Never a better time than now: team.blue’s Jonas Dhaenens and his Founder’s journey
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How did Jonas start his first company at age 16 and what problem was he trying to solve?
To be honest, I think Twenty years ago. It was maybe harder because now what I see around me is there is so much seed capital, so much ventures, so much cool ecosystems where people can just start working together with other cool ecosystems and you can always make it a financial play, but I focused always to integrate really good uh people, but definitely also the technology underneath it.
Hello everyone and welcome to Orbit, the AG podcast series where we speak to leaders and innovators from across the software and technology ecosystem to discuss the key trends changing how we all do business. Today I'm joined by Jonas Danens, the CEO of TeamBlue. Team Blue is a leading digital enabler for SMEs and entrepreneurs. Its goal is to shape technology and to empower SMEs and entrepreneurs with innovative digital services. Jonas is a true tech entrepreneur and his business, Team Blue, is now at the heart of helping other entrepreneurs get started. So Jonas, this is probably a good place to start. Um, maybe tell us a bit more about how you got started in in business and and a bit more about Team Blue.
Thank you, Ross. So actually I started the business at the age of 16, at the moment already twenty-two years ago. So it's been ages. But uh I started the business uh called Combel in Belgium and I just wanted to start a business of my own. My goal actually was always to start a business where I have a scalable business model and something where it's connected also to the internet. I want to help also SMEs and I wanted to help SMEs getting online. And actually I found out at the age of sixteen and and ninety nine that There was almost nobody doing what I had the idea to do, and just registering domain names, uh getting SMEs online in Belgium. It was really difficult or it was actually an extreme hassle.
Uh you needed to uh fill in some forms, uh send out a facts.
What challenges did Jonas face when bootstrapping Combell and how did he achieve early cash‑flow sustainability?
or a uh specific letter to a professor in uh in Leuven. So I just wanted to facilitate this process to easen up that process for a lot of SMEs who just wanted to be online and just wanted to be an email address uh and and having space for their own website. So that's where I actually started. But I just wanted to not build a technical thing about it i just wanted to build a real business about it so i always dreamed about making a big business out of this and uh and definitely with subscriptions with with more software or uh infrastructure you can do this and uh so i always focused on more standardization in our platform to make sure that we really get a scalable platform
How did Team Blue, which is now a sizable European business, grew from from Camel?
Yeah, so actually Campbell started in ninety nine uh as a as a just a Belgian player, and then step by step it grew uh organically quite fast. In my space, there were a lot of people that started at my same age in ninety nine, two thousand, two thousand and one, and that always were more technical people and less business people. So they just grew their business until the phase that they needed to hire people, needed to professionalize sometimes, and and sometimes they hired already people or four or five or six. But that was a bit the the struggle with them because they were more from the technical side than from the business side. Combell actually grew quite fast in the in the beginning. I didn't actually had any additional extra capital
It was 99 until 2005. So it was not uh the time that a lot of external capital was available and it was also not so much known that you need to raise capital. Uh so I just yeah bootstrapped it from uh from my own. Uh and luckily I I got uh yearly payments of my clients. So I was able to build out that sustainable cash flow profile from uh from Cobbel and I did that. Actually until uh two thousand uh two thousand and ten in in a small stage and then uh from two thousand and ten to two thousand and fourteen uh a little bit si more sizable within Belgium. But Next to buying companies and making sure that that they were integrated. I always kept that it was important to
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
How did Jonas start his first company at age 16 and what problem was he trying to solve?
0:02–1:55
2
What challenges did Jonas face when bootstrapping Combell and how did he achieve early cash‑flow sustainability?
1:55–4:27
3
How did Combell evolve from a local Belgian startup into the pan‑European platform Team.blue?
4:27–7:05
4
Why did Team.blue decide to partner with Hg Capital and rebrand, and what was the strategic aim behind the merger?
7:05–9:17
5
What does Jonas look for when evaluating founding teams for new investments?
9:17–11:11
6
Why does Jonas believe today’s ecosystem makes it easier to launch a tech company compared to 20 years ago?
11:11–12:45
7
How does the Benelux region support SaaS and B2B startups, and why is it a strong launchpad for entrepreneurs?
12:45–13:35
8
What final advice does Jonas give to aspiring entrepreneurs about scaling, profitability, and timing?
13:35–13:40
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