[00:00:08] Barry O'Kane: Welcome back to HappyPorch Radio, the Circular Economy Technology Podcast, where together with leading experts, thinkers, and doers, we explore the intersection of technology and the circular economy. 

I'm Barry, the founder of HappyPorch where we provide software engineering expertise for a more circular economy.

[00:00:26] Jo Weston: And I'm Jo, a co-host with Barry. I help purpose-driven and circular businesses turn their vision into a brand and story that moves people to act.

In this episode, we are joined by Bob Jansen. Founder of Firmhouse, which is a recurring commerce platform for subscriptions, renting, product-as-a-service and more.

[00:00:51] Barry O'Kane: We covered so much in this conversation with Bob, talking about the systemic change needed for circularity and for rental, the role of rental and the story of Firmhouse and the technology.

But one thing that stood out for me was Bob's reflection on the impact of AI, both in terms of their own in-house development and how newer AI tools are really changing and accelerating or adapting the way that they develop the product, but then also allowing them to rethink about some of the features or some of the ways they offer, in the platform for users to interact.

Jo, what stood out for you?

[00:01:25] Jo Weston: I think really it was what Bob was touching on in terms of the economics model needs to work for rental to make it a success. So from an investment perspective, but also from a perspective of consumers paying a true price for a product and only at that point can they actually see the difference between the rental cost and the cost of buying a product outright.

And similarly for producers of a product to also pay a true price in terms of the labor required and the materials required to build the product, but also the waste at the end of the cycle of a product, that they take responsibility for that.

[00:02:06] Barry O'Kane: Yes, we covered so much in this conversation. It's really fun and really enjoyable.

So without any further ado, let's meet Bob.

[00:02:13]  Bob Jansen:  Hey, I'm Bob, founder of Firmhouse. We're a recurring commerce platform amongst a lot of models we power is rental, so we're actually the rental space for, since I think 2019, 18, so quite a while already, so quite some experience there. Based in the Netherlands and we power quite a few of the names that are known in the sustainable circular commerce world.

[00:02:33] Barry O'Kane: Awesome and welcome to HappyPorch Radio. Thanks for joining us.

[00:02:36] Bob Jansen: Thanks.

[00:02:36] Jo Weston:  One of the first questions we always like to know is why you founded Firmouse? How that came about, when that came about, and a little bit of a backstory of what was the problem that you saw that needs to be solved, and how's that evolved from when you first started out?

[00:02:53] Bob Jansen: So the founding story is quite a lengthy one, but I'll cut it short so very much.

If you'll Google it, it's founded in 2008, somewhere during our studies. We've been a long time agency and we specialized in turning ideas into MVPs and releasing them quickly, and we did that within the corporate world as well and in 2017/18 together with Philips we rolled into Product-as-a-Service, Try & Buy a model for one of their products. We were hired as an agency to build the first version of a Try & Buy a platform to rent out a product directly to consumers. And that actually triggered us into, yeah, building this as a product. 

We always had the wish to become a product based company and to let go of the consultancy side of things.

And yeah, this was a really great opportunity. And at some point they became a launching customer for the proposition that we are today, the commerce platform we're today. So it's like by being paid for solving problems for big companies, we rolled into this opportunity and it really triggered us into yeah, the opportunity that's behind it.

Also, impact wise for what we can do on the sustainability and circular world.

[00:03:53] Jo Weston: Nice. And what was the rental product for Philips?

[00:03:56] Bob Jansen: It was the Philips Lumea. It's a very specific category product for hair removal for women on arms and legs. And it's designed for using it at home. And then you do an onboarding of 90 days and after 90 days you'll know it works for you, but it's a very expensive device. It's five hundred euros.

So they, at some point, max out in the market opportunity behind it, how many people can put 500 euros to a device that they don’t know will work. So the Try&Buy model is really smart. 90 day trial, onboarding, trying a product and then you know if it works or not. If it doesn't, you send it back.

