In this episode, Nick van Eeten interviews Hans de Penning — serial entrepreneur and co-founder and CEO of Neople, one of the hottest SaaS startups out there. Neople builds AI “digital colleagues” that work alongside customer support teams. Hans talks through his journey: dropping out of his engineering studies, founding an engineering consultancy, building the electric car-sharing company Amber, surviving COVID, selling Amber, and then starting Neople — which grew to 100+ customers and raised a €6M seed round inside its first year.
Nick: Welcome to a new episode of SaaS Unscripted. Today I have the pleasure of interviewing a serial entrepreneur, CEO and founder of one of the hottest SaaS businesses out there: Hans from Neople. Hans, can you introduce yourself?
Hans: I’m Hans, one of the founders of Neople, which is actually a pretty new company — we started one and a half years ago, not even. I used to be an engineer, so I did a lot of software and electrical engineering, but also a dropout. I started my own company during my studies.
Nick: You mentioned you’re a dropout. What made you drop out?
Hans: After a while we started a student team, where we made a small car for a competition. That was actually already like running a business, because we had a team of about 15 people that we had to bring together to really make a car in nine months. That was a really stressful time, but the fun thing was that it was actually harder than running a business, because all these people were doing it for free — they were just students. So it was really hard to motivate them, especially around the exam weeks, and to keep everybody working towards the same goal. If I think back, it was actually more challenging than running a business in some aspects. But that really triggered me. My father is also an entrepreneur — he has his own company — but it never came up to me that I wanted to start something myself. When we joined the student team, it was like: okay, this is way more fun than studying. And that made me drop out.
Nick: What was your role in that project team?
Hans: We called it team manager, but if it translates to a company, it’s sort of a CEO function.
Nick: So a CEO was born. And you dropped out right after the project, or how did that timeline go?
Hans: When the project stopped, I wanted to do my studies and start a company at the same time — and that was a bad decision, but I tried. So it was studying during the weekdays and then building the company in the evenings and weekends. That turns the other way around when the company grows, and after a while it’s just studying during exam weeks and you’re not learning anything from it anymore. I finished my bachelor’s, but I definitely didn’t want to do my master’s. I said: okay, it doesn’t make sense, I’m not going to learn anything from it — not because the content isn’t valuable, but because I’m not putting the right effort into it. So that made me stop.
Nick: How did you found that business? What did you start?
Hans: The thing is, you don’t start a company on Monday and say “okay, I want to do this” — that’s basically not how it works. There’s a very long period before that where you’re thinking, “I want to do something in this direction.” For us, I was doing it together with my co-founder, who was also in the student project. We said: okay, we learned a lot during the student project, maybe companies want us to do that for them — just doing engineering stuff and building things in a very short time frame. That was our first thought. Maybe companies want to pay for it, so let’s start a business in that direction. We just started talking to a lot of companies to see if they were interested in giving us money to do their projects. And it worked — we got our first project after a few weeks. We didn’t have any experience in that topic or that technology, but we figured: we never did it, but probably we can. So we just tried, and it worked, and we were able to send an invoice. But we didn’t have a company yet, so we had to found one after we finished the project.
Nick: What was the company?
Hans: It was an engineering consultancy. We did projects for a lot of startups — in the beginning it was only startups, later on it was enterprises with really difficult projects. But in the beginning it was like building a small hardware device for a startup and helping them bring it to market.
Nick: So you studied engineering, after the student project you dropped out to start a consultancy. How did that evolve — what kind of revenue, how big was the team?
Hans: The first year we did it with the two of us. I was selling the projects, and my companion Frank was making them — those were the roles we had. We did that for one year, but then the projects became bigger, and especially while trying to study at the same time, we couldn’t do it on our own anymore. That’s when we hired the first two people — friends from university. It was difficult for us to hire, because we didn’t have experience in it, so we asked: can you freelance, maybe that’s easier for us? So we freelanced with a few people in the second year. After two years we were already with about 10 people. That grew quite fast, because the projects became bigger and we had something unique — although we didn’t know it. There was a big shortage of engineers in the market, and that’s basically what made us grow. We weren’t aware of it, because in our perception everybody was an engineer — we were in engineering studies. So we didn’t know that was the reason we grew, but it worked.
