From burnout to depression to creating a platform that improves employees well being with Jelle Houben from Binqy

Eric (00:02.611)
My guest today is Dutch startup founder Jelle Houben. He's the founder of Binky and their platform is designed to obtain relevant insights into it in employees well-being, which can then be used to build a healthier work environment. Binky currently has thousands of customers and they operate in the Netherlands and my cohost today is the one and only Buster Franken from Fruit Punch AI. Jelle, welcome to Innovators Can Laugh.

Buster (00:26.772)
Peace.

Jelle Houben (00:31.362)
Thank you, thank you so much. I'm very happy to be here.

Eric (00:36.063)
Yeah, no, I'm excited to have you here. Now let's get started with innovation because innovation is defined as can something that can be a new method. Maybe it's a new idea or a product. For example, Romanians are really good at new food concepts. I saw an advertisement. Yeah. I saw an advertisement the other day for a Mexican pizza, and this was a pizza with guacamole on top.

Buster, I think this is pretty crazy. I will never eat this. Would you ever eat something like that?

Buster (01:11.64)
I think I would try it. I always try to go for the craziest thing on the menu, which is kind of like a lame thing to say to a waitress, but yeah, it does give you some nice options. It does sound like something kind of American to do, like some sausage crust pizza or some Mexican pizza, but Romanians apparently, good on you.

Eric (01:32.543)
Yeah, no, they put corn on their pizza too. I don't know what is it with Romanians and pizza, but guacamole to me sounds disgusting. But on that note, when we talk about innovation and we talk about solutions to helping prevent burnout and improving well-being in the workplace, my question for you, Yela, is what sort of innovation does Binky provide employers?

Buster (01:36.7)
Hahaha.

Jelle Houben (01:57.638)
Ooh, that's a nice question. It does need some explanation, but I think the biggest innovation that we're really trying to build here is a very complete tool that allows organizations and users and teams to work on themselves and have the whole chain from prevention to follow up just in one tool, making it very accessible to prevent psychological absenteeism and also helping when necessary.

Yeah, and there's a lot of

Eric (02:29.431)
Why did you start this company? Yalla.

Jelle Houben (02:32.246)
So when?

Eric (02:34.783)
Why why? Like when was the light bulb moment that you said I need to create something like this

Jelle Houben (02:35.839)
Oh, why?

Jelle Houben (02:41.142)
Yeah, that's a little bit of a sad story actually. So one of my co-founders, Joris, a couple of years ago, one of his best friends, she got into a burnout. She didn't really get the right help at that point, didn't know where to go. Eventually this also led to a depression. Yeah, she went back to living to her parents. She got isolated a bit from her friends, family, and Joris also lost kind of the contact with her then.

until a couple months later when he received a call from her parents that she wasn't there anymore. So when Jor's and I met, he was still in the process of processing this. And this was the moment that we thought, yeah, we should really come up with something to help people actually prevent this. And that's when we started working on Bing.

Eric (03:27.063)
Wow.

Eric (03:30.391)
Wow. I imagine this was probably for one of those maybe big companies, like a consulting company or something like that, that she was working 80 plus hours a week.

Jelle Houben (03:40.356)
Um, not even. No, no.

Eric (03:41.447)
Do you know what kind of company? No.

Jelle Houben (03:44.266)
No, she was still a student at the time. So it's funny, we also work with students and we work with companies. But at that time she was a student and that's, yeah.

Buster (03:55.9)
really. Yeah. Yeah, I know, I know quite a few students that burned out at some points, kind of the, the kind of pressure that I think our generation experiences and Gen Z as well as is, is different in a way. Yeah.

Jelle Houben (04:12.536)
Mm.

Eric (04:14.907)
Yeah, I've never heard of such a thing of a student getting burnt out. Is this something that, when you say Gen Z, I mean, what do you think that could be? Could it be that there's just too many distractions maybe?

Jelle Houben (04:28.874)
Oh yeah, that's so super tough. There are so many reasons why this could happen. You see kind of spikes in burnout and stress during people's lives. And I think at this point for students or younger people, there's so much stress going on with also social media, but also the pressure is a lot higher now to perform quicker in your life. I'm not sure if it's because of ourselves or because of the society, but yeah, that's also what we really see.

the pressure is a lot higher.

Eric (05:01.151)
Yeah. I mean, when you have friends like Buster, who, uh, is such a remarkable, uh, you know, person achieving all these different things like security guard and, uh, paper boy and chemistry teacher and startup founder. I can understand that. So you got to get some loser friends that way you can feel better about yourself.