And you only pay for the month you used it, and then if you keep it, you could buy it from the company at a discount.

[00:04:37] Jo Weston: So like a temporary rental for a set number of days.

[00:04:41] Bob Jansen: Yeah, that's where it started.

[00:04:42] Jo Weston: And what kind of customers are you working with now?

[00:04:46] Bob Jansen: It's split into two categories. 

One is the durable section, so this is bikes, fashion, things that last that you can rent out typically at a higher ticket price or higher purchase price. And then we have the consumable section, which is anything from toilet paper to vitamins, to a lot of categories in there, coffee.

And then we have customers who do both, so they have a coffee machine to get the coffee beans that they offer in one proposition, which is, in my opinion, the true Product-as-a-Service, you pay for good coffee, always to get the device and to have good coffee at home, and everything that has to evolve around it is delivered by one company.

[00:05:20] Jo Weston: Ok, for example, what types of companies or brands are we talking about here just to bring it to life for people at home? So like bike rental, who are we talking about?

[00:05:30] Bob Jansen: So we have Bikeflip, which I think is a really cool example, they're similar to Bike Club. The Bikeflip is on our platform for doing bikes for kids. Obviously they grow, so you cycle through, literally cycle through the bike sizes as you go, and it's a subscription on a monthly basis and they swap the bikes so you can go pick a new bike with your kid at one of their locations.

So that's a really good one. 

Tiny Library, the stroller segment is obviously big. And we also have Baboodle as a customer, which is in the UK. So Tiny Library serves Netherlands and Belgium. And so you have a lot of these in the durable category across Europe. Bikes is Ride Noord, which is a Dutch brand that's on our platform, which is cool.

Also doing a lot of delivery riders, and then in the consumable section we have The Good Roll, Boldking and a few other bigger names as well that are really in the consumable section. 

[00:06:16] Jo Weston:  Nice. And where are you hoping to go next with the platform?

[00:06:21] Bob Jansen: There's always more integrations and features to build, so the midterm for us is really being fully Shopify native. So Shopify is a huge avenue of growth for us as many of the other platforms you're probably talking to. A lot of business comes from there and there's a lot of big brands going to Shopify. So this is one of the areas where we already are far along and localizing that for Europe is a bit of a challenge on Shopify, but that's one.

And then for the longer term we're really looking into leaning much more into doing more operational areas within the businesses that already are on our platform.

So right now it's really focused on being able to subscribe on the checkouts, doing the recurring deliveries and managing subscriptions, which is really around the subscription side of things or the rental side of things. But there's so many more problems. When you start and scale an e-commerce brand, which are on the operational side, where, for example, AI is a huge opportunity for us to, instead of having to hire 10 people to grow your business, you can do maybe with two or three.

So that's like the problems we're looking at currently to solve.

[00:07:19] Barry O'Kane: I really want to come back to the AI question as well, because it is really interesting to see where you're seeing how that's affecting both your development and as you said the offering for the clients as well. 

But just to continue that theme of the story and the clients you work with, what have you seen change in terms of the challenges and opportunities since 2018 when you started this working in this sector, really focusing on the sector because I know a lot has changed and it feels like there's areas where you've really seen and being able to identify some of the challenges and therefore some of the opportunities as well?

[00:07:48] Bob Jansen: Obviously through us and a lot of other platforms out there, technology is not an issue anymore. So there's a lot of technology out there to power the Product-as-a-Service, Try & Buy those kind of things, that if you would take a time machine and go back to 2018, there were maybe a few players that were coming from , you know powering businesses that were selling a software product with billing, and then they were trying to make their way into commerce. And now you have like highly specialized platforms and verticals for  transacting and doing subscription billing in any category. A lot of things remain the same, so technology is not really a problem anymore.