Nick: What kind of revenue did you do at the consultancy?
Hans: In the beginning, in a few years we grew to a million. The company is still growing strong and it’s now a few times bigger.
“You don’t start a company on Monday and say ‘I want to do this.’ There’s a very long period before that where you’re thinking, ‘I want to do something in this direction.'”
Nick: And how did you move on from there? You founded another company.
Hans: Exactly. I like to do a lot of things — maybe not at the same time, but I have a lot of ambition. Consultancy is a linear business, and I saw a lot of our startup clients that, if they got traction with their product, were growing like crazy. I thought: that’s an interesting dynamic, completely different from us, where we have to hire a few more people to grow a bit. I wanted to discover that. So in the evenings, after I stopped my studies, we started our own startup where we made technology for electric cars. We thought maybe we’d spin it off after a few years, but we got traction quite fast and decided to bring it into a different entity and build a team around it directly. So we ended up with two companies: one engineering consultancy and, in the end, a car-sharing company.
Nick: I see a pattern there — you did the same thing with your studies.
Hans: Sure, but I learned from it. It was my master’s in business instead of my master’s in engineering.
Nick: So how did you manage that organizationally — two companies, one with traction, the other gaining traction?
Hans: That was a difficult time, and that’s also what I’ve learned: you cannot do multiple things at the same time, especially not running a startup, because it’s not about workload — it’s about focus. That’s the most important thing. If you don’t have focus on one thing, it will cause problems after a while, especially when things go well. If things don’t go well it doesn’t matter — but maybe things aren’t going well precisely because you don’t have focus. So after a while my other co-founders from Amber, the car-sharing company, were also like: okay, you have to choose. And they were completely right.
Nick: Different co-founders, then?
Hans: Different co-founders, yes. So I had to choose. At that time, my companion was better at running the engineering business — he really knows the technology, I don’t. So we made the decision that he would run the engineering business and I would run the car-sharing business.
Nick: I forgot about one important part — how did you come up with the idea to create software for electric cars?
Hans: My specialization during my studies was automotive, and I wanted to do something with it because I really like cars. I like the freedom it gives, and the technology that is very durable — that sparked my mind. While doing the engineering projects we never did anything for automotive, because that’s hard, really regulated, and difficult for a young company to start in. We wanted to do it anyway, so we figured: if there are no customers for us, we’ll just build our own product around electric cars. That was the beginning.
Nick: So how big did the prototype get?
Hans: We actually built a complete car. This is the thing with startups: they never end with the product they started with. You always pivot, because you have an initial thought — “we want to do something like this” — and you end up with something completely different. We started with “we want to make an electric car,” so we built a prototype, hired people to design the car. We came quite far — we had a prototype, all the drawings, and suppliers for part of the technology. But of course it never came into production, because that’s hard. We did a lot of designing and sourcing.
Nick: Was there already a lot of money spent back then on the prototype?
Hans: Too much, of course. In the first two years we only spent money on building a car that we never made. But it was the same basis we used for the company that later became the car-sharing company. So yes, you spend a lot of money, but you already have a team, you have experience, and you know things that don’t work. I think it’s fine — that’s part of building a company. You waste a lot of time, effort and money in the beginning.
Nick: And that was already in the period that you went all in on Amber?
Hans: After about one and a half years I completely shifted to Amber.
Nick: How did you finance that back then?
Hans: Friends and family. There were investors — we made a kind of stock structure for them, gave convertible loans in the beginning and converted them. So we already had a structure for financing the business, but it was only friends and family in the investor pool.
Nick: And what was the point that you pivoted to Amber — to car sharing?
