A conversation with Mille Mertens Polak, Co-founder and CEO of SpeakSoon, about building a startup that solves the chaos of physical networking, and why 110 interviews taught him more than any business plan ever could.

Imagine this, you're six hours into a trade fair.

Business cards stuffed in your pockets. Badge scans piling up. Handshakes that blur together.

Someone in SaaS. That guy from the cybersecurity booth. The woman who wanted that information you promised to send.

All fading into noise.

This was Mille Mertens Polak's reality for four and a half years in B2B sales.

He joined a 7-person startup. Then a 35-person scale-up. Then freelanced for companies that had cool products but didn't know how to sell them.

And at every single one, the strategy was the same: go to conferences. Be where your customers are. Network in person.

So he did.

He showed up with his phone, maybe a notebook, maybe business cards, and a pitch.

"What happens is by conversation number 10, the first 3 conversations have usually been forgotten," Mille says. "It's logical that you won't remember all the next steps that you promised."

After the event, he wanted to grab a drink.

But he couldn't.

Because he was facing what every networker knows: the admin.

Hours of digitizing cards. Remembering conversations. Doing follow-ups. Updating the CRM.

The chaos during. The time loss after.

That frustration became SpeakSoon.

The goal is simple: help professionals who go to a lot of physical networking events never again forget who they spoke to, what they spoke about, and handle all the admin they hate doing.

Here's how it works.

Two hours of admin work now is just 15 minutes.

"We're capturing all these manual inputs and we're digitizing them, structuring them, organizing them, and enriching them," Mille explains.

As long as there's a person name and a company name, SpeakSoon starts to work.

Then there's an entire online environment where you can see who you spoke to, what about, all the research done for you, ready to act on.

Mille didn't start with a product idea.

He started with a problem he lived with.

In February of last year, he stopped working full-time. He had a Notion doc filled with about 20 business ideas.

"But they were trying to be a product first and not a problem solver first," he admits.

He needed to pick one. And he needed a technical co-founder.

His first idea was a personal network assistant on top of LinkedIn. He was looking for a co-founder and realized the person was probably somewhere in his network, but he couldn't find them.

He built some concepts. Started validating.

Then he talked to a few startup founders who asked him a simple question: "Have you actually asked your target audience? Do you know if people actually want this?"

He hadn't.

So he started doing interviews.

To date, he's done about 110 of them.

"Professionals that often network to discover where the pain around the network is. Is it before, during, after?" Mille explains. "Unbiased questioning about how they use, build, and everything around their network."

And the pattern became clear.

Cybersecurity professionals. Hospitality managers. SaaS sales teams. Personal coaches. Consultants. Investors.

Completely different worlds.

Identical pain points.

The pain of using and leveraging your network exists. But the pain of building it initially at conferences, networking events, and open coffees, that pain is much bigger.

"It's not just me," Mille realized. "It's these 100 other professionals from a bunch of other sectors that have these same issues too."

When you find a problem that persists across multiple sectors, you've found a market that's actually starving.

That's when he decided: this is the pain I'm going to solve.

Mille didn't quit his job on a hunch.

He gave himself six months and four specific goals.

If he hit all four, he'd go all in.

By November, he'd reached all four goals.

So he went full-time.

"And follow your gut feeling," he adds.

Before SpeakSoon, before B2B sales, there was Bar Polak.

Mille was 16, working in a restaurant. They put him behind the bar. He loved it.

When he needed a new student job and couldn't find one, he thought: "Fuck it, let's launch my own business."

Bar Polak was a mobile cocktail catering service. A little tuk-tuk with pallets in the back for garden parties.

One day, his neighbors spotted it.

"We're getting married in 2 weeks, don't you want to turn this into a bar and do it at our wedding?"

He did. He added some wood planks, and some more pallets.

But he got 10 bookings from that one wedding.

"I'm an entrepreneur. I’m not a mixologist, but I just know how to make good basic cocktails" Mille admits."

This student-of-reality mindset would become the foundation of how he built SpeakSoon.

Over five years, Mille built Bar Polak into a proper business. He did about 175 events.

And it was brutal.