What is a problem for this world, especially when you talk about rental and Product-as-a-Service is finance. Like, the key thing for the past seven years that we’ve been involved in this industry, which is not solved and is very hard to solve is finance. Just financing a business that will be, you know, in the red for a predictable 5 or 10 years, selling to consumers having assets where they can't locate them or repossess them. It's just like a really tough business model. So it's like cash heavy, you need a lot of working capital and it's super high risk. You can de-risk it to a certain extent, but you can't de-risk it fully where there are investors, and if you're sitting on 100 million, you can put it into a safe investment at a lower rate, or you put it in a high risk investment. 

And I think this is one of the key themes that we see that if that doesn't get solved, we can talk a lot about rental, we can talk a lot about Product-as-a Service and how it'll fix the circular world, but without the money backing it and proper money backing it available to a lot of entrepreneurs, it will just not happen. 

And for us as a platform, this is one of the reasons why we're looking outside of the rental in a Product-as-a Service space and building there as well, because we're limited in our growth in by basically how much capital is flowing into the market for rental and Product-as-a-Service. No, like, technology will always hit a ceiling as well because there is demand, but there is no capital behind the demand to actually build the big businesses behind it.

[00:09:42] Jo Weston: Have you seen that capital changing significantly in recent years? 

[00:09:47] Bob Jansen: I know there is more. I used to be a bit more involved in initiatives there, but it sounds bad to say, but I gave up a little bit at some point because it always costs you a lot of time and not much came from it for customers or other partners out there. I think it's gonna be really hard unless it's going to be demanded or triggered by regulations or something like that.

And so the answer is no, unless you're in a really big market that's gonna address hundreds of millions of people, the capital providers are just too small to actually have a meaningful dent into being able to purchase assets. So what I do see is that there's entrepreneurs doing a lot of creative models around there.

So I know Tiny Library does revenue share models with the brands that they have on the platform. So instead of buying all the assets and then renting them out, they become like a hybrid of a retailer. And then they have finance to purchase the assets at a lower price, but they, revenue share. I'm not sure if this is exactly how to do it, but you see this blended strategy coming where they become a retailer and then the financing party. And then of course, you're an e-commerce company as well. So it's really hard business model to pull off to grow. But financing in that sense hasn't progressed as much as it should have, in my opinion.

[00:10:59] Barry O'Kane: And not just as you said, the sort of risk or awareness of risk, but actually just understanding the business model even. So that's I think one of the things that's fascinating for people who are attempting to or are building businesses in this area, they're leading the way in everywhere. Like they're talking to investors. Only small subset investors really understand the risk and that situation and they're trying to do the same with their customers, their users. There's an educational piece although some of our previous guests have talked about how in their sector that may be getting a little bit easier as time goes on, but there's this extra burden on top of everything else and that they're pushing and very often they're driven by real deep values or motivation that is this problem needs solved. And so I will lead the way by trying to push against the tide. So it was really interesting.

[00:11:40] Bob Jansen: Yeah, one hundred percent, like you also have to measure what you're competing with, right? You're competing with companies selling a product and you're trying to run it out. So it's your cost of acquisition, your whole business model in the subscription world is turned upside down because when you make the sale,it's like you don't instantly get the whole lifetime value of the customer out of it because you sell products. It takes you 12 months, 24 months, depending on how you do your pricing strategy to make back that money. And so there's quite a high risk hurdle for it to actually be doing it. And that's why it's so limited on being funded by the finance world because there's so many other opportunities out there to put your money in safer assets that it's just hard.

But there's good movements in there. So the revenue sharing models and technology will obviously be like a big fix here that you can apply, but ultimately it comes down to capital at some point for any business but especially these businesses.

[00:12:30] Barry O'Kane: Yeah, because there's an upfront asset cost, and then as you say, it's a long payback. And I mean on paper, the model and the opportunity there, what are you seeing? Are the opportunities there? I guess for the money for investors on paper, there should be more of a lifetime value from the products. It's just, it's a longer payback period. And then there's also, we can talk about the environmental and materiality and the benefits of circularity. So on paper it feels like it should be there, there should be more interest.