Hans: The most important thing we learned — with every company, also with Neople — is that when you don’t work with clients, you don’t know where you are in your journey. When you’re building a car, you’re working in a garage for seven years and then maybe a car comes out, and then you try to sell it and see if there’s a market. We didn’t want to wait that long for that feedback cycle. So we started with the concept we had in mind: a car that is not owned but used. That leads you to car sharing. The car we were developing was really tailored around that concept — very durable, with replaceable parts, that can be driven for millions of kilometers. But you don’t have that car yet, and you want to validate your concept. So we leased some cars to test it. It was really hard to get investment and build a company around building a car in the Netherlands — that’s the difficult part — but you can find investors, customers and people to run an operational business. So if you’re already leasing cars and sharing them with a community, you’re making money, you’ve got traction, you’ve got feedback, and you know what’s working and what’s not. But the same problem came up: you cannot build a car and run an operational business at the same time. So we chose to do the car-sharing business.
Nick: How did it go with the team — did you stumble upon it, or were you testing markets?
Hans: We tested a lot of markets. We got a lot of luck with our first customer, because our first paying customer was ABN AMRO — a little bit by coincidence. It was hard to get these cars leased, because as a young company you don’t have any annual accounts, so it’s really hard to get a car on a lease contract. We were looking for a customer willing to pay enough that we could cover the lease, and after a while we stumbled upon ABN AMRO. They also wanted to make the transition to electric driving — and we’re talking about 2017, 2018, when that was not as common as today. This was a really good step for them, and it made it possible for us to start the business.
Nick: You make it sound very easy to have ABN AMRO as a launching customer. How did you land it?
Hans: That’s a funny thing. What helped is that we had some empathy on our side — we were a young company, really ambitious guys who wanted to build something. There were people inside ABN AMRO who were charmed by it and were willing to help. Then you have your heroes, your ambassadors inside the company, helping you through the whole process — because we didn’t have any experience with corporate sales, we didn’t know how to do it.
Nick: How old were you guys back then?
Hans: 23, 24.
Nick: And how did it go from there?
Hans: We learned that all the big companies look at each other — what are you doing, what looks good. When we could say “we are working for ABN AMRO,” that gave a lot of trust to other corporates, and that made it possible to start with other enterprise customers. Then we really got traction and grew a lot, because a lot of big companies wanted to move to driving electric. We had a very low barrier to start with us, because it’s car sharing — you’re not taking away cars from people and replacing them with electric cars, which comes with a lot of objections. It was also a way of trying out electric driving for them. So that was our way in: start with our concept to begin driving electric. And it worked. We grew our customer base, grew our team, and got funding for the company. After about three quarters of a year we got funding from an investor to fund our growth in the car-sharing business. It worked. We grew and grew — and then COVID hit.
Nick: And that was a B2B proposition, right?
Hans: We were only working for enterprise and business customers. When COVID came to the Netherlands, these companies weren’t allowed to work at the office anymore, and they weren’t allowed to go to customers anymore — there was no need for any kind of mobility. If you’re doing mobility for enterprises, there was no business at all anymore. Our complete business came to a complete stop overnight, just after the press conference. The business was over, basically. All the cars were standing still in the garages, and then we had to make a plan, because we were out of business.
Nick: How long did that pivot take?
Hans: From March 2020, when we had the first press conference — we started in August, so after three or four months. That was a really hectic time, because you see that you’re losing a lot of money and investing a lot in a new concept. That was tricky, and also not really understood by everybody in the company, or by the investors. They said: what are you doing, investing in a new product when we’re losing a lot of money because we don’t have any business anymore? But we started testing and piloting with our first user groups in August, and on September 1st we did a big marketing launch and invested a lot of money in performance marketing to bring it to consumers.
Nick: You answer that super practically — “this is what I did” — but you were basically almost out of business, losing money, with investors and internal people not knowing what you were doing. How did that feel?
