In this episode of SaaS Unscripted, host Nick van Eeten sits down with Erwin van der Vlist — co-founder of Speakap, the employee communication platform for frontline workers. Erwin shares how he and his co-founder Patrick built the first version while working part-time in a supermarket, how they turned it into an international SaaS company, and the hard lessons from his five-plus years relocating to New York to crack the US market.

Nick: Hello everyone, welcome to a new episode of SaaS Unscripted. In today’s episode I’m interviewing Erwin van der Vlist, founder of Speakap, and we’re going to discover the American adventure he’s had and his personal journey up to today. Erwin, welcome to the show. Maybe you can introduce yourself, including the things I forgot.

Erwin: Absolutely. I’m the co-founder of Speakap. We started the company about 12 years ago here in Amsterdam. I was born a little bit north of Amsterdam, about 40 kilometers. At that time, both the other founder and myself were working in a supermarket part-time next to our studies, and we experienced how difficult it is to communicate. So we decided to make that better and started a company called Speakap, built it up in Europe, and about six years ago I moved to New York to expand the business to North America. I learned a lot of lessons and made a lot of mistakes, so I’m happy to share some of those today.

Nick: Good to hear. I want to start at the beginning. You and your co-founder founded Speakap — how did you come up with the name, how did you build the first product? If people are working in supermarkets, how do they build a software company from that experience?

Erwin: Both Patrick — the other founder — and I are not technical. But we experienced, as frontline workers, how difficult it is to communicate when you never sit behind a computer and don’t have a company email. We used a lot of paper on bulletin boards, TV screens, and some local WhatsApp groups, and we thought: we can make that easier by creating an app. At first it was actually a website, not really an app. We put our savings together and worked with the entrepreneur — the supermarket owner we worked for — to create that first version. An external company built that website for us; it took a couple of months. It wasn’t a lot of savings at the time, but we had a product. By using it ourselves we could expand it to other supermarkets — it’s a local supermarket chain here in the Netherlands — so we had the owner introduce us to other owners. That’s where it started: a very simple product at first, some form of digital bulletin board, so we could make communication with those part-timers much easier. It was very time-consuming to call them every time somebody called in sick or the truck got a delay — very practical examples.

Nick: And how did you come up with the name?

Erwin: At that time it wasn’t called Speakap — it was called Supermarkt Centrale, so it was very specific for supermarkets. If you’re a supermarket owner, you think: okay, that product is meant for me. That worked very well, but at some point we found out it’s not very scalable internationally, so we had to change the name. That was actually on a Sunday afternoon. It needed to be in English, so we were looking for a domain — and the domain name was actually the most important driver for us to come up with the name Speakap. That domain was available, .com, .nl, a lot of extensions.

Nick: Did you always have the ambition to start your own business?

Erwin: Not per se. During the time we created Supermarkt Centrale — the predecessor of Speakap — I had actually briefly started my career at Deloitte. I was starting as a finance consultant, had a full-time job, and did this on the side. So it came onto our path; we saw the opportunity of something that was missing in reality and we jumped on it.

Nick: And what was the moment you thought, “we have something here”?

Erwin: When it started to spread, word of mouth, from one owner to the other, and we got inquiries coming in: “oh, we also want that product.” Then we thought: this is very interesting. In that first phase we didn’t have any investors — we just put our own savings together, built a website, and at some point had 50 or 60 supermarket owners using Supermarkt Centrale. One of those owners introduced us to an investor, who saw the opportunity and the potential: you can do this much broader than just supermarkets. That was the time I decided to stop working at Deloitte. The investor funded the business, and we started to make the product more international and more robust, and then it became Speakap, in 2011.

Nick: Before that time, how many customers, what kind of revenue, how many employees?