But what, I guess my question is having seen all of that, and in all of that, are you seeing areas where there is opportunity and that you are getting more excited about the short term opportunity?

[00:13:02] Bob Jansen: The categories I think typically are quite known. So it's like products you use that need to be of high quality that you use temporarily. So you know, strollers and take anything for kids. People want the best for their kids and there, you bring down high purchase cost for a consumer into a subscription cost. And then, you just return it to the brand, that's the retailer, and you don't have to set up on Marketplace or eBay or other places. I'm not sure if it's talked about a lot anymore, but we had somebody on our team who did a paper, their thesis on research for laundry subscription. So like a different category. And the basic question behind it was, are people who subscribe for a laundry machine at home, who actually take it on a subscription, doing it for the environmental factors or not? And basically the conclusion was you're addressing a category in the market who can't pay an out of pocket highend washing machine and you're giving that specific device on a subscription. So then it ranked all the other factors, which would be convenience, and the lowest one, the last ranking factor was sustainability. Obviously this was like 2019, 2018, somewhere around that time.

Things change. But if you look at Coolblue here in the Netherlands, they have a washing machine subscription, very successful. But most of the people I think, that use that is for the convenience. If your washing machine breaks down and you have a big family and they're all in sports and they need clean clothes to go to the soccer match on Saturday morning and it takes two weeks to get fixed or to get parts, there the service component becomes really big. So then I can see the financing, convenience, like those are the two main factors. People get products that really solve something for them and then there obviously, is like a sustainability part of it as well but people typically don't rank for it. 

So this is how we also look at the market. Strollers, baby products, bikes, Swapfiets. Why do people get a Swapfiets? Not because they can't afford to buy a bike of two hundred euros. It's because when it breaks down, somebody shows up, fixes it, repairs the tire, it's convenience again.

A friend of mine had a really good phrase for this when we entered this market basically, and he summarised it to “it has to be obviously more awesome than ownership”. Renting the product has to be obviously more awesome than buying it. And I think a lot of companies fail being able to adding that into a product and we have to be honest, a lot of products don’t have a service component, or a convenience component that can turn it into a rental and make it awesome in rental. That's just the truth.

[00:15:24] Barry O'Kane: Yeah. It's the reality of it. In an earlier episode we had, we spoke to Lucy Wishart, who's in academia in circularity, and the sort of academic term they talk about is consumption work. So the effort that somebody has to do to consume, if you can make that easier, as you said, make it more awesome than new is a much cooler phrase.

But it's just interesting to think about that being the core thing that makes these models work. 

[00:15:45] Jo Weston: Think it's a transition towards more of an experience, so moving away from just selling a product to selling an experience and that transition is happening, it's just not happening in all sectors at the same speed. But people really valuing an experience and just having a product is in some sectors not good enough anymore.

So I think that is definitely a trend that we're seeing.

[00:16:11] Bob Jansen: Yeah, I hundred percent agree. There is a lot of movement in the market and I think Barry, we spoke about this when we had our chat a couple of weeks ago. There's I think, like two major drivers that can come from the outside and then if you would call in five years and have this podcast  recording, we might have a very different discussion around it.

One is when we start paying the true price off what a product actually costs because we're not, right? If you really take the supply chain and everybody gets equally paid everywhere, products that we have in our lives are gonna be much, much more expensive in retail. And much more expensive if something big happens in the world, I don't know, war or whatever, or we had COVID, like prices go up because supply chain is much less optimised and it's harder to run, prices can go up.

Like when that happens to what kind of event it is, then rental makes more sense because people don't go into your website and go Whoa, I can buy it for 500 euros, or 25 bucks a month for 24 months. That doesn't make sense, right? I'll just buy it. But if that product is now a 1000 euros and you can rent it out, then, those are the forces that we see.

