very important that you speak a lot with the partners you work with — investors or co-founders — about where you want this to be. What can be very devastating for your business is a conflict with your partners; if you break up with a co-founder, that can be devastating. We didn’t have that, but I hear stories around me.
“Think carefully about what kind of business you want to build, and then decide what you need to achieve that.”
Nick: And it is your first rodeo, so you’re now projecting your learnings onto your second rodeo, I guess — just kidding.
Florian: Every time I reach a new point, I think, what’s next — which is a good thing to have. But especially with your team, you should give them the impression — not the impression, but really reflect and show them all the hard work they’ve done and all the achievements — before you only set new goals on top of goals. Founders always think it’s not enough, it’s never enough, but for your team it’s important that you really show you value all the hard work they’ve put in. Honestly, if I look at where we are today — all the customers, a great product, a great growth rate, one of the faster-growing companies in the Netherlands right now — you should be pretty happy already that this has been achieved.
Nick: But you have to remind yourself.
Florian: Definitely. Sometimes it feels like — for example, if you pass the 1 million ARR mark — you think, well, 1 million is not a lot, you actually need 10. And suddenly 1 million doesn’t feel like a lot, whereas if I think about my 100K mark, 1 million seems like a lot. So you need to sometimes be humble about that and be happy with where you are.
Nick: That’s great to learn from that mindset. I loved learning so much about your journey — I thought I knew a lot, but there’s a lot of new things that came up. There are a couple of little scoops coming about YourCampus, so stay tuned everyone. YourCampus is going to be one of the coolest companies out there, and they’re hiring, apparently. Looking forward to hearing the response to this. Thanks, Florian.
Florian: Thanks, Nick, for the top — my first podcast.
Nick: Thanks for joining us on SaaS Unscripted. To explore the latest career opportunities, visit our website, nobelrecruitment.com, and don’t forget to subscribe and leave your review on your favorite podcast platform. Until next time on SaaS Unscripted.
