Scaling a SaaS to €35M ARR: 3 Mistakes I'd Never Repeat

0:00Okay, so I want to talk to you about three mistakes I made while growing my business and also selling it. Um First, I want to give you a bit of context. So, first the I in the sense, that's me, almost the same clothing. I think different Apple Watch. But Tim Van de Casteele, um I'm a technical co-founder, started the business 10 years ago. So, the second part in that, the business, the business that I started was called

0:25Silverfin. I would be very surprised if you know it. Maybe the Belgians, I'm also from Belgium. The Belgians, Marie over there. But it was software as a service for accounting firms. I grew it to 35 million ARR when I actually left the business, sold it a bit earlier, and I sold it for 300 million according to public sources because I can't say because I signed an NDA, obviously. But ballpark figure,

0:49approximately right. So, I want to tell you about three mistakes I made. The mistakes are a bit random, they're not ordered to be clear on that. But they're three random mistakes that I made that I don't want you to make or if you make them, at least I can say I told you so. Um first mistake, and I took a bit of inspiration in the open source world, and that's me being benevolent dictator. And I'm using it a bit freely, but being a benevolent dictator, what do I mean by that? I mean

1:19that I use people as tool. So, most of you are founders here. That means that you think you know it better. At least I did. So, that means when I say jump, you jump and and you execute. And that's a great feeling because I'm super efficient. I can just like do whatever I think I want to do, it's my gut feeling. And at the same time, I feel very much in control because people

1:44just do whatever I say they do. Okay. So, I feel very much in control. And that it works. I mean, I've done it way too long, that's the mistake, but it works very much because you can really drive the company wherever you want to do it. And with five people, 10 people maybe, it does work. But in the end, you're creating a huge bottleneck. Uh you yourself are the bottleneck. We were actually two benevolent dictators, however that works. Um but we were creating bottleneck. And the thing is that if you tell people to do something, and they do it, they execute on it, they might do it well, but they start to

2:23come up reasons. If you don't explain why, they start to come up with reasons. And spoiler, mostly they're the wrong reasons. So, they start to make all these micro decisions, which in the end the company is making micro decisions. They start making these decisions and the wrong ones for the wrong reasons, so they're making the wrong decisions. It also creates a disconnection from the business. If you just have to execute, if something is wrong, all the blame is to the dictator, not to you. So, it creates this big disconnect. So, my

2:50answer to that is empower people early. And that's pretty easy. It's pretty obvious. Basically, most my mistakes are pretty obvious. Um but empowering people early means that you write something down, you write down your principle, your guardrails, but then you you have the courage, you're brave to actually let them make decisions. Make people make decisions. And And the earlier you do it, maybe the smaller the decisions that they can make. They can't run with their head into the wall, but it gives them more skin in the game, and it actually

3:23It actually allows for better decisions. Because again, if people can make the decisions and the people closer to the problem make the decisions, they will make bit better decisions almost by definition. Better than the decisions you would have made as your benevolent dictator. All right. Second mistake. Not thinking about culture. And that's something also again super super obvious. It has been already talked about quite a few times here. Um culture

3:49I'm an engineer. I'm a technical guy. And for me, people were saying, "Oh, culture, you write it down, and you put it on posters or whatever." These hollow words, I didn't believe in that. I didn't like that. For me, it was like, "Culture is what's practiced, right? Culture is you lead by example, and and you do, and people will see." And again, that's true to a certain extent, but it translates badly. So, we had offices in in different regions. For example, an

4:19office in the UK, we had remote people. If you don't write things down, then it's very hard to translate that behavior. If If you have a retreat, like how do people know how to behave in person if they only have met you remotely? At the same time, kind of a recurring theme, if something is not written down, like people will hear what they want to

4:37hear. You'd be surprised if you have a conversation and people agree with you how many times is you have to if you actually write it down, there's actually quite a huge disagreement. So, my fix for this is just write down a one-pager. You can follow a certain framework or whatever, but even just writing down what you think the culture is, that makes a huge difference. If you're with two founders, you'd be amazed if you actually try to do some wordsmithing where you actually differ. So, if you write it down, only that process already makes you actually