Hans: That’s a good question. Of course I was scared, because you build a company, you know things are working quite well, and then everything is going to hell in just a few months. On the one hand, you’re really scared that you lose what you have. On the other hand, you have a lot of energy and time to fix it, because you’re not running the business anymore. That energy really motivated me to continue.
Nick: Was that more adrenaline — “I have to fix this” — or survival mode?
Hans: It was also survival mode. And that doesn’t always lead to the best decisions, because you want to survive, and that’s the most important thing.
Nick: What were bad decisions back then?
Hans: A lot of them — I think a lot in hiring. You hire people because you say “okay, I now need people in some department I don’t have yet,” too fast, because you’re not paying attention to building the right team — you just have to fix it. You need people in support and in marketing that you didn’t have before, so you hire everybody you can find who wants a job. We had a really good team in the end, but we also made mistakes there, and we had to let people go at the time. That’s no fun and games. But if you’re scared — and scared is the right word — and trying to grow the company in really rough times, these things definitely happen.
Nick: Looking back, what did you achieve with Amber? How big was the operation, what kind of revenue?
Hans: We sold the company in 2022 to an investor, and now it’s merged with MyWheels. That was really good for the company in the end, and considering the investment climate, it was fitting.
Nick: Was it one event — the merge — or did you first sell to an investment company and then merge?
Hans: It’s both. It wasn’t at exactly the same time, but it was related. I think we made a good landing with the company — that’s a good thing. We learned a lot, and that’s something I really got out of it. I think we also changed the landscape of car sharing a bit, because before, nobody was doing electric car sharing — it was more expensive, since the cars were more expensive. But the operations are actually cheaper in some aspects, so if you do it right, you can do it better.
Nick: Why did you sell?
Hans: It was the right time for the company. We had just recovered from COVID, and the nice thing was that we held the team together — a team that was really motivated to continue. We had our consumer customers, and then the business customers came back, so we had two user groups doing quite well. In this market, especially with consumers, consolidation really makes sense, because you want to have a lot of scale to make companies like this work. So it was the right moment to do it.
Nick: And after that, were you completely hands-off? What happened then — how long did that free period last?
Hans: Long enough. I stopped with anything I did for half a year, and spent a few months abroad, because I really wanted to wrap my head around what I wanted to do next. All the options are open — do you want a job, build a new company, do investing, be a consultant? Everything is somehow an option. So it’s: okay, what’s next? And then it also becomes a little bit scary, because you don’t know what to choose. It was an interesting time. I learned a lot about myself, what I like and don’t like, and where I want to spend my energy. I even considered working in a completely different part of the world, like building solar plants in Africa.
Nick: How did you do the soul-searching — just give it time?
Hans: I did a lot of hiking, just wandering around, thinking, drawing. That’s the only thing I did for a few months. And then I really got going. I already had the idea of Neople with a few people who are now my co-founders. I had to choose: is this the thing I want to do, and dive back into the chaos of a startup again?
Nick: Was Neople one of the ideas you had during those hikes?
Hans: Like I said, I was really serious about building solar plants in Africa. But you also want to place yourself in a position where you can be successful on the one hand, and have adventure on the other — and do something where you have a feeling that you can do it. The perfect crossing of those was Neople.
Nick: How did you come up with the idea? Now I want to know everything about it.
Hans: Where we started was: we did a lot of things with Amber that made us really efficient, also applying some sort of AI — completely different now than then, of course — to make our operations more efficient. Our thinking was: if we can make other companies do the same things we did, we can mean a lot for them. Then we started thinking about how to bring that to companies, because not all companies are tech-heavy or searching all day for the newest technology. We started pitching, and we had different names and different pitches — every pitch we did at the time was different, because we wanted to test as many things as possible in the shortest amount of time. After a while it was: if we’re saying “we’re going to automate everything in your company with AI,” why aren’t we presenting ourselves as an artificial intelligence company? Why aren’t we using AI to pitch for us? That’s where we came up with Emily. Emily was an AI-generated name, an AI-generated pitch, and an AI-generated video that pitched the idea of the company.
