A conversation with Ludovic Diercxsens, co-founder and CEO of Driven, about building twice, raising €1.5M, and why distribution beats product every time.

Picture this.

You've had a killer month. Three major contracts closed. Quarterly targets hit two weeks early. But as the end of the month approaches, the excitement fades into uncertainty.

You open your personal Excel file. The one you maintain alongside the company's official records. You start calculating your commission. Base salary, multi-year contract bonuses, churn deductions. The math becomes a blur. You won't see an official statement for another three months. And even then, the number on your paycheck rarely matches the one in your head.

This is the reality for some sales reps at companies across the world. And it's the problem Ludovic Diercxsens decided to fix.

Ludovic starts his mornings with a flat white. He always tries to make latte art.

It's a small ritual. A moment of craft before the day takes over. Because once it does, his mind rarely stops.

"The hardest part of this journey is that your mind is constantly thinking about the business. It's very hard to shut it off. I'm not sure if it's ever going to stop."

That kind of obsession has a cost. It also has an output. In a few years, Ludovic has co-founded two companies, raised €1.5 million, and built a product that's quietly solving one of the most persistent problems in B2B sales.

But he didn't get there in a straight line.

Before Driven, there was Kloze. And before Kloze, there was a question he had to answer honestly: how do you start a company when you have no idea if the idea will work?

His answer was to not quit his job yet.

Ludovic was working at Loop Earplugs, one of Belgium's fastest-growing companies, when he and his co-founders began exploring ideas. Two days a week, he stayed at Loop, keeping 60% of his wage. The rest of his time went into figuring out whether there was a real business to build.

"In the first months I would not have been able to add a lot of value."

His boss Dimitri had been given the same opportunity at a previous company. So he understood. That support mattered more than Ludovic expected.

For him, the half-half model wasn't a compromise. It was the path forward. “You don't know if a business case exists until you look for it. And looking takes time you shouldn't give up a salary for.”

Ludovic and Tom De Kooning met at university. They ran an investment club together where students pooled money, buying stocks, learning how markets work.

Tom went to school with Andres De Jonge. So Tom brought them all together.

Three people. Complementary skills from the start. Ludovic on the commercial side, Tom as CPO working with designers and focusing on what to build next, Andres as CTO handling backend technology and AI implementation.

"We're a very good team. A lot of trust. The fact that we can say what we think to each other and talk about things."

That foundation would matter more than any of them expected.

Kloze was a product for the Belgian real estate market. They did the work properly. They made a list of every real estate broker and agent in Belgium, identified their actual focus market within that, and talked to about half of them.

They converted 10% of their focus market. Real traction. Real customers. Real revenue.

But then they looked at the numbers.

The entire Belgian real estate market was about 5,000 brokers and agents. That was the ceiling. And to grow beyond it, they'd have to go international. France, Germany, bigger markets. But real estate regulations are different in every country. They'd have to rebuild the product from scratch for every border they crossed.

"At some point you realize this is not going to make a big company. Our ambitions were not aligned with the business case."

So they stopped. 

"It was not easy. We built a product, we found a market. And then you're sitting in a room, you realize you're not going to continue with this, but you have no idea what's next."

No clear path forward. A runway of a few months. Three people staring at each other in a room.

"We go to sleep, you can't sleep, you wake up, you talk more about it."

They started looking at problems around them. Problems that were recurring, not one-off. Problems that hit every month, every quarter, not just once. Sales remuneration kept coming up. And the more conversations they had with CEOs, CFOs, and operators, the clearer it became.

This was the market. And this time, it felt completely different.

"With Driven, since we started it has been full gas. The opportunity is way bigger."

Back to that sales rep with the Excel file.

What they're doing has a name: shadow accounting. Instead of selling, they're spending hours checking their own math, maintaining a parallel spreadsheet because they don't trust the official one. Motivation quietly erodes. Trust slowly breaks down.

On the manager's side, it's just as bad. Compensation plans get complicated. KPIs pile up. Nobody can explain the plan in under 20 seconds. And nobody can tell whether any of it is actually changing behaviour.

Driven fixes both sides.

For sales reps: real-time visibility into exactly what they're earning. Every deal, every stage, every number. Transparent and live. No more waiting, no more spreadsheets, no more surprises. The moment a deal closes, they see what they've earned.

For managers: analytical performance data that connects compensation to behaviour. Are reps pushing deals to next quarter because they've already hit a threshold? Did close rates shift when the comp plan changed? Driven shows you the patterns you'd otherwise never see.

And now, an AI agent that does the analysis for you. Telling managers what's working, what isn't, which KPIs are actually driving behaviour and which ones are just noise. Always in an advisory role. The manager still decides. But now they decide with data.

"Like consultants or sales compensation experts do, but on a daily basis."

