Trooper

Written on
12.3.2021
Thomas Smolders
Thomas Smolders

In normal times, not a weekend goes by without a spaghetti night, waffle bake or quiz to support the local soccer team and youth movement. Scaleup Flanders alumnus Trooper helps make associations' dreams come true.

What could be more Flemish than our rich club life? From youth movements and soccer teams to parents' committees and choirs, hundreds of thousands of Flemish people come together every week to have a good time.

Those members have many dreams for their clubs. New equipment, a trip with the entire team, new jerseys... Dreams sponsored with benefits, performances or a waffle sale.

One of those associations is Chiro Humbeek. When their classroom burned down a few years ago, the whole village put its shoulders to the wheel in campaigns to raise money. Three people - Klaas Olbrechts, Elisabet Lamote and Jan Dejonghe - came up with an original idea. On Bol, anyone can create a referral link. When someone else buys something via that link, you get a percentage of that amount.

Eventually they punched in to raise 300 euros. Soon other clubs came knocking and the three realized they were onto something. Trooper was born. Not much later, Elisabet gave up her job as Strategy Manager and her co-founders also took the plunge. With success: in the meantime, Trooper has helped more than 8,000 associations to 2.7 million euros.

Why they chose Trooper and not, like Chiro Humbeek at the time, cut their own deal with Bol? The scale. 'It is not easy to close a deal with all those webshops, but Trooper now has 1000 partners,' says Elisabet. 'From Decathlon and Booking: whoever buys something there and passes Trooper first can donate a portion to an association of their choice.

'We also support them in communication. We know what works and what doesn't and we have flyers and posters that can be used. In the corona crisis it is of course different, the word-of-mouth advertising that the actions on Trooper normally depend on is now largely gone. The crisis has had an impact on our platform anyway: people are shopping online more than ever, but the average amount is dropping because people are booking fewer vacations online," Elisabet says.

In November 2017, Trooper briefly became national news when Studio 100 decided to step in. Two years later, KBC followed suit in a subsequent capital round. 'Thanks to those investments, we can further develop the platform. It is a lot of work to automatically prepare the invoices for the associations. Our team therefore now consists of eight people.'

That growth, of course, brings with it a lot of questions. 'Founding a startup is one thing. Now we are captain of a team ourselves and we have to train our people as well. It's a phase you have to go through as an entrepreneur anyway, but one we had a lot of questions about. How to organize everything? How do you take care of the culture? How do you cultivate structures and processes?'

To find answers to those questions, Trooper's team knocked on Scaleup Flanders' door. There they followed the group coaching program, a series of keynotes, workshops and one-on-one sessions with other growth companies. "It is very interesting to be in a group with other entrepreneurs. Everyone has different business models, yet you feel they are struggling with the same problems.'

One of the things that Scaleup Flanders is betting on is assistance in the internationalization of companies. Although this is not yet so obvious for Trooper, Elisabet says: "Because we are so committed to helping with communication, it is not easy to internationalize that, although of course our technology is scalable. Fortunately, we live in Belgium and will soon start an interesting project: we are going to expand into Wallonia. By setting foot there, we can undoubtedly learn a lot about our internationalization!

Fancy joining our group coaching program like Trooper? In ten sessions, together with other tech companies, we focus on challenges that scaleups face. We do this through keynotes and workshops, but also through individual conversations. Find out all the infohere!

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