Nick: And Emily is still the CEO, I saw?
Hans: She is. We’re now co-CEOs — but she’s smarter than me. The fun thing is that it really got the attention of the people we were pitching to: “oh, that’s nice, you’re making an AI pitch your company — I also want an AI to do things for us in the same way.” So we thought: maybe that’s the product. Maybe the AI agent — what we now call the Neople — is the product. That’s how we shifted completely to: we’re a recruitment agency, because Emily is bringing other AI agents to companies.
Nick: It feels so logical when you see it — the whole proposition is: you put a face on AI, and people say “I want that face working for me” instead of the technology that they don’t trust.
Hans: Exactly. That’s how it started. We made multiple Emilies, then we had Sam and Taylor and all these AI characters, and we started pitching them to a lot of different companies.
Nick: You said “we” — who is “we,” and how did you get together?
Hans: My co-founders are Job, Bas and Meno. Job I already knew — he was the CTO in the engineering company back then, so he knows how to build products, and he also has a master’s in AI, so he knows the technology. Every time I talked to Job he was saying, “oh, you have to look at this, this is new technology, look what it can do.” So he was a very logical person to get involved. Bas and Meno I met through a mutual connection — that was really interesting too. I was pitching the concept to him, and he said, “I also know other people building a company with a completely different proposition.” They were both building a company together. We sat together and gave presentations to each other: this is what we’re going to do. The fun thing is, they were working on customer support, because they knew customer support will be completely different in a few years because of technology and how the market is evolving. They had a proposition for customer support, and we had the Neople — the character that does things for you — but it didn’t have an application yet. It was just: we bring an AI character to your company and it starts working for you somehow. When we were pitching to each other, I said: why don’t we make the Neople do the customer support for you? And we just saw the match. Everything became logical in the end.
Nick: So good. How does it go — is it like dating?
Hans: It was dating. We actually called it dating. We said: if we want to start a company together, we’re going to marry, so we have to get to know each other. We didn’t have a company or anything to put it in, so it was: every Friday and Wednesday we’re going to sit together and build a virtual company. If we like it and see that it works, we’ll start together. That went quite quick — after a few weeks, a few months, we said: yeah, I think it’ll work, and we started building the company.
Nick: Dating with your co-founders. If I have a lot of SaaS founders or leaders watching this — are you willing to share the pitch deck from then? The original one with Emily, and maybe the one from your co-founders — that’s how two worlds combined. That would be super cool to share.
Hans: Yeah, of course, I can do that.
“Why aren’t we using AI to pitch for us? That’s where we came up with Emily — an AI-generated name, pitch and video. People said: I want that AI working for me. Maybe that’s the product.”
Nick: So after dating, you started to build the AI Neople that focuses on customer support. How long before first traction, first clients?
Hans: On purpose, we started with multiple types of clients — accounting, legal, HR and support. After a few months we had four Neople working at four completely different companies. We did a lot of testing and built prototypes that could do the job, and we started innovating from that point. After about four months we said: we now have a lot of knowledge about how it’s working in these companies, now we have to choose. Doing everything at the same time won’t make you a winner in this space, because then you’re a master of none. It’s not that it’s the right choice — it’s making a choice. With one of our customers we really saw better adoption of the concept. This was Bob — Bob was part of the team, they put it on their Facebook and on their website, they talked about it, it was really a thing. They adopted the concept as we presented it: this is your new colleague, going to work with you. We said: if they adopted it best, we have to choose that direction. The functionality — helping answer questions from customers — is something we have to learn and get better at over time, but the starting point is that people want to use it and want to work together with it. That’s why we chose this. Our ICP, our ideal customer profile, was the mid-market e-commerce company working in support.
Nick: So you nailed it down super specific.
Hans: We chose: this is our ICP, this is the type of customer we want to address. And then we approached a lot of similar companies, using the proposition from our first clients.
Nick: You write on your LinkedIn that you’re working at the fastest-growing company you’ve ever worked at. What makes the traction so good?
