Dutch YouTube show Over de vloer bij was the first programme ever to record at the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven, and it came to visit InSpace. Founder Jelle Engels gives a tour of the new headquarters on the tenth and top floor, and tells how the company grew from zero to over 500 clients in a single year. The episode is in Dutch.
A rocket on the High Tech Campus
The InSpace rocket hangs on the facade, on the campus that is also home to companies like ASML. You do not get in easily: only companies working on hardware or software technology are admitted. “I am very proud that we were let in, especially for a guy without a degree”, says Jelle. Five months before the recording the floor was still an empty shell; now it is the home base of the Dutch team, right at the top, “because then you are truly in space”.
Sixty-plus people, three offices
InSpace is sixteen months old and the software has been live for almost a year, come September. The team now counts more than sixty people, spread across offices at the High Tech Campus, in the centre of Antwerp and in Cologne, with expansion to the United States, Ireland and the United Kingdom in preparation. Notably, everything happens in-house, from development to marketing. “We are building something that has not been built before and we want control over what we build. We are building a rocket and that rocket has to fly.”
From billing hours to software
InSpace started as a traditional agency billing hours to its clients. When ChatGPT broke through, Jelle and co-founders Wouter (technical) and Martijn (managing director) decided to change course: the service became a product. A scalable, data-driven software product with an intelligence layer that implements an SEO strategy on the client’s domain. When Google changes the rules with a core update, InSpace adjusts the rules of the software and the change is rolled out to every client at once.
Existing clients were called with the new proposition. The result: in many cases eighty percent cheaper. A client who used to pay ten thousand euros a month in hours now pays a fraction of that for the same output.
Product first, not sales first
InSpace was deliberately built product-first. “If our product delivers value to that entrepreneur, that entrepreneur is happy and stays a client”, says Jelle. He calls customer success perhaps the most important role in the company: everyone has to be happy. The approach works: where Jelle was called crazy at launch, InSpace signed around ten three-year contracts in the past month.
The moonshot: 50,000 companies by 2031
The big goal is clear: by 2031 InSpace wants to help 50,000 SMBs worldwide, with software that makes the marketing world more transparent. And the slogan that goes with it was born at the Belgian office: “The sky is the limit, unless you go InSpace.”