And the other one would be really on regulatory roads, right? So closing the loop in circularity, which is a big way, everybody's talking about this for years. We have to close the loop. The company should be responsible for what they produce. They should end up with the products. The products shouldn't end up in some kind of trash heap somewhere in the city or somewhere outside the city and be sold to another part of the world and ship there and then they deal with it because that's what happens. The companies should deal with that end of the cycle. But like rental became if you don't sell it, great! Because then it has to go back to the company because they're the owner. But then again, a lot of products, they don't make sense on rental so then how do you close the loop?

So I think regulatory forces where governments, Europe or, I don’t know if this will ever happen in the US but if you look at Europe, you know these things might happen at some point. Like a company has to get back 50 or 60 or 70% of their resources. Repurpose them, put them into products and become circular.

I think those kind of forces will at some point come and then again, prices of products will change.

That's like a long way of saying we've been here since 2018. Some people have been talking about it since, I think 2010, 2006, 2000s. We're very early on this shift of consuming, we're very early on the curve.

[00:18:22] Barry O'Kane: Yes. Yeah, I think that's totally fair. And just to pick up that point you talked about the paying, the externalized costs. So both fair and equitable supply chain, but also then the fact that we as a society are paying for waste. That we're paying both ends.

We're paying to own or use the product, but we're also paying to then get rid of as a society. So, anyway, that's the sort of system level, really exciting changes. I want to just bring us back a little bit more in this conversation and particularly move and start talking about the technology.

So first of all, let's dig a little bit more into Firmhouse, the platform. It's obviously grown and developed over the years. So where are you now? What does it look like in terms of feature set and like from the technology point of view, the types of problems that it solves?

[00:19:02] Bob Jansen: As a platform in the industry, we've been always very focused on really being very good at the transaction side of things. So we have been dealing with a lot of complex environments when it comes to doing payments, multi-market, multi currencies, and dealing with that without being able to rely on Shopify in the beginning, for example.

So we basically have built our own little engine, big engine by now that can do really complex models in terms of, Okay, how do we charge a product? In which currency is charged, who's charged, what are the taxes on it? We have all that inside of our platform, in our engine, we call that the commerce revenue engine.

Outside of that, there is a lot of processes adjacent to it that are happening, which start being able to put any product into a cart. So we could do any basket combinations where it's a phone rental with a case that you buy and then you get a digital subscription for eSIM to go abroad, like all of those combinations into one basket, take it into our checkout or the Shopify checkouts. Then charge for it and then, dealing with everything that happens afterwards. And then when you look more on the circularity things, we can do anything from risk reduction, so making sure we have credit scoring mechanisms, identification methods, so we can do the passport checking and everything. 

And then there is this whole set of features around the logistics side of things. So shipping a product or getting it back or getting it partially back. And really knowing did this customer sign up for a 24 month agreement for product A and then maybe product B is a 12 month agreement. And then everything is a one subscription and we deal with all the being able to trigger return logistic in month 13 for product B, but not for product A. Like all that logic is in there. I think we have a really large enterprise customer who currently onboarded for the board of consumable side of things. And their CTO face it in a way where it really boiled it down to everything out there that they've looked at was designed from a subscription perspective. So subscription first, so customer has like, a monthly payment that they make for something that they're getting, which basically comes from the Software-as-a-Service world.

And we have everything evolving around the product. So you have a bunch of products and we charge for those products and only for those products that part of the plan, or they're part of the pricing, like a sub-pricing group, et cetera. So yeah that's where we operate. 

We have had customers in 40 countries. So we have done quite a few exotic things when it comes to currencies and localisation and languages so it is very rapidly scalable as well.

[00:21:21] Barry O'Kane: Yeah, that's really interesting. And as you said, that's dealing with that level of complexity and dealing with so many different parts of, I guess the operations and the relationship or the transaction, there's so many different moving parts to the platform.

What's the journey been like over the eight years from the development point of view? Because it's never a straight line when you're working on a product. So what has been the real sort of challenges or learnings that you've seen as you've grown this platform over the last few years?

