Startup Studio Spotlight: Builders
Welcome back to another edition of our Startup Studio Spotlight series! We’re very excited to bring you another insider look into the startup studio world, told by some of the top startup studio founders around the world. In this spotlight, we spoke with Builders, a Rotterdam-based startup studio designed to build and grow technology companies from scratch, by bringing together bold ideas, seasoned co-founders, operational support, and investment capital.
Builders studio partners with seasoned founders to transform bold ideas into powerful software solutions. As such, they strive to build new technology companies that solve daily challenges for modern-day workforces and accelerate human capital, locally and around the globe.
Builders has played a key part in the creation and success of companies like:
Influentials is an end-to-end influencer marketing platform that lets brands work with influencers. It takes care of all the heavy lifting and enables companies to focus on running successful campaigns to grow their business.
IPS is a managed cloud platform provider for the creative industry. Providing world-class DevOps combined with the total freedom of control through their platform.
Obeyo is a smart living-as-a-service platform for co-living operators which integrates intelligent building features, with community tools and living services.
If this sounds interesting to you and you’d like to learn more about the ins and outs of the approach at Builders, stick around and take a look at our spotlight interview below!
What sets you apart from the rest of the startup studio space?
Builders combine technology and entrepreneurship to craft outstanding software companies that outlast the hype and add real value. We believe in creating complementary founding teams by partnering up with co-founders in business (CEO) and product (CTO). Based on our studio’s composition, our co-founders can work on the things they are best at from the earliest stage, and our studio fills in the gaps by offering all the essentials needed to eliminate pauses from the building processes. This way, we seamlessly work together to provide value to customers early on, develop a solid product-market fit, and quickly become leaders in the spaces we enter.
How has the startup studio model allowed you and your studio’s companies to navigate the pandemic?
Since our background in building online companies, we had most of the tools and processes already in place to switch to a remote-first working setup. Because of this, our studio team and ventures adapted exceptionally well to the transition to working from home.
This smooth transition made us prioritize people and culture early on, making it a lot easier for our ventures to navigate these weird times. In close collaboration with our venture teams, we shifted gears according to the pandemic’s impact on portfolio companies. For instance, one of our companies in the online marketing space saw ad-spend tumble down, which required a complete change of strategy in a matter of days.
These challenging times also spark new opportunities. The fundamental shift in the way we work requires new ways of thinking and approaches to getting things done. At Builders, we’re continuously developing new business opportunities to tackle the challenges surrounding this new reality. The way we design and operate our studio gives us the needed edge to help us get at the forefront of building the remarkable technology companies of tomorrow.
How would you describe your studio’s approach to developing new ideas?
We are on a journey to build a universe of meaningful companies for the future of living and work. To select the best ideas, we conduct extensive research into market verticals and identify the focus trends relevant to our studio scope. Additionally, we engage external experts in the selected market to confirm our views with their perspectives. After identifying key focus trends, we connect with promising entrepreneurs and identify relevant business opportunities within a specific vertical. We do this by hosting ideation workshops together with our team, market experts and entrepreneurs from our network. As the last step, we host design sprints with the most promising entrepreneurs and validate the selected business opportunities. By the end of this process, we establish the fundamental blocks for our next venture, and we are ready to start our journey with a new founding team.
The essence of our validation process is to laser beam assumptions early, move forward with each success and keep iterating fast. Our approach to validation is data-driven, meaning that the more promising data we find, the more efforts we will invest. We believe in validating through real, non-biased insights by conducting lean experiments, whether via landing pages, MVPs or other proven validation methods.
What services do you offer your startups?
Builders studio leadership has 70+ years of experience building software companies. Our team of seasoned executors and operators supports ventures with what they need, whenever they need it — from operational support to investment capital. We offer every service needed to let our co-founders focus on building the product and executing sales. A selection of our services includes company formation, product management, branding, growth, operations, and talent.
How do you source your clients, and how do you decide which ideas to take into your studio for further development?
We source and match co-founders with business ideas from a very early stage. We partner up with experienced founders and c-level executives inside startups and scale-ups with proven track records in specific market verticals.
We get potential founders involved in our ideation and validation process through ideation workshops and design sprint weeks to find the right founder-opportunity fit. We use a mix of inbound and outbound recruitment tactics to get in touch with our future founders.
In collaboration with our network of market experts and by boosting the personal brand of our co-founders, we position ourselves as thought leaders in the space. This creates a natural flow of potential customers on top of our product-led growth strategy.