5:11think about it. But at the same time, it gives you something to actually align with other people. All right. Mistake number three, the outsider's glow. I asked GPT what it's called. I don't know. It's probably not an actual thing, but to me, you're building a company, and you get a lot of senior people, maybe some juniors, and and you start building a

5:34team. You have five people, 10 people. And there's a certain moment in time that you look and you look towards management, maybe leadership team, and you see that you don't have the skill in house. Now, how my mind works is you start to look outside and you look for experienced people because I don't want

5:51those mistakes on my payroll, right? Like, let somebody else pay for it and I'll just reap the benefits of that. At the same time, like looking at experienced people, it's it's a bit comfortable. It's a bit lazy because you don't have to make a bet. Like, you see on a CV, "Oh, this person

6:07has already done that specific thing. Let's just um take that person and use it." And even if I was wrong, like they probably lied on their CV, it's not on me. So, with outsiders, we have the tendency to actually be more hopeful. Um so, we we give them the benefit of the doubt. But, internal people for one need career progress. So, if you put in leadership team or or somebody else on top of them, like they're "What the hell is this about? Uh what is my next step?" At the same time, internal people, they have a they're way more committed and way more loyal than anybody externally. Like, it's

6:45impossible for somebody that hasn't joined your company before to be already loyal to it. So, in that sense, they have a head start that somebody that anybody actually externally can't even achieve. So, my learning was to give internal people the benefit of the doubt way more than outsiders. Um and the thing is, yes, it you make a personal investment and a personal bet, so you do take a risk, a way bigger risk on a person than you would do internally. But, we've made the mistake of installing a leadership team and basically then firing everybody, trying that again, and eventually realizing that we actually had to promote people

7:20internally. Our first employee, um who started with customer success, we put somebody on top of that, fired that person, put somebody on top of that, fired that person, in the end to realize actually that he was the person that we would should have put our faith in. And then actually he um is the person now,

7:36for example, leading our biggest market. Now, these are three random mistakes, but uh maybe obvious to you, definitely not obvious to me, definitely not while making them. There were also things that I would do again, things I do think that we did successfully and I've had a few here and I'll just go down the list, but I want to highlight one thing because it was also highlighted in one of the conversations here before and that's I taking some secondary. So secondary, if you're not familiar with the term, is if you sell some sales along the process and just like not taking even but just giving selling equity to somebody else

8:15and seven years in I think we were doing around 14 million ARR then. So a sizable business and at that moment in time we did have another private equity fund actually buying into us. They had a certain amount because we didn't want to sell our shares like we did believe, but now I'm [snorts] not such a good poker player like Omar so I thought let's take some chips off the table. Um And so they said look we have this certain amount we want to invest 10% of our fund that we have that minimum. We dropped down that minimum a bit, but we said look that capital is not needed in

8:50the company. Can we do something? So we took some some money that definitely like it could pay off our mortgage. We didn't do that because the loan was sufficient enough that investing in ETFs or whatever would be better, but creating that cushion, creating knowing that whatever you do actually you are maybe not set for life, but definitely set that created a huge relief for me and my co-founder and at the same time definitely if you were two yeah, you might be in different stages in life. My co-founder has children, I don't. He had a need for a bit more liquidity, I didn't. I also didn't have

9:25the capabilities to offer him liquidity. So by taking that part parts some money off the table actually like the liquidity needs of different people, different co-founders, if you have a co-founder, definitely can be met more easily. Now, if you want to ask me more about these things, the other things that I would do again, I'd happily answer those. But, uh that's my conclusion. So, basically, what I want for you is to make your mistakes, to give a presentation about mistakes, to tell it to people, and watch them make the same mistakes again, because basically, if you don't make these mistakes, you won't learn from it

10:01anyway. Thank you very much. [applause]