[00:21:46] Bob Jansen: That's a broad question. Every time we think we've seen it all, when it comes to an exotic question on charging for something or a unique business model, or a unique selling plan, somebody pops up in our demo request form and says Hey, I'm looking to sell this product on this model.

And so it was really interesting to see that eight years ago it was really, a form that generated the charge into Mollie and then Mollie charged it to the account  , took the money and then paid it out to fulfill it basically up until the moment where a lot of scripts were influencing what was happening there and you know, we have all standardised that into the product, into the platform. So I'm very confident in saying that if it's physical and you want to put it in a subscription, our platform can handle it. So that's the progression from like a blanket statement version. But if then still today, we would be looking at some of the things we're doing for large companies. There's still a script here and there, talking to our platform, doing something unique in product swapping or changing a price or things like that. So I think that's like from like a broad perspective on the financial side and the transaction side, that's huge advancement there, even up to the point where we've been talking to even Shopify and they're like, Whoa-What the the hell, you can do all these things with just a standalone platform and then connect it to our APIs like, try and buy and all those things for them are small things to do, but they're big impact if they start doing them for merchants, but for them on the bottom line is tiny.

I would say like in the past months, we've been investing a lot in Shopify native. Previously we didn't. So basically what Shopify native means is that like at first you have to use our checkout to go past the Shopify checkout, which Shopify doesn't really like, if merchants can't do it with Shopify checkout, they allow it. Even for local payment methods and all kinds of subscription types on rental, Shopify checkout didn't support it. And there's more and more workarounds in their APIs coming that we can use to really go native. I think in the past eight months to a year, we've really accelerated that part of a roadmap to really be fully integrated into Shopify.

And I think, there's been reinventing everything we had was part of that as well. So the team has been under a lot of pressure going through Hey, we're going native, and now everybody expects everything to work when they sign up for  Firmhouse, which it doesn't. And we're getting very close to being future par with the big players out there within a year of time. So that's good. 

And then specific areas where we shine is like risk checks, background checks identification like those kind of processes, which are really important when you would go back to the finance part of the whole equation.

If you finally get somebody who wants to fund your business, the first thing they'll ask you, what's my risk? Then their first question is, do you know your customers? We have 10,000 subscribers, but we never run a background check. We never ask for a driver's license or a password. So no, we don’t know our customers. And then they go great, you do those 10,000 checks and come back for the money and we already handle all of those things. If they set them up in our platform correctly, then you know, we handle all of those things as well.

[00:24:32] Jo Weston: I'm just looking at the time and wondering if maybe we should now move on to one thing that we really wanted to talk about, which was AI and how AI is affecting your business, or how you are using AI to make improvements on the platform?

[00:24:47] Bob Jansen: So first I think in a company perspective, for us as a team, the first steps we did with AI were in 2021 when we did some Copilot development with GitHub and stuff like that.

It was very basic. And then obviously as everybody knows, everything accelerated like crazy in the past six months.

 The first impact we're noticing is that we can develop much faster because there's really good support from AI tools to build good code or we can deploy to production as well from a platform perspective and looking at the impact on the industry I'll just give you one example that's I think something that for us really clicked when we build a feature in a very different way than we would normally have built. 

So Bikeflip. Let's say you have a kid, certain age, they grow, they have certain length, so they need certain bike size. You have a huge collection of those bikes in your assets, set up in our platform or in your own database.

You might want to build a workflow that you know after a while when the kid gets a new bike, you want to swap it for a different bike. Normally you would build like in this clicky interface, like you would build a box, like they have bike A, if met condition B, then draw this line to that bike that meets Condition X. And then, you have this whole workflow. And we were always asked to build a workflow based system that allows us as a merchant to our customers to build those kind of workflows and we were really looking up to Oh man, we have tobuild this whole interface into the platform with lines and drawings and stuff, and it's quite a big thing to build. And right now we have a prototype working, which is like a natural language based interpretation from an LLM that we just feed into an AI and then it just does the magic for you.

