In this student entrepreneur Ruud Sneep tells how he started “Uitgetypt.nl” with Jacco de Vos and Herjan Meloen. In this interview will be discussed how the company started and the experience of starting a company while being a student. This interview is has been conducted in collaboration with Starterslift Tilburg, the center of Tilburg University for entrepreneurial students with talent and ambition.
1. Could your briefly describe what the business involves and what it is trying to achieve?
Uitgetypt.nl is an international transcription agency. Transcription refers to the activity of turning speech to text. Uitgetypt.nl operates in the Dutch, English, German, Spanish and Portuguese language and holds office in The Netherlands, Germany, Spain and Brazil. The founders of the company are Jacco de Vos, Herjan Meloen and Ruud Sneep. They started their entrepreneurial adventure during their studies in 2009.
2. In what way has the company evolved since its inception?
At the time, their initial venture was rather different: a “drivers-company”. On a random afternoon in May, Herjan phoned Ruud and bluntly asked: “When are we finally going to start our own business?” Herjan had an idea, since Jacco and he were regularly driving people who were “too tipsy” to drive back to their homes after a dinner or a party. Jacco and Herjan intended to make this service more professional and since they contemplated starting a business with Ruud before, they invited him to join. That is how their life as a student entrepreneur started.
3. Can owning and running a business be combined easily with your studies?
During their venturing activities, the three students came across many new different ideas for a new business. Since the young entrepreneurs were still studying, they were not bound to any financial obligations such as their mortgage or high costs of living. This enabled them to work on multiple different ideas simultaneously and in a flexible manner, whilst still concluding their studies.
One of the ideas the three pursued involved the transcription of audio. “This is a company which currently supports our living expenses and finances our further investments.” In the meantime, the three have grown into different companies. Herjan has his own business in design furniture and project management. Jacco and Ruud are still the remaining owners of Uitgetypt.nl, but they use their income to invest in the expansion of multiple businesses internationally in for example Spain and Brazil.
4. What skills have you acquired during your studies that can be applied to your daily business activities?
“The skills we have built during our studentship has prepared us for a spotting opportunities and being able to commercialize them rather quickly.”
Jacco explains. In answering our question on what the entrepreneurs have learned from their studies, Ruud is quick to reply that he actually still is a PhD-student. “In 2012 I got the opportunity to write my PhD. Currently I am concluding my PhD in the field of innovation and corporate entrepreneurship. It sometimes is difficult to combine, but I learn a lot and moreover I get to know interesting new people. Both is very useful for being an entrepreneur.”
5. How do you see the future of the company?
The future is at their feet. Within Uitgetypt.nl the gentlemen are investing in speech-technology and automated transcription software. Outside their core, they invest in ideas flowing from their international network. “We are not going to grow old in our transcription agency. We are marketleader in the European market however, so why not use that position for improving the industry by investing in speech-to-text technology? Still, we need to spread our chances and move into different industries. Perhaps the biggest example of this is such a vastly different investment such as a loan comparison agency in Brazil. Yet perhaps it is best to explain this at another time.”
6. Finally, what would you like to say to students who are also planning to start their own business?
To give the current students at Tilburg University some advice on Entrepreneurship, the three gentlemen are assertive: “Just start! You are young, flexible and it is better to overcome any entrepreneurial barriers now already, rather than when you are older and have financial obligations! And what can go wrong? Look at us, with something so dull as driving home drunk people and transcribing interviews, we got to develop so many more new and interesting ideas, meet interesting people and travel the world!”