Erwin: No employees. Patrick and myself did it, because that external company developed the website — but in a way that we could create instances per customer quite easily. I believe we had 50 or 60 supermarket owners, some with multiple locations. The revenue, I’d say, was maybe 100,000 a year, recurring. Recurring was even very new in those days — there was no ARR and CAC ratios and all that type of thing. We were really on the forefront of all of that. It was about 100,000 annual recurring revenue, and the investment was much lower than that. I think that’s also what got the investor interested.

Nick: So in today’s terms, you had a bootstrapped SaaS company that was doing really well.

Erwin: You can say it like that, yes.

“Recurring was very new in those days — there was no ARR and CAC ratios. We were really on the forefront of all of that.”

Nick: What made you want to grow Speakap into what it is today?

Erwin: At that time we weren’t really looking for investment. I’d started working at Deloitte, Patrick had also started his career, and Supermarkt Centrale was a nice side project that was doing very well. But the investor who stepped in made it possible for us to stop our careers and really go for it — let’s make something big out of this. And we did, but it was hard work, very hard work. When we started building our own product, you get all kinds of challenges with developers, development and the quality thereof, getting to a launching product that’s good enough to sell beyond supermarkets. That cost us about two, two and a half years to get to a new product that was scalable. Our first non-supermarket customer was Okura Hotels here in Amsterdam, and that was a celebration moment for us — a big hotel with a very well-known name being able to start working with us was quite an accomplishment.

Nick: That moment, from getting your initial investor on board to signing Okura, took two years. What were the actions you took in those two years, from hiring and development to strategy?

Erwin: It was hiring developers — but again, Patrick and I weren’t that technical, so we made some mistakes there. Then we came across a very good CTO persona who stepped in, and with the CTO we were able to build a strong development team. It took us about nine months with that team to build the first version of Speakap.

Nick: So back then you jumped on Speakap to make it scalable, and that first period was not scalable at all?

Erwin: Correct. There were big learnings until we hired the CTO, and then we could create a product that could at least go to market.

Nick: And from that moment, it took you two years to break even, basically?

Erwin: That’s correct.

Nick: What were your roles — how did you divide the work between you and your co-founder?

Erwin: In the beginning you do everything together, almost. But Patrick is much better at how the product should work and look — he has a very sharp eye for UI/UX design. I’m much more the commercial guy: sales, marketing, business development. That’s basically how we separated our roles.

Nick: So that’s four years into Speakap. What happened after that?

Erwin: We were growing, finding more customers, adding more features, growing our employee base. Once we hit about 20 people, we decided to hire someone in HR, so you professionalize certain functions. Around 2017 we saw the opportunity for this product internationally — there are some competitors in the space, and Patrick and I really wanted to make this big, so we shouldn’t only focus on the Netherlands. We wanted to expand the business to the US. We raised money for that from a VC called Connected Capital here in Amsterdam, and that allowed us to set up shop in the US. That actually meant that I, as a founder, relocated from Amsterdam to New York, and I lived for over five years in New York building the business there.

Nick: How did the decision-making go to pack up all your stuff and go?

Erwin: That was mostly personal motivation. At that time I was single; Patrick had a girlfriend and a little kid coming, so he was less flexible than I was. And I really was looking forward to an adventure like that internationally, so all the puzzle pieces fit together nicely. That made me decide to go. Patrick was then responsible for the European operations — most of the employees and most of the customers — to keep it running here, and I moved to New York to build up a team together with the VP of sales that we hired in New York.

Nick: A lot of SaaS companies in the Dutch or European ecosystem are thinking of attacking the US market. What are your learnings — how hard is it to get started?

Erwin: I can write a whole book about this. Let’s look at it from a personal and a professional perspective. Personally, I just packed two suitcases and went to New York — I’d never been there before, it was the first time, sight unseen, two suitcases. Just before moving we hired a VP of sales — together with Connected Capital, Patrick and myself, we did an extensive interview round to find the VP of sales, because I don’t have a network in the US, I don’t understand the culture. That VP of sales actually made us choose New York; he found the office in the New York area. The idea — and the business plan we created with Connected Capital — was to build a team of SDRs, sales development, that reaches out to customers, tries to get meetings, and then shows the product. So we hired about four people in the beginning and started reaching out to the market. But that hiring process — I moved in August, the team was complete in November, December — in that time you’re really working on onboarding. You have some meetings, but you don’t have any revenue coming in, and we didn’t have any customers at that time.