And then we build like, the interface around it to make it human readable and human interpretable and give some form of control. But at the heart it's the AI, like following instructions to execute the workflow. So instead of building, and that's I think the big insight that we're seeing, like how software development in my own background, which is design, is changing things, is that instead of building the software that allows a person to configure something that does something in their business and think of a process to execute it you’re getting a digital teammate that you give a set of instructions that you delegate a task to in human language almost optimised for an AI that can execute it. And that’s a huge impact for us because it accelerates so much of our work now. And the impact of us, on our mission becomes bigger, beyond just, doing subscriptions or doing repeat revenue or doing transactions.

It allows us to build digital teammates or agents, however you wanna call them, that you can deploy to a company and give them that execute tasks like there are a colleague. And I think that's gonna be like a huge technology accelerator for this world. That, yeah, we think is a huge opportunity.

So that's like trying to give an example there on how we see it, like where it's going, but how it's impacting us today. Like faster development. Like any startup not using AI at the moment. That's crazy. Like you have to almost. Like others will outcompete you, outbuild you. But then inside our product you have to flip your thinking on how you're building stuff and how you're presenting it to your customers and how they're using it, how they're capable of configuring things. So that's a big one. So for us, a lot of people go to the operations side of things where people will be able to hire digital colleagues that don't exist in real life, they hire an insider platform to execute on things and to optimise the business and to run the business.

[00:28:07] Barry O'Kane: I really like the way you've described both of those things. Like one just the coding, like having the better tooling to help improve the speed of development and solving problems and the feature set, what the actual product can do. Because I think those two things are quite distinct and it's quite interesting to think about them in two different ways.

So that's fascinating. Do you see any risks or what are the risks or the challenges that come with the rate of change that these new tools are bringing to your business?

[00:28:32] Bob Jansen: I think as a risk to our business. I do my own fair share of I've done HTML & CSS when I was young and I really liked it because you can make something that works. 

Now, using Lovable and other platforms, you can do what they call vibe coding, right?

So you can go in and build something, but you can also build it very insecure and it can break at any moment. So I think the risk to our business is that you have to really prove your value more and more when it comes to your like, and we're not, but you have to prove it and you have to, make sure that you deliver that value. We are a transactional layer, we have direct interfaces with Adyen, Mollie and everything. We know exactly when transactions happen and don't like, that's a big part of what we do, and that's a huge asset for us. That's not gonna be replaced by somebody who vibe codes something on Lovable that looks great with a great landing page, maybe even built by an AI and knows how to get a demo sign up and maybe sign somebody up and it connects to Shopify or whatever. For people in the market to identify what's really good quality that will last, that they can actually process millions of revenue on like securely and predictably and correctly and auditable. Like that layer becomes more and more something that is a big part of what we do. So a threat could be somebody who says they've built it, but it's not really working and that is capable of getting a lot of traction in the market with a better story or a better positioning.

I see those kind of things as risk, but like really we're sitting on top and building on top of a layer that's really good, used by huge brands. We had so much customers as well, and they don't select you lightly. So we know that we're there. And then now it's our challenge to really keep up at the rate and use that layer and turning it into something that we're building the same stuff that all the cool kids are building, like all the young kids out there.

[00:30:11] Jo Weston: And one question I had is how do you deal with data security? Because I think that's clearly a risk with AI that's very easy to just put like a spreadsheet in AI with all secure data. How do you manage that within the business or for your clients?

[00:30:28] Bob Jansen: The technicalities of that I actually don't know because I'm not CTO of the company, but we actually put a lot of thought in the things that we're building there. So it's not that we just give blanket access to OpenAI or Anthropic or whatever, and it's Here's a database, good luck with it and just, start querying stuff. So all the principles, good software design that we always apply to build our platform we're applying them here now as well. And what that means is that, we don't release things or build things that are not tested in a thorough way.