Jelle Houben (05:17.632)
in the past.

Buster (05:19.028)
I felt like a loser so much. You can always compare yourself to somebody that's doing it better, right? Like, I have felt a lot of these feelings myself. I don't know about you, Jelle, but yeah.

Jelle Houben (05:33.566)
No, I totally agree, yeah.

Eric (05:33.591)
Yeah. Okay.

Eric (05:38.067)
Okay, so you have this idea to launch this company. How did you get it launched? Did you, are you bootstrapping everything or did you get funding? And when, when did you launch this? Yalla.

Jelle Houben (05:48.298)
Yeah, also a nice question. So we actually started during the masters of entrepreneurship. Um, it was, uh, it's a really nice master, master here in Amsterdam where you can actually learn and already practice a bit of the entrepreneurial, uh, yeah, roads that we're going to follow. Um, and we started during a course, actually, it was called the, I'm not sure what it was called, but we were just supposed to set up a business and validate the idea, um, and we just started doing that for two months and then we realized it was quite a

nice and nice idea and the problem was really there. And at the end we could pitch against 30 other startups. And at that point we won the competition and we received a thousand euros to start the business. So that was really a nice start for us to get things going.

Buster (06:35.333)
Thanks.

Eric (06:39.564)
Nice.

Buster (06:39.624)
How many businesses come out of such a course? Is it just a winner or did other people have some crazy ideas as well that they continued with?

Jelle Houben (06:50.546)
Yeah, that's funny actually, because there were quite some nice ideas. But eventually you also see that it's not just the idea, it's also really the people behind it. If you're willing to invest all kinds of time and money in it. So I think a couple startups, they went on for a while, but they eventually stopped. So, yeah, eventually I think it's literally us or maybe one other company that came out of that year's master, at least.

Buster (07:17.388)
Oh, yeah. Commitment.

Eric (07:17.491)
Yep. So Yela, yeah. So last night I had our monthly innovators can laugh meetup where me and several other B2B podcasters get together and we discussed the various tactics that we try, but failed to grow our audience. For example, last season I posted a question and answer on Quora for each episode, but that failed to generate any sort of a real traffic or new listeners. My question for you is what tactics have you done?

that failed in getting traction for binky.

Jelle Houben (07:50.866)
Oh, that failed and getting traction. Um, so, um, yeah, that's, that's interesting, uh, because it's literally go it's going pretty well for Binky right now, but it's only started since September last year, uh, when we raised our, uh, seed rounds of investments. Um, and after that, when the investors really tried reaching out to people and we got some, yeah, online.

Buster (07:56.968)
Good one.

Buster (08:09.33)
Eh.

Jelle Houben (08:18.518)
Uh, visibility, it all increased rapidly, but before that it was just, yeah, we, we kept on calling, uh, every, every person we knew, or we were just looking for people on LinkedIn, uh, LinkedIn posts at two times a week, uh, going to events. Um, and yeah, it's hard to say if whether it really failed because it's, yeah, you just gotta keep going and at some point you're gonna find the point where it actually works, so I wouldn't say it's failed, uh, but

Buster (08:30.633)
Yeah.

Jelle Houben (08:46.766)
the first one and a half year were really hard because the tool wasn't really finished and we had to sell it already. So that's for us the main obstacle there. Yeah.

Buster (08:52.275)
Mm.

Buster (09:00.061)
That's the way to do it. What is the furthest you went in terms of an event? Did you have some crazy event that you went to hunt down a specific person at a specific company?

Jelle Houben (09:14.326)
No, this year I went to Medica, which was in Germany, all the way in Germany. Luckily we were invited to join. So it wasn't that expensive for us, but it was really nice to be there. And it was huge event. You might know it. I'm not sure. But yeah, we just went there to look at all kinds of potential customers, but also competitors.

Buster (09:21.725)
Yeah?

Jelle Houben (09:44.35)
all kinds of hardware and not software. So it was, uh, that was, that was quite a filled day. Actually, uh, it was, there were thousands of company, but companies, but none of them made sense for us to talk to it. So that was, that was interesting.

Eric (09:59.171)
Hehehe

Buster (09:59.481)
There you go.

Eric (10:02.691)
Okay. So what I think I heard is that some things that did work for you was outreach, calling everybody that you knew, the investors, also doing some outreach on your behalf and then also posting on LinkedIn a few times a week. Is that correct?

Jelle Houben (10:16.668)
Yeah. Quite basic.