Hans: I think it’s software — there are fewer barriers. That definitely makes sense. With Amber, you had to lease cars, they had to be built and shipped. With the engineering company, for every hour you sell, you need more people. This is: if you can plug in more customers, it’s easier — not easy, but easier — so that allows you to grow faster. But the most important thing is that we have the right timing, because AI is a thing we cannot ignore, and we’re AI-native, building our application on top of AI. People are now looking for that transition towards more automation. The other thing is the team. With the first 10 to 15 hires we had people with experience in the same phase and the same role. At Amber we didn’t have any experience yet — we built experience together, which is really nice. But now we’re hiring people who already have experience building other companies, and they bring that experience in, which helps us grow faster, because we’re not making as many mistakes. The team has already seen a lot of things. So timing and team are the most important things, and there’s no reason not to scale.
Nick: And how fast are you growing now?
Hans: To give an example of things we’ve also published: we started the company last year in January, and we now have more than 100 customers. That’s really fast. We also got funding quite fast — five months after founding we got our first pre-seed round of €1.5 million. And we just closed, a few weeks ago, our second round: one year after the last funding round, we got a second round of €6 million. That gives a general idea of how fast everything is going.
Nick: This is the third time you’ve founded a company, so you’re an experienced founder with an experienced team, you have software without the barriers of a very operations-heavy business, and you just closed your seed round of six million — which makes you one of the hot shots of SaaS at this moment. How do you see the future — what is your big goal?
Hans: We have a lot of ambition. We’re already working for some foreign clients, and we’re now opening an office in Germany, because we have a few German clients but no German native-speaking people. We want to have people who are native German that can help our clients there and in our go-to-market. Our ambition is to do it worldwide, but you have to make steps to get there, and in our opinion these are the right steps. The other thing is that our product is far from finished — the Neople are adding a lot of value, but we want to do a lot more with them. So we’re making the Neople better and growing the development team, because now you have the challenge of onboarding a lot of new clients and at the same time developing features that help all the clients. Those go side by side, and you want a big enough team to do both well. That’s something we want to invest in.
Nick: Great to hear the ambition — I feel it. How does that translate to your culture? How does the team work?
Hans: We have a lot of conversations with the team about it, to learn what we want to build and how we want to work together. People are working really hard — that’s something you definitely see — because they want to make it work, and because things are going pretty well, it feels like “I want to contribute to it, I want to do it better.” That really contributes to the results we’re making together. So we have a really action- and result-driven team at the moment. Of course, we also have to spend time on work-life balance for the team, and on appreciation — a really important thing, that everybody feels appreciated for what they’re doing. That’s something we need to put a lot of effort into, because it’s also part of the high-performance culture we currently have.
Nick: What are your career dreams from here?
Hans: It’s actually a little bit contrary to what I said about Amber, where I said I don’t want to manage the bigger company. But now we’re at the point where, in this space, we will be a big company very soon. I don’t want to be done with my job then — and I don’t think that’s needed, because I’m also learning a lot from this whole journey. I want to still be comfortable, perform, and do the best of what I can, also when the company is growing bigger and internationally. This is the first time we’ve built a company across borders — with Amber it was really hard to get cars in a different country, because everything has to change. Here it’s easy to scale abroad, but then you also have to manage a company abroad, and that’s new for me. I want to learn it.
Nick: I would love to interview you in a year from now to see where you take it. I already love all the golden information you share — I think a lot of people will find it very inspiring to hear the story. Great that you want to give back to the SaaS community and show your journey here on the SaaS Unscripted podcast. Is there anything else you want to share today?
Hans: For every founder that wants to start a company: just don’t think too much about it, just start. You will never end up with the things you have in your head right now — and that’s perfectly fine. You will learn.
Nick: A great addition. Thanks a lot, Hans. I really loved the conversation, and I’m going to keep following you very tightly.
Hans: Thank you. Thanks a lot.