That sounds obvious, but I think with AI you need to do it even more and more because it's, and I believe the term’s there, and I think if you want to talk about this stuff, get a CTO on the podcast show, the things you need AI to do need to be “deterministic”. So we need to be sure of the output that it gives and it needs to be accessing the right data so we can hard code those things. And I think that makes us like, really different where if somebody is building something, using an AI or building a new tool that's querying all these APIs, it's easy to make a mistake versus you know, us building on top of our own layer and really releasing it as a future as we would normally release it to our customers. But the core question there, I think, is much more a deep technical question, so not sure if this answer answers it.

[00:31:38] Jo Weston: And perhaps one of the last questions I'd like to ask is obviously when you built the platform to start with, and you are working with Philips, coming back to the story at the start, you had a choice of which way you could take the business and clearly you want to take it in a particular direction.

What's your vision for the future in terms of circularity and rental?

[00:32:00] Bob Jansen: So for us, the long term view is we want to make it possible to sell, produce and consume in a planet positive way. And I've always struggled with the term circularity because what’s circular and everybody's been debating what circular is. So I think as a company, as a tech company, or as a player in this field, you have to strive to make impact that you know is progression.

And when you talk about circularity, and especially in e-commerce, a lot of companies, they're focused on, Okay, I need to do 100% sustainable. We're only gonna rent out products. We're never gonna sell a product because it doesn't fit with the circular. Like those kind of questions, if you focus on progressing in this mission of being planet positive 1% every day. At some point, your impact will be huge. And I think there will be a lot of different models in circularity or closing the loop and sustainability that will come, but also it has to address the demand of the users. And that comes back to the question where like, why do people buy a washing machine subscription like finance, convenience and service. And then, oh yeah, sustainability is, somewhere there as well. 

So the long term view is that we keep building the tech to actually progress faster in that area and to make sure that there's all the tools and infrastructure for entrepreneurs that want to sell in a planet positive way, that want to produce in a planet positive way that we help them do that.

Some of it will be very boring to build. It'll be very operational things that work super well, and therefore they don't have to hire five people in their team, but only one. And it makes it more accessible for somebody with an idea to go out there and to be building a sustainable, small business with the technology that only big businesses could get in the past.

And I think that's where the area is or our energy is not rental only, not buyback only, but really Here’s all the tech and infrastructure with a bunch of AI digital colleagues that will help you build the business. 

You have a great idea? Hit the ground running and let’s go!

[00:33:48] Barry O'Kane: Outstanding. And that's a wonderful way to bring this conversation, which has been a wide reaching conversation to an end. So one final question for you, Bob, for those listening who want to find out more, who want to use what you just described and do what you just described where do they go? How do they reach out to you?

[00:34:04] Bob Jansen: Yeah, Firmhouse.com, @ me on LinkedIn Bob Jansen. And I think today we have quite a few features already that are easy to use. So if you're starting up something, whether it's rental or something on a consumable level, takes one or two days to set things up and you can go Live.

If you have questions, reach out to me directly, my team or get to our website and request a demo. We can show you around what we can do there.

[00:34:26] Barry O'Kane: Wonderful. Thank you. And as usual, we'll put all those links on the Show notes on happyporchradio.com. 

Thanks again, Bob, for joining us today. Really appreciate your time.

[00:34:34] Bob Jansen: Thanks for having me!

[00:34:35] Jo Weston: Yes, thank you!

[00:34:38] Barry O'Kane: : Thanks for listening.

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[00:34:52] Outro: This podcast is brought to you by happyporch.com. Whether you need bespoke software development, fractional CTO support, or just expert advice, HappyPorch is here to support your circular economy initiatives. If you're driving innovation and circularity, we'd love to chat. 

Your hosts were Barry O’Kane and Jo Weston. 

Barry is a software engineer, leader, and entrepreneur with over 20 years experience. He founded HappyPorch to help you create web and software solutions that support the shift to regenerative circular economy. 

 Jo helps purpose driven and circular businesses turn their vision into a brand and story that moves people to act. She works with teams at tipping points ready to scale or reposition for greater impact.