Nick: So your focus was full on hiring a team, and they would go to market?

Erwin: Correct. And I would be there as a founder to support the team during calls, when I can make a difference. When the new year started, you create goals — where do you want to be with the MRR in that specific market — because the costs are pretty high. Salaries are quite high, and next to salaries you have health benefits, which are quite costly as well. The running cost there, with five people and myself and an office, was about 100K a month — quite a lot of money. So it was: we need to get to 100K MRR, because then you get to some form of break-even. That cost much longer than anticipated. The problem we ran into is that we didn’t really have product-market fit yet in the US. We had a great product here and a lot of customers, recognizable brands that people in the US would know — like McDonald’s, IKEA, many more — but there were certain items in our value proposition and product offering that weren’t exactly correct for the US. So we had a whole team that cost a lot every month, but every time they got almost the same type of feedback, and we didn’t really close new customers. It was very challenging. At some point we decided to change certain team members, to not have the risk that it was maybe the quality of the people, so we basically shuffled through two entire teams and had hardly any revenue — for about 16 months. In total that whole phase cost us about 1.8, 1.9 million, with not much revenue against it. So I decided, together with Patrick and Connected Capital, to let go a lot of people, and I started doing it myself.

Nick: And in that moment you learned quite a bit?

Erwin: When I started reaching out to customers and talking to them directly — much more than before in a supporting role — I started finding certain trends of missing items in our product that stopped us from being successful. One of the things I started doing was recording all my calls, then sharing them with my product team, with Patrick, and even some snippets with investors — to show: the opportunity is here, but we need to make changes to our value proposition and our product. If I summarize it, the main difference is in the area of legal and compliance. Here in Europe, if you’re a part-time worker in a supermarket and you decide to install an app on your phone, and your employer sends you company news and you read it and give a like, it’s totally fine. In the US, however, the legal teams see that as a risk, because now that hourly, part-time worker is looking at a company-facilitated channel, reading news in his or her own time — and officially that employer needs to pay for that time spent. So we found out: if we don’t have certain mechanisms in our product to prevent that, or at least protect the employer, we won’t be able to sell this product. We made those changes, and then I kept reaching out and talking to more and more prospects, and slowly started to get customers on board.

Nick: What did you change, actually?

Erwin: It was basically some form of a pop-up in our app that says: “hey, hourly worker, be aware you’re using this app now more than two minutes today — please accept this notice and agree that you cannot ask for compensation for using this app any further.” Just to protect the employer. Once we had that, I started seeing some customers sign up. It cost me, personally — because I didn’t have a team at that time anymore — about a year, maybe a little over a year, to get to a million ARR, profitable, because the costs were very low. It was just myself, an office, and some running costs. I went to events where I spoke on stage. Then when we had about 1 million ARR, I saw: okay, now it seems we have product-market fit, we have good American customers, they like the product, they renew. Now I’m going to build up a team again, step by step. The first hire was an SDR, and that worked out brilliantly, because we already had a running business.

Nick: If you would do it again, what would you do differently?

Erwin: I would not hire a big team. I would go there myself as a founder — it’s extremely important that you are there. We Dutch are quite good at and able to pivot, listen, adapt, change how you position yourself. As a founder I also have much more say in how the product roadmap could be changed. If you have a new hire over there who doesn’t have the years of previous experience and doesn’t know all the associates and employees in Amsterdam, where the biggest part of the company was, it’s very difficult to get things changed. So that would be my first and foremost advice: as a founder you need to be there, in that market, to really understand it, feel it, be connected with your customers and prospects and what they say. I would still record all my calls — now all our commercial calls are recorded, so we can learn collectively from it across departments. And I would hire maybe one employee, an SDR, in the early days, when the costs are not that high. An SDR can book meetings that you do together, so you get in front of customers, learn those trends, and adapt. Once you get to some form of revenue — half a million or a million ARR, however it works in your business model — then you scale up, and Americans have a tremendous quality of accelerating and speeding it up.