Eric (10:18.995)
Okay. Cool. So some of the things that I do when I onboard like a new podcaster who joins my, my podcast network, I have them fill out a Google form. It has basic information about their podcasts. We then do like a 15 minute welcome, a call where I tell them about why I created the podcast network, what it's designed to do, how it works, what to expect when you onboard new clients.

What does that user experience look like for them? Yeah.

Jelle Houben (10:50.802)
Ooh, that's a tough one. So our onboarding process is quite elaborate or it's quite big. Because what we do is we measure the wellbeing of employees on a weekly basis. So it asks quite a lot from the employees. And if employees don't use the platform, they don't really see the use fit, but also the managers don't see the use fit and the organization doesn't either. So.

The whole company, Binky just lives on the participation and the engagement of the employees. So therefore we have quite a big onboarding process where we have several meetings with first the admins, so the head managers of the company, depending on the size of the company. Then we also have a meeting with all the team managers and then also with all the employees just to onboard them, educate them on the subject, yeah, teach them how the product works.

and make them fill in their first survey, for instance. Yeah.

Buster (11:53.86)
Yeah. Do you also provide masterclasses like on the different signs or how to talk to each other or stuff like that?

Jelle Houben (12:02.57)
Yeah, I like that question. That's something we're working on. We don't do it at the moment. So we, we so mainly focused on the technological part and we try to integrate as much with partners that are the expert in giving master classes or the experts in psychology, for instance, psychologists, trainers, coaches. Yeah.

Buster (12:23.676)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And a lot of people make use of that as well. Like kind of like the link to the psychologists. Like have you seen people sign up through that already?

Eric (12:26.519)
Okay.

Jelle Houben (12:34.334)
Yeah, that's a good one. So the funny thing is that there are quite some companies, you know, you have like company doctors, but also other big companies in the Netherlands or Europe, America, where they offer psychological sessions for all employees. You might know some names there. And their use is very low. So almost no one uses their, yeah, that servants who talk to a psychologist.

Buster (12:51.188)
Mm.

Jelle Houben (13:01.098)
But when we integrate with them, we create that much awareness among employees, and we help them reflect on their wellbeing that they actually think, hey, shit, something is not going really well, or this is a problem. Now I know what it is, and I feel like I can talk about it. And then we see a steep increase in the amount of meetings scheduled. So that's super interesting. Yeah.

Buster (13:27.163)
It's beautiful. Yeah. Well done.

Eric (13:29.547)
On the employees part, how much time and effort is required every week? Yalla, to do this.

Jelle Houben (13:35.946)
Very important one. So at this point, the survey, so it's a weekly survey and we send this to every employee through Slack or WhatsApp emails to make it as easy as possible. And then it literally takes you 10 to 20 seconds a week. And then based on your scores and your time, your interests, you can look into your own dashboards and personal feedback, advices, followups, action points, whatever you like. So you can invest as much time as you want, but it's.

At the base it just takes you 10 to 20 seconds.

Eric (14:09.611)
Yeah, I think everybody has 20 seconds. Yeah.

Buster (14:10.06)
Do you have a... Yeah, I was gonna say do you have a startup version as well? Maybe I want to do this with my team actually. It's pretty cool.

Jelle Houben (14:12.087)
Ha ha.

Jelle Houben (14:18.782)
Always. Yeah. Feel free, man. That's we, we start off the, yeah, we have customers with only 15 employees, but also with 400 plus employees or a thousand plus. It doesn't really matter how big your company is. Um, so that's, that's really nice, but yeah, let me know if you want to test it. Then, uh, I can just give you a guys an account.

Buster (14:41.021)
Nice, awesome.

Eric (14:41.695)
Very, very cool. Very cool. So yellow, one of the things that I'm trying to do to elevate participation, member participation in my community, uh, is gamify it. And so for example, uh, podcast members, they get points when they do certain things to support another member. Uh, if they give another podcast or a nice review on Apple podcasts, then they get certain points. If they recommend someone who would be a great guest, uh, then they get more points.

What is something that Binky, that the platform does to help teams and leaders to elevate their performance?

Jelle Houben (15:19.05)
Ooh, so I love that you gamify it that way. That's really nice. Because yeah, that's also how we do it actually. So we track the engagement of employees and for every survey someone fills in, they receive credits and we call them Binky coins. They can spend them on separate company, yeah, reward pages. So the company can give rewards to their employees in exchange for those Binky coins. And that's really increasing the engagement. So we have...

Buster (15:45.492)
That's smart.

