Founders with Pek

The episode delivers a handful of genuinely useful operational nuggets - AppSumo as a paid marketing channel, trial gamification tied to setup completion, and the 120-Zap automation stack - but these are buried under substantial biographical filler, generic founding-story narration, and well-worn startup platitudes about listening in sales.

“we have 120 zaps or so running at all times to automate lots of things in our company”

“If you set the software up perfectly, you get 30 days, which is a great motivator for people to get set up well”

The reframe of an AppSumo lifetime deal as 'getting paid to do marketing' is a legitimately non-obvious way to think about a famously bad-looking unit-economics deal, and the trial-extension-as-gamification mechanic is distinctive; otherwise the episode leans on standard 'do sales yourself first' and 'automate routine work' advice that circulates widely.

“You get paid to do marketing, then it is actually a good deal”

“sales is not really that hard. It's just about listening very well to people”

Jeroen is a genuine founder-practitioner who has run Salesflare for eight years, navigated European funding routes, and made real operational decisions at scale; the company is modest in size (7 people, ~2,000 customers) but he speaks from direct experience rather than as a thought-leader or career podcaster.

“We've been seven now for five years. We are big believers of automation.”

“I would do everything from the business development to the sales, the demos, the customer success, everything”

The episode is consistently anchored in real numbers: AppSumo's 70% cut and 6,000 sign-ups in three weeks, 120 active Zaps, a 50k government grant, a 100k bank loan, Product Hunt hitting 700 upvotes day one, and a 20-30 day average sales cycle - these specifics meaningfully raise the evidential quality above average.

“We had I think around 6,000 companies signing up in a span of three weeks”

“back in the day it was 70%”

The host asks broad, unpressured prompts ('What worked? What didn't work?'), spends notable time on family background and personal interests irrelevant to B2B operators, and rarely follows up to probe a claim or introduce productive tension; the Groupon analogy is a reasonable contextual addition but the overall interview feels like a friendly chat rather than a probing conversation.

“So tell us what, what worked? You know, what's been working? You know, any lessons learned there? What didn't work? What went. What? Yeah, what went well? What didn't go well?”

“Tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, maybe your family, family life and. Yeah. And personal interests.”