Around 15 clients so far. Implementation time cut from six months to six hours. No implementation fees. No platform fees. Just a simple price per seat.

This is something most SaaS founders don't think about enough: timing.

Ludovic is very specific about when Driven becomes essential. There's a moment.

New quarter. New comp plan. Nobody knows it yet. Everything changed. The team needs to understand it, trust it, and start working toward it.

That's the moment. That's when a company will move fast to implement Driven. Mid-cycle, with six months of spreadsheets already done, is a much harder sell.

"That's the sweet spot. And that's when we want to be there."

Driven raised €1.5 million at pre-seed. From first contact to close: two to three months.

The trick wasn't a perfect pitch deck.

"We first started to contact people without really being in raise mode, to just already have some contacts. And then we suddenly went into full raise mode."

A few VCs pushed back. Questioned the business plan, the valuation, the assumptions. But then commitments started coming in. And once a few people commit, others follow.

More than 10 investors now. Angels, Pitchdrive VC, New School VC among them.

But the money didn't release the pressure. It shifted it.

"It's maybe three months later, because you did the round, you said it was a pre-seed, you had an MVP, so now you have to build a product that needs to be live by that date."

Accountability to yourself is one thing. Accountability to investors who believed you is another. That's when the pressure becomes real.

Ludovic has spent enough time in this space to have a sharp view on where companies consistently go wrong.

The main mistake: complexity.

"If you can't explain your comp plan in 20 seconds, it's already too complicated. One or two KPIs. Three at most. Trackable. Directly linked to the behaviour you actually want. More than that and the behavioral impact gets diluted. People stop understanding what they're working toward.”

For a first-time sales leader hiring their first AEs, he's very specific.

“Set a clear OTE. Define the base-to-variable split upfront. Build in acceleration: a lower commission rate until reps hit 50% of quota, then step it up as they exceed targets. And hire two reps at the same time. If you only hire one, you can never tell whether the results are about the person or the plan. Two gives you a comparison.”

For sales reps evaluating an offer, go well beyond the OTE number.

"Ask what the top earner makes within the company. If your OTE is 100K and the top earner makes 110K, then you know. But if the top earner makes 700K, you can do the math."

And one more thing he's seen hurt early-stage companies more than almost anything else: chasing the wrong customers.

"A big mistake is trying to convince bad customers or non-ICP customers because you need to get a deal. You just want to close, but then you realize the setup is hard, the value isn't there, the impact isn't there."

For Driven, the ICP is clear: B2B SaaS companies with at least 10 sales reps. 

Ludovic is direct about the lesson that took him longest to learn.

"Be able to tell the right story before you build the product. Check if your story resonates before trying to build something that does it all."

A lot of founders believe that if they build something that solves a real problem, the sales will follow. They almost never do.

"Distribution is way more important."

From Loop, he's borrowed two things.

The first is culture. Work hard, play hard. Celebrate wins together. Make sure the team does things together, not just works together.

The second is the marketing playbook: test every channel, find where ROI is highest, and double down hard. At Loop, every channel had a team behind it. The better the channel performed, the bigger the team got, the bigger the budget grew. That's what Ludovic wants to replicate with Driven.

One regret: not going deeper into international founder communities earlier. The Antwerp and Ghent ecosystems are strong. But the input from founders operating at a global scale, earlier in the journey, would have changed some decisions.

He splits his time between The Beacon in Antwerp and Wintercircus in Ghent, where he goes once or twice a week. But Antwerp is home. And the Beacon's floor of startups is where the day-to-day gets built.

The team today is six people. A senior developer hire is next. Then the commercial side: marketing, sales, support. Small core team, heavily assisted by agencies, freelancers, and AI.

"We also took some more time to really build a good product first. Q4 2025 and Q1 this year, we saw we had to improve some key product aspects before really starting to scale and sell."

The €1M ARR target is on the board. They're not there yet. And Ludovic says it plainly.

"You always have to be ambitious and at least aim for a goal that can be met. The fact that you just say it shows what your ambition is and that you won't be satisfied with anything else."

Ludovic Diercxsens has built two companies, walked away from one that was working, and raised €1.5 million for the next one.

He started with a structured search: talking to CEOs, CFOs, and operators until the pain was undeniable and the market was big enough.

He'll tell you the product is rarely what makes or breaks a startup. The story is. The distribution is. And the team you're willing to stay in the room with at 2am when there's no clear way forward.

The flat white is just the beginning of the day.

The mind doesn't stop until much later.

Question: If you look at yourself at 80 years old, what's one thing that you would regret not doing if you continue the same way?

Ludovic’s answer: “Probably like a big trip with my family. I think if you're 80 years old, whatever you do in business, not going to be that important at that age. It's gonna be what you do with your family and friends, and the memories you make with them.“

You can find her on LinkedIn!

🌞