“As a founder you need to be there, in that market, to really understand it, feel it, be connected with your customers and prospects and what they say.”

Nick: So you moved two suitcases to the US, you had an office, an apartment, and 16 months of no success. How did you experience that period?

Erwin: Extremely tough, because of course there’s also pressure — from investors, from the management team here. There’s so much pressure, like the US needs to succeed. Maybe I put the most pressure of all on myself. Personally, I even saw my blood pressure was higher than before — there was really a form of stress in my body. Sometimes I had days with 16 or 18 Zoom calls back to back to back, because it was not an option to fail. I put that on myself, and that was very difficult.

Nick: Did you ever think of quitting?

Erwin: There was a moment, a couple of months before I reached that 1 million ARR. I remember it very well. I was here in the Netherlands for a couple of days, and Patrick and I had a conversation, and I said: I just don’t get it. I work so hard, I push so hard, and there’s so little that comes back for it — almost no reward. For a long time it was like 200 or 300K ARR, and I was working on three or four deals very extensively, and they all signed up with us, and that was when we jumped from 300,000 to a million. But in that moment, just before that happened, I recall that conversation with Patrick: so tough, and almost no reward, what am I doing? I’m happy that I pushed forward for another couple of months, and I did win those deals. If that hadn’t happened, I don’t know — maybe it wouldn’t have been a success.

Nick: How did those conversations go with your investors and your co-founder, during a period of no rewards? Do you have an example of how such a briefing call goes?

Erwin: Because of the lack of results, we increased the cadence of meetings. It was always monthly, and then we made it bi-weekly, specific to address the US going concern — as a way for me to ask input from Patrick and the investors on things that are happening, but also as a form of report: what have we been doing, what customers have we been talking to. As I mentioned, I sometimes created recording snippets just to show investors, so they can see it firsthand — don’t hear it from me, but see in the recording how a customer responds to a certain feature. I had those four big deals lined up and shared a couple of the recording snippets to show: it’s coming, we need to hold on a little bit more, give me a little more time. But after you ask that five or six or seven times, it becomes a bit annoying. Still, they kept trusting me that we were doing the right things, because I was extremely open and transparent in those bi-weekly update calls.

Nick: It seems you always had the gut feeling that it would work.

Erwin: Yes, because I also saw how customers responded to the product — that initial response: “oh, this is great, we can do this, this will solve issues we currently have.” The problem then was: how can we have those sponsors who really like this win that battle with their legal teams or their management teams? So we had to elevate how we do strategic, enterprise-type sales, and make those changes in the product. We even proactively shared: “your legal team probably sees an issue in this, but we’ve already come up with a solution — if you speak to your legal team, this is the ammunition you can use to win that discussion.” We really had to elevate how we sell and be more proactive. That conversion is very low in those moments, but once it’s a running business, I saw the conversions improve significantly.

Nick: You’ve sold millions in SaaS contracts — how do you elevate your own sales game?

Erwin: A couple of things. I started working very closely with the Dutch Consulate in New York. The Consulate helps startups and SaaS companies that want to expand to the US, more specifically to New York, either by organizing events or linking founders and entrepreneurs from the Netherlands with people like myself and others in the US. So I started doing quite a lot of speaking sessions during those events, and even had cohorts of startups come to our office. In those interactions I learned too — they learn from me, but I also learn from them, and that’s sometimes quite eye-opening. Next to that, I started reading more books about strategic sales and influence in sales — how do you work with one buyer and make them knowledgeable and powerful enough to sell it to other buyers that you’re not in the room with. So: reading books, and networking with other founders, sharing openly and transparently the challenges I have, so I can hear theirs and we can learn together.

