SiteManager

Alexander Hoguewegs spent seven years in corporate at Volvo before making the leap to entrepreneurship. He joined a web design agency in 2012, where he quickly identified a critical pain point: web designers and agencies struggled with collaboration between designers, developers, and content managers, and faced significant bottlenecks in resource management. Rather than stay in the agency business, he made the strategic decision to build software to solve these problems at scale.

In 2014, Alexander began building web design technology to help his colleagues at the agency. By 2016, he had transferred all the IP into a new company called SiteManager and pivoted from projects to pure product. He bootstrapped initially through a combination of creative financing—securing a small seed round from an accelerated program in Belgium (the iMac iStart program), a business angel, and a bank loan. By the time of this interview, he had secured €850,000 in total funding through a financial mix of government loans, bank loans, and private equity (split between equity and convertible notes), though he hadn't deployed most of it yet.

SiteManager launched with an MVP in March 2017 and immediately went after outbound sales. The pricing model was simple and elegant: €55/month (~$65) for solo entrepreneurs and €155/month (~$180) for agencies, with upselling based on published websites. By the time of this interview, Alexander had grown to 138 customers with approximately 350 total users across the platform (agencies were inviting colleagues and clients onto the visual CMS system). The outbound sales strategy proved effective, with a customer acquisition cost of €1,200/year ($1,400 USD) per customer. Since customers paid upfront, Alexander recovered the CAC in the first month on a cash basis.

The upfront payment model was a major win—it solved the cash flow problem immediately. By the time of this interview, SiteManager had achieved an ARPU of €90/month ($105 USD), though this would grow as newer customers began publishing websites. The unit economics were healthy: with 138 customers at $100/month average, the company generated $14,000 MRR ($150,000 ARR). Monthly gross churn was an impressive 1%, and net churn was negative at -1% due to strong upselling—a direct result of the business model where agencies began generating revenue from published websites on the platform.

However, Alexander identified a critical bottleneck: onboarding and training. Customers took too long to get productive on the platform, which threatened to undermine the inbound marketing strategy he was planning to launch. He was actively developing an online training center to reduce onboarding time from four hours to one hour and shift to a self-service model.

With healthy economics and a proven acquisition model, Alexander's goal was to scale from $14,000 MRR to $50,000 MRR within a year before raising a larger institutional round. The team had grown to 7 people (2 operational founders + 5 on payroll, with 3 more joining in September), distributed across Belgium and remote locations. The company was transitioning from pure outbound sales to a hybrid model, planning to launch inbound marketing efforts and expand into the Nordic market. Alexander had €850,000 secured but was being deliberate about deploying it, preferring to prove scalability first before taking on bank loans or larger equity commitments.