We also activate founders using the following activities:
● We host a founder community called House of Founders.
● We stay in touch with founders through our founder CRM.
● We send out personalized (love) letters to our future co-founders.
What does the studio’s level of involvement look like after the business has launched?
In the end, the numbers and added value all have to make sense. To ensure interests are aligned, and we become equal partners with our co-founders. The commitment to our ventures is related to the phase in our stage-gate venture building model. Our studio team is hands-on involved in building and launching the company in the early days. Later in the process, we gradually add people to the founding team to replace our role as a studio. After we are preparing our company for a spin-out, our involvement changes to a more strategic manner.
At the core of our studio lies our venture playbook, which gathers all the relevant knowledge and best practices derived from decades of operator experience. This continuously evolving playbook is designed to accelerate the progress of our ventures at every step of the journey. Our founders use this playbook to keep momentum and focus on adding value and growth instead of executing mundane tasks.
What unique benefits does the startup studio model provide entrepreneurs?
● Being surrounded by like-minded, driven individuals.
● Proven tools and processes to gain insights and optimize performance from day one.
● Establishing the right partners to build a company with.
● Hands-on operational support from experienced startup operators.
● Lots of flexibility to focus on things that matter instead of wasting time on stuff that is already figured out.
● Working on pre-validated business ideas, something that is already tested for viability, feasibility, and desirability.
● With operational and capital support, moving faster while getting farther. ● Skipping steps in the fundraising process, saving time/creating focus. With this upside, building a great product with a better entry into the market.
Networked knowledge
An active network of hundreds of founders & investors, providing ventures access to unprecedented amounts of operator knowledge to scale at 2x the pace.
Shared resources, shared purpose
Day zero support ensures critical mass for every new concept from the first spark.
Moving faster while getting farther
Gaining lots of flexibility to focus on things that matter instead of wasting time on stuff that is already figured out.
Skipping steps in the fundraising process
Growth capital to accelerate our developments is just one phone call away.
Founder-opportunity fit
Ensuring that founders tackle the right type of business opportunities that fit their skills and passions.
What is the biggest trend/shift you see happening within the startup studio industry?
● Studio fund structures are becoming standardized.
● Studios are entering specific niche markets with industry veterans.
● New studio verticals are popping up, such as (social) impact and IoT.
● Big exit events and IPOs from studio-born companies (Snowflake, Dollar Share Club, Giphy) validate the model as a whole and elevate the studio space to the next level.
Thank you for reading this spotlight feature edition! We’d like to thank the team at Builders for taking the time to speak with us and provide some amazing insights about the startup studio space and their upcoming projects. Before you leave, make sure to take a look at the leadership team that takes part of Builders, and make sure to check out other startup studio spotlights in our blog!
Leadership team
Michael van Lier, Managing Director
Michael is the founder and Managing Director at Builders. His responsibilities include investor relations, funding, legal, company formation, and ideation.
Michael is an entrepreneur, innovator, and tech evangelist dedicated to empowering the next wave of tech entrepreneurship. He has been founding tech companies for two decades. Michael started his first online company in 2000, at 16 years old. Later, he founded and exited multiple software and cloud-oriented companies, which he grew by acquisition and organic growth. Michael spent his career at the intersection of cloud hosting, tech startups, software consulting, and early-stage investing.
Sharon Klaver, Managing Director
Sharon is a Managing Director and partner at Builders. Her responsibilities include finance, operations, HR & talent, growth, design, and branding.
Sharon is an entrepreneur at heart dedicated to bringing together like-minded people to build value-driven software companies on a global scale. Sharon founded her first online company when she was 16 years old. Later, she founded, funded and managed several software companies. Throughout her career in fashion and software, Sharon has developed in-depth operational and financial leadership experience.
Robbert van Geldrop, Director of Product
Robbert is a Director of Product at Builders. His responsibilities include venture validation, portfolio management and product management. As an entrepreneur, software developer and active angel investor, he is passionate about everything SaaS, metrics and Lean Startup.
Robbert van Geldrop is an entrepreneur and software developer who wrote his first lines of codes on an Atari ST when he was eight years old. He founded his first software company at the age of 19. Robbert is also an angel investor in multiple fast-growing SaaS and e-commerce startups. Robbert is a Lean Startup adept of the first hour and has coached hundreds of entrepreneurs in various incubation and acceleration programs across Europe on his hands-on experience regarding experimentation at the early stages of new ventures.
For more information, visit http://builders.studio/