Nick: A lot of people will be in a similar situation, or earlier-stage, thinking “I want to sell bigger deals” or “I want to break into the US.” When did you come back to Amsterdam?

Erwin: About nine months ago, so the middle of last year.

Nick: Was it after business milestones or personal milestones?

Erwin: A combination. It was a personal decision, because most of my family and friends are here, and at some point you start missing all the special occasions — weddings, birthdays, births of children. You can almost not be there anymore, and it felt like friends and family were sliding a little bit away. So I felt: if I don’t move around the five-year mark, I’ll probably never move back.

Nick: And how does your personal life look now?

Erwin: Very well. Married, we live in Amsterdam, out west in the Da Costa area. We spend our time in Amsterdam and around, and we really enjoy it. The weather, maybe not so much as New York, but in general the quality of life here is good. In New York as well — but after five years living in Manhattan, next to Central Park, with the office there too, it is extremely busy. In Amsterdam, it’s funny, if I tell people here there’s almost no people, almost no traffic, it’s so quiet and relaxed — people declare me crazy, but that’s how I feel coming from New York.

Nick: And what is your role now back at Speakap?

Erwin: Patrick is still running the business as the CEO. As co-founders, I’m very focused on the commercial side of the business — I support sales, customer success, and also product, to bring back what I hear from customers and prospects to inform roadmap priorities. And a big chunk of my work is supporting the US team. So it’s really on the commercial side.

Nick: I’ve learned how you started, why you started, your challenges, what you learned going to the US and coming back. What drives you, and has driven you all the time?

Erwin: I really get my drive when I speak to customers — maybe that’s a cliché, because I’m also on the commercial side. But Patrick and I started this with an idea during a part-time job many years ago, and now we work for 700 companies in the world, some with tens of thousands of employees. So we have almost a million frontliners who now have improved communication and engagement with their company. That’s quite rewarding. And during those customer calls, to see that it clicks, that the customer gets excited — “I can use it for this use case, and that use case” — that gives me a lot of energy. In the US that also pulled me through it: even though it was one time a yes and, in the beginning, a hundred times a no, that one time yes is where I drew my energy, my drive and my perseverance from.

Nick: And that still drives you?

Erwin: Yes. That’s why I really want to be on the forefront of things at Speakap — I want to talk with customers and prospects, that’s where I derive my energy from. Not so much managing people — other people are much better at being a manager of a department. I really want to be on the forefront and be a doer.

Nick: And what does the future look like for you and for Speakap?

Erwin: I hinted at it earlier — some of the investors in Speakap have been in there for quite some time, so at some point I think we’re working towards an exit, which is quite logical. Nothing concrete or no specific direction yet, but I think inevitably that will be happening. Until then, we just give it 100% every day and build as much value as we can.

Nick: What advice would you give people who have a great idea and want to build a technology business — where to start?

Erwin: I would say start small. It doesn’t have to be — nowadays maybe less so than a year and a half ago, and a couple of years before that — only about raising money, raising money, raising money. It’s much more about how you can make a return on that money. If you raise a million, how can you make that worth two million? That is the true challenge. It’s difficult to raise money, obviously, but it’s much more difficult to make a return on it. So don’t just stare in the direction of “raise, raise, raise.” You can sometimes make a lot of impact without too much — be that bootstrapped, early-days Speakap that was called Supermarkt Centrale. That’s where Patrick and I really created the fundament of our vision, and therefore the fundament of Speakap. The investment at that time was, I think, 30,000 of our own savings, and that’s it.

Nick: And looking at your journey now, what would you advise people who are in a struggling phase? I learned from you that you needed just a little confirmation that you were on the right path, and you forget all the no’s you heard before that. Besides perseverance — which is very important — can you learn that, or is it a personality trait?