Jelle Houben (15:48.502)
Yeah, I think the engagement is around 87% per week amongst all our users. And that's all thanks to the rewards, the gamification thing. And because, yeah, also regarding the performance, we hope to eventually also implement a way that we can reward employees for actually taking action. So when we can track that someone improves or takes action because of our feedback, then they would receive extra Bitcoin coins.

Buster (15:59.208)
Really?

Jelle Houben (16:16.312)
So that, yeah, that's, but that's in the future, but that's, uh, will be really nice.

Buster (16:22.536)
And what can they spend the binky coins on now, like a spa day or something? Like relax?

Jelle Houben (16:28.315)
Yeah, we're quite in the, at the beginning of this still. Um, so we have several ideas here, but what we do right now is that a manager can just add their own benefits or rewards in the platform and this, yeah, it depends on a free day to having a free lunch or maybe a group activity. Um, but at some point we would also like to have our own rewards there and people can just, yeah.

Buster (16:35.954)
Yeah.

Buster (16:44.116)
Alright.

Jelle Houben (16:56.606)
safe up for it.

Buster (16:57.627)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Nice.

Eric (17:00.607)
Yep. The big question right now is Buster, what kind of rewards are you going to offer to your team?

Jelle Houben (17:05.987)
Yeah.

Jelle Houben (17:09.334)
Then we close.

Buster (17:10.552)
I think maybe a spa day is a good one, like a deep tissue massage, a trip to Barcelona or something.

Eric (17:21.643)
Oh wow, shit, that's a good one.

Buster (17:25.777)
You want to work at fruit punch, huh?

Eric (17:29.072)
Yeah, initially I was thinking you were gonna give them like, you know, like a fruit tray or something because of the name, right? You know, like here's a pineapple and some oranges and apples, you know.

Jelle Houben (17:34.516)
Yeah, yeah.

Buster (17:35.116)
Oh yeah, yeah yeah. Yeah, here's an apple a day. To give the doctor her way. But actually no, go see a doctor.

Eric (17:46.892)
Yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, that's very, very cool. I'm excited for you. What are you excited about in the next 12 months as it relates to Binky? Yalla.

Jelle Houben (17:57.85)
Ooh, yeah. So this is going to be quite actually a very important year. So we're very happy with how everything is going right now, but for now, for this year, the main focus is on finding the perfect product market fit. So we have, as I told you at the beginning, we have different kinds of, yeah, income streams for instance, or different kinds of customers. So we have our, we have companies, partnerships, et cetera.

Buster (18:23.898)
Hmm.

Jelle Houben (18:26.818)
So this year we really want to figure out what's the best way to go. Do we just want to integrate like a white label with platforms or do we want to have our own customers? Um, but we also just started working with company doctors. So a company doctor's a doctor have like easily 150 customers. Um, and they know exactly in which company it's gone bad or it's going well. Um, Oh, um, I lost.

Eric (18:55.447)
Very cool. That's exciting.

Buster (18:56.952)
And what tests, yeah, what tests are you doing and how are you going to determine which, which one you're going to go for? Is there also a component of kind of like the kind of company that you want to build or are you going by purely by the numbers?

Jelle Houben (19:11.998)
Ooh, I love that one. Um, that's also, I think, I think, uh, that's also one of my struggles personally. So, uh, that's, so we started being with three of us and the three of us are all first time founders. Uh, luckily our investors are. Yeah. Super, uh, experience. So that's, that's really nice. But for instance, I wouldn't have the perfect answer to this question. So at this point, we, of course know where we want to go. We want to become the tech player in this field.

Buster (19:16.061)
Yeah.

Buster (19:26.701)
Mm. Yeah.

Jelle Houben (19:41.418)
But we're mainly looking at the numbers. Well, we should maybe also look at something else. So if you have any tips, please let me know. But yeah.

Buster (19:43.41)
in

Buster (19:51.228)
Yeah man, you know, I was trying to go by the numbers for a long time and then, but there's this thing, you know, it's called intuition and eventually made a decision on intuition and then that turned out to work really well. Sometimes there's these things that you can't quite capture yet but you feel it. It sounds like bullshit but can be very valuable.

Jelle Houben (20:01.162)
Mm-hmm.

Jelle Houben (20:17.342)
Yeah.

Eric (20:18.537)
No, 100%. I definitely know. When I started my network, it was just all on intuition, like that gut feeling that you have.

Buster (20:25.168)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. If you only go by the numbers, you shouldn't start a startup in the first place, right? That's... ..draff.

Eric (20:30.515)
Yeah. No, I've tried launching businesses and just looking at like the numbers of potential and none of them worked out. So definitely agree with you Buster on that. Yeah. Okay. We've come to the rapid fire section, um, of this interview. So I have some questions for you. Give me the first thing that comes to your mind. Don't even think about it. Are you ready?