"I did a full-time job from 9 to 6. And at 6, the bar was standing there in the parking lot filled with drinks and ice. I would jump in, drive to the first party, work until 1am, go to sleep, and the next day was work again."

When COVID hit, he faced a choice every founder eventually encounters: adapt or die.

Event catering was dead. So he pivoted fast.

Cocktail at-home service. Easy e-commerce website on Wix. People could order cocktails online, select an hour, and he'd drive to make them outside with a mask on.

It was his most profitable year.

"That really taught me how to react to a rapidly changing environment," Mille says. 

It also taught him how to sell properly. Parties of €500, €1,000, sometimes €3,000 or €4,000.

"That's proper selling. You have to make offers, you have to negotiate."

And most importantly: he was always talking with customers, always listening, trying to offer them good service.

"I always say this to people when they're hiring for a salesperson. If they worked in hospitality, you got to know the worst and the best people, and they're great with people."

Eventually, he sold Bar Polak.

The lessons stayed.

At Tectonic, SpeakSoon had its first really rough MVP.

Mille's goal was to showcase how they use WhatsApp to capture leads, contacts, context, and then do a bunch of things in the background people don't see.

The first assumption they had to test: does it make sense to use WhatsApp for this?

For adoption, it's perfect.

You can scan a QR code and start using it immediately. No new app to download. No new behavior to learn.

"It's like talking to a contact in your WhatsApp, that feels like it's an assistant sitting at the office that you're just sending everything to throughout the day that you're networking," Mille explains.

But there's a problem.

By using natural language, people behave differently. They use different inputs. They expect a lot.

Some people say: "I spoke to Ben from Salesforce, I need to call him in 3 weeks," and send the picture of the card.

Other people just say: "Phone number." And expect it to know who it belongs to.

"The final product is going to be more complex than we expected," Mille admits.

They're exploring two directions: either guide people on how to use it properly, or use geolocation and timestamps to determine context automatically.

Everything launched at their event on February 26th.

142 people attended.

Mille brought together four startups transforming sales and networking: Better Growth, Venyu, Driven, and SpeakSoon.

Keynotes. Networking. Food and drinks.

And attendees got free usage for a month trial.

"Then it's up to me after that month to close them," Mille says.

The event wasn't just marketing.

It was validation. Product testing. Community building.

And it worked.

SpeakSoon just started fundraising a few weeks ago.

They're looking for €750K. Closing by summer or earlier.

The plan: expand the team, build a whole inbound go-to-market engine, create a product-led growth motion.

"In about 2.5 years from this summer, we want to hit €1 million in ARR," Mille says.

The vision is bigger than just solving admin chaos.

"We want to facilitate physical networking. My goal is that professionals associate SpeakSoon completely with physical networking."

Helping professionals find the correct events. Helping them get match beforehand. Helping them prepare. Helping them pitch better. Helping them network better.

Not just the after part. The entire experience.

Mille is very clear about this.

"Make sure that you solve a pain or a problem. That you're not just building a product to build a product because you like it or you think it looks good."

Interview people. In depth. People who do the thing you're trying to improve in different ways than you do.

Question them. Unbiased.

"Try to figure out if that pain point is consistently present across multiple sectors or multiple types of people."

And then set key goals.

Numbers you want to hit that will be the reason you commit 100%.

Building SpeakSoon wasn't about having a brilliant idea.

It was about living a problem for four and a half years, refusing to accept it as normal, and then interviewing 110 people to make sure he wasn't crazy.

Mille Mertens Polak is a student of reality.

And reality said: networking doesn't have to be this chaotic.

He didn't start with a product.

He started with a question: why does networking have to be this way?

And 110 conversations later, he had his answer.

It doesn't.

Question:  What’s one piece of feedback you wish you would have received earlier and what did you do once you got it? 

Mille’s answer: ““Don't be afraid to sell something that's not perfect. Right now, our product is 75% to be commercially viable. But, I know if I want to prove traction I need to know there’s willingness to pay. So I'm making a plan to get to that ASAP.””

You can find him on LinkedIn and if you want to get started with SpeakSoon, go ahead and fill this form!

🐶

What percentage of business cards get thrown away within a week?

A) 62%

B) 88%

C) 79%

D) 97%

_{You can find the answer at the end}