Erwin: Of course I had those doubts, and I got the pressure from Europe. In those moments I decided to put aside my ego and just share anything that I do — any call is recorded and anyone in the company can see it. I’m the founder, I record my own calls. There’s quite a bias on that — a lot of people are not very happy with “oh, all my calls are recorded, what are you going to do with that?” I just got over that ego issue and recorded everything, and was extremely transparent in what I do, so that other people — they’ll never understand it fully like you do, but they can understand what you’re going through and see that we’re on the right track.

Nick: So it’s sharing and being extremely vulnerable to feedback, also on your own work?

Erwin: Yes, and also asking for feedback. I created snippets and shared them with Connected Capital — here are five or six examples, please give me feedback, however you feel it is. I will not be offended, I will not be sensitive. I want to learn — if I have a blind spot, point me in that direction.

Nick: I love that. Is there anything in your early days, your youth, or your hobbies where that perseverance was challenged as well?

Erwin: Both my parents were entrepreneurs as well. I never did top sport or something that could be an example. But some of the norms and values that I have I take from them, and I guess perseverance is also there. I remember my father sometimes in the evenings still had to make quotes for customers — he had his own painting company, painting houses and stuff, which is hard physical work. During the day you work hard, and then in the evening you also need to do some paperwork to acquire new customers. So I saw that hard work is sometimes needed to become successful, and in return I also saw that we could go on vacation quite a bit and go out for dinner, compared with maybe other kids in the same area whose parents didn’t have their own company. A different situation.

Nick: More personally, how do you keep a good balance with your work life?

Erwin: My recipe is: I do not have a MacBook at home — I keep it at the office, the same as I did in New York. I wake up and often go do an exercise in the gym, a cycling class, quite an intense workout, and then immediately go to the office. I work with a lot of focus during the day, and then if it’s 6 or 7 p.m. and my work is done, I close my MacBook, bike or walk home, and at night I don’t work. In the weekends I don’t work either.

Nick: That’s a good one — work out, and have very good rules with yourself about when you work and don’t. Discipline. And I wouldn’t be the founder of a recruiting agency if I didn’t ask about your hiring learnings and challenges. What is your vision on hiring, and how have you hired the right people for your business?

Erwin: It’s always tough, especially in a different culture. I don’t really have a recipe for success that avoids all failures — that’s impossible. One of the things I learned hiring people in the US is that we typically do three interviews, but we also do an open-ended case specific to that job role — it could be three items in that case the person needs to prepare and present to multiple people at Speakap. When it’s open-ended enough, you can really see the quality of a person, especially during the conversation when you discuss that case and have follow-up questions — you can go deeper and deeper. We now also inherit that in Europe. At first we didn’t do case studies, and that’s also a time when I made mistakes with hiring.

Nick: Do you prefer to hire people who can do the job right away, or people on culture and potential?

Erwin: The latter.

Nick: And what is that cultural fit?

Erwin: We have values — smart, fun, trust. Those are the three values we have at Speakap, and we look through that lens whether people fit our culture. Sometimes that’s subjective, of course, but we try to do it as much as we can.

Nick: Does it get more difficult as you grow the team?

Erwin: We have at least 30 or 40 nationalities across 85 employees, so it’s extremely diverse, and I think that creates a fantastic culture. I wouldn’t say fitting new hires in is more difficult than in the early days — maybe it even becomes a bit easier, because you have established teams. It’s not a one-person team anymore, it’s two, three, four people, so the additional hire you can offset to the current people to see if it fits. Finding the talent is of course very tough — I don’t have to tell you that — but that’s ongoing.

Nick: How do you do that now?

Erwin: We use quite a lot of LinkedIn and personal network, we have a kind of reward program internally, and we work with some recruitment agencies — like Nobel, of course, and others.

Nick: It’s been a great journey of discovery with you, Erwin — how you started a company basically from Supermarkt Centrale, almost like a student project, started a corporate career but jumped onto your entrepreneurial journey quite soon after, and learned a lot about how to grow in the US, how to feel in the US, and how to come back successfully. A great conversation, and I’m looking forward to sharing it with the SaaS community.

Erwin: I also enjoyed it, so thank you.

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.