Buster (20:40.868)
Right.

Jelle Houben (20:53.331)
I hope so. Let's see.

Eric (20:55.787)
All right. What is something that people, most people don't know about you? They're not gonna see this on your LinkedIn profile.

Jelle Houben (21:03.636)
I used to be very well at gymnastics. Like, yeah, I did a lot of tournaments there.

Buster (21:09.328)
Makes sense.

Eric (21:10.275)
Alright.

Buster (21:13.344)
No, the posture and everything and the confidence.

Eric (21:20.73)
I thought it was something else or something. I thought maybe you'd challenge him to like a boxing fight like you do with your other friends and... I'm sorry.

Buster (21:26.684)
And I lost.

Jelle Houben (21:30.442)
and I'll talk to you.

Eric (21:31.211)
Okay. All right. Next question for you. Before you run for president, you must destroy all evidence of your involvement with blank.

Jelle Houben (21:46.585)
A couple of weeks ago I broke someone's glasses on a party and no one should know that.

Buster (21:58.056)
Did you just like stumble into a cupboard? What happened?

Jelle Houben (22:03.263)
That's a good story.

Eric (22:07.133)
Okay.

Buster (22:07.809)
Hahahaha

Jelle Houben (22:10.844)
I'll explain after I became president.

Buster (22:15.38)
Okay.

Eric (22:17.398)
Okay, next question for you. At a time you were someone's hero, you were someone's hero, what did you do?

Jelle Houben (22:31.306)
Well, maybe the same... No, yeah, the first thing that comes to mind is the same event with the glasses. I helped someone who was getting into a fight, and then I took those glasses to save the fight. But the glasses broke due to the event. But I'm not sure if I was...

Buster (22:32.424)
He's a hero every day now.

Buster (22:45.627)
Oh.

Buster (22:49.832)
I'm sorry.

What?

Eric (22:56.908)
Man, you're like a hero and a jerk all in a span of 10 minutes or something. That's what it sounds like. Ha ha ha.

Buster (23:01.864)
Hahaha

Jelle Houben (23:02.478)
I'm losing my traction, yeah.

Eric (23:07.105)
Okay, last question for you. Blink is an unusual food or drink that you consume.

Jelle Houben (23:17.434)
Um, not really unusual, but I would say beans. Beans are just power food, a lot of energy, proteins, good for your gut health, good for your brain. I eat a lot of beans. Yeah. And good for your skin too.

Buster (23:35.166)
Just straight out of the can. Like you just have always have your can of beans next to like a kind of Popeye next to the...

Jelle Houben (23:36.638)
No, I...

Eric (23:41.399)
Vintage.

Jelle Houben (23:45.47)
No, I'm not gonna say anything.

Eric (23:49.583)
Yeah, nope. Is there a particular flavor or type like black beans, charlo beans, green beans, chickpeas? I don't know. Is there a certain type?

Buster (23:50.355)
That's true.

Jelle Houben (24:00.842)
Uh, no, I tried to fry as much as possible. Yeah. So, uh, but especially in the, in the chickpeas and, and chili beans, those are the best, but, uh, I tried to fly as much as possible.

Eric (24:09.631)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, well Buster, there you go. If you ever have a dinner party and Yela's invited, you know what to serve, right?

Buster (24:11.143)
Hmm.

Jelle Houben (24:17.92)
Yes.

Buster (24:20.26)
All beans. Yeah.

Jelle Houben (24:22.419)
I can bring my own beans.

Eric (24:23.955)
Okay. All right, Jelle Halven, thank you for coming on Innovators Collab. This has been a pleasure. Where can people learn more about you?

Jelle Houben (24:33.386)
Um on LinkedIn, I think that's uh, and they can always reach out to me if they like so, I don't know if you're going to share any information, but Uh, if people would like to get to know me better than feel free to reach out on LinkedIn or email

Eric (24:38.005)
Okay.

Eric (24:48.607)
All right. I'll include links to your LinkedIn profile and your website and the show notes. Thank you again for coming on the show Buster. Thank you so much for being a wonderful cohost as always, man. Cheers. And for everybody listening, we'll be back next week with another European startup founder, and if you enjoy this, feel free to tell others about it. Thank you very much.

Buster (24:57.108)
Cheers.

Jelle Houben (25:08.138)
Thank you too.

Buster (25:08.916)
Thanks Eric.

Eric (25:10.963)
Yeah, okay, just keep the browser open for a few more...