'Entrepreneurship is complex, a study is really not a redundant luxury'
Entrepreneurship is romanticized these days, believes Bas Swaen, co-founder of Scribbr. That is because it is mainly the success stories that make it into the media. But starting a business means working really hard seven days a week for peanut butter sandwiches. 'You know somewhere what "weekend" is, but you don't do it yourself.'
By Rutger Vahl
Financially independent at 34. It's not why Bas Swaen ever started doing business. In fact, at first it didn't look like he would earn much with his businesses. A game for the iPhone in 2012 was hard to get off the ground. A market research tool for supermarkets didn't really catch on either. It wasn't until his third attempt - editing student theses - that he got lucky. A week after my partners and I had this idea, we launched a basic website. A day later we had our first customer. From then on, the number of applications doubled every month.' Scribbr grew rapidly for ten years, until Bas and Koen - the two remaining founders - sold their company to the American Course Hero in April 2022. The acquisition amount was not disclosed, but Course Hero itself is worth 3.6 billion. Big money, in other words.
Hard work
I hope this won't turn into another success story about entrepreneurship,' interrupts Bas with dreams of luxury yachts and palm beaches. When we started in 2012, entrepreneurship wasn't at all obvious if you were at university. But nowadays it seems fashionable to start your own business. I think that's a good thing, but realize that entrepreneurship is first and foremost just hard work with no guarantee of success. We worked 6 to 7 days a week for quite a long time, and those were not 8-hour days. I earned almost nothing, ate peanut butter sandwiches, and our office was anti-squat. Weekends didn't exist and I never went on vacation. Now when I hear a start-up entrepreneur talk about his or her fourth winter sports vacation this year I doubt if anyone is really an entrepreneur. And don't say to me, "I'm good at outsourcing." A good entrepreneur does indeed outsource, but still hardly ever takes a vacation. Why? Because your business means everything to you. You have an idea and you want to execute it to the best of your ability.'
Selfmade (wo)man
What also does well in the media are stories about the self-made man or woman. Nothing is better than the entrepreneur who was once expelled from school, started a company as a teenager and ten years later is a millionaire. Bas Swaen, however, is glad that he studied fiscal economics and finance in Tilburg. 'It's true that as an entrepreneur you learn a lot in practice. But I think it's good to have one specific skill when you start a business. The fact that I know a lot about finance, for example, has helped me enormously in the development of Scribbr and in conversations with potential investors. Entrepreneurship is complex, an academic education really comes in handy.' And besides: the seeds of Bas' entrepreneurship were sown at Tilburg University. In the final year I took a few entrepreneurship courses. I received practical tips on what to look out for if you want to start a business, but also met like-minded people. That was very inspiring and it motivated me to start my own business. I'm still in touch with some of my fellow students from those days.
Lousy English
The idea for Scribbr arose when Bas had written his master's thesis. His supervisor thought it was very strong in content. But he also said that my English was pretty lousy,' Bas smiles. That comment gnawed at me. Around that time I ran into Koen. He was looking for someone who could help him with his master's thesis, which he was working on at the time. Our experiences were a good match. Meanwhile, Scribbr has grown into a company that employs a hundred people and has some 700 freelance editors associated with it. In 2019, the Amsterdam-based company won the Financieele Dagblad's Oryx Prize as one of the fastest growing companies in the Netherlands. Final editing of theses, which it started in 2012, is now just one of its many services. The Amsterdam-based tech company also has tools to check for plagiarism and whether citations have been entered according to the rules. The website helps students with free advice to improve their theses. Scribbr operates internationally. 'The Netherlands is now a smaller market than, for example, Germany, England and America,' says Bas.
New paths
'Every year on January 3, Koen and I make a plan for the future,' he says. In early 2021 we sat down together and came to the conclusion: we want to continue with Scribbr, but not until our retirement. So we started looking for a takeover partner. No, that was not very difficult. If you're listed, like Scribbr, you get weekly emails from potential investors. The selection process was time-consuming, though. We had a lot of conversations. In the end, we found that Course Hero was the best fit for us. With their money and knowledge, Scribbr can make the step from start-up to scale-up, an international company where a few hundred people work.' As usual, Bas and Koen have signed on to stay with Scribbr for a few more years. 'You might think that we're going to mind the store now and then leave. But the opposite is true. Koen and I have always been in the business with our own money. So all the risks were on us. That made us cautious in certain respects. Now that the risks lie more with Course Hero, we feel freer to take new paths with Scribbr. I think the acquisition encourages rather than limits our entrepreneurship.
CV Bas Swaen
Age: 34.
Education: Bachelor's degree in business economics and fiscal economics, Master's degree in finance from Tilburg University (2006-2011).
Company: Scribbr (founded October 2012).
Marital status: single, no children
Opinioin: 'You don't hear much about the really good entrepreneurs in the media. They don't have time for interviews.