Patrick van der Mijl and the message that missed the shop floor

A message pinned to a supermarket noticeboard has one obvious weakness: the person who needs it has to walk past. Patrick van der Mijl learned about that weakness while working in a Dutch supermarket. Price changes, promotions and product updates were travelling through printed notes. The shop floor was expected to keep up. The paper, naturally, had done its part.

Van der Mijl was studying and working alongside Erwin van der Vlist, who would become his co-founder. Their experience gave them a business problem with unusually little abstraction. They knew the people missing the messages. They knew the work those people were supposed to do. Before there was a software company, there was the nuisance of trying to get everyone informed.

Today van der Mijl is the co-founder and CEO of Speakap, based in Amsterdam. The company builds employee software for people in stores, hotels, factories and other workplaces where sitting at a computer is rarely the main event. His path into technology began with a practical question: how do you reach a colleague who is busy somewhere else?

A side project with a very literal name

The two future founders met through supermarket work in 2007. Their early business took shape as Supermarktcentrale in 2009. Its name left little room for misunderstanding. The problem was equally plain: shift-based teams needed a convenient place to exchange information, arrange work and stay in touch. A digital meeting place could do jobs that a collection of pigeonholes and phone lists did awkwardly.

Neither founder was a programmer. They commissioned development while keeping other jobs. Van der Mijl worked in real estate; his published career history places him at De Boer Makelaardij from July 2008 until December 2010. This was a side project growing alongside an ordinary career, with all the divided attention that implies.

In 2011 they committed to the company full time. Supermarktcentrale became Speakap, and the business moved to Amsterdam. A name tied to one kind of shop gave way to something that could travel. The founders had identified a wider audience for the difficulty they already understood: employees whose working day did not come with an inbox.

The usefulness of being specific

Early descriptions of Speakap reached for a familiar comparison: Facebook for companies. It was understandable. Social networks had made posting, commenting and sharing photographs feel ordinary. Bringing that familiarity to work reduced the amount an employee needed to learn. Still, the comparison risked making the business sound more general than its founders intended.

Van der Mijl described a much more particular proposition in 2017. Speakap could reflect the layers of a retail organisation. At Rituals, for example, communication could be organised around countries, stores and regions. The point was to put a useful message in front of the appropriate group, rather than invite the entire company to rummage through everything.

That distinction gave him a way to compete with companies that had far more money and name recognition. He was selling knowledge of a working environment: the structure of a store network, the needs of its employees and the routes information should take. Familiar social features were the entrance. Understanding the organisation was the harder work behind them.

His ambition was international even then. In a 2017 account of the business, he said Dutch customers supplied 75 percent of revenue and that he wanted the share eventually to fall to 10 percent. That was a target, rather than a result. It shows how early he was thinking beyond the market where the company began.

Twelve months before a yes

The sales process imposed its own discipline. By late 2017 van der Mijl was describing deals that could take twelve to eighteen months. A large employer was making a decision about how thousands of people would communicate, so the conversation involved more than someone finding a spare company credit card.

He discussed a German customer with 50,000 employees, whose name he could not disclose. The scale helped explain the patience required. An app could be straightforward to use while being complicated to introduce. The buyer had to consider the organisation around it: managers, departments, existing systems and people who might have perfectly good reasons to resist another login.

It is a revealing combination in his career. The original irritation was immediate and everyday. Building a business around fixing it required long sales cycles and a tolerance for waiting. The supermarket had supplied the idea. Enterprise buying supplied the calendar.

External recognition arrived along the way. Speakap won Sprout’s Startup of the Year title for 2013. In March 2017, after its retail innovation award, van der Mijl rang the gong to open trading at the Amsterdam exchange. For once, getting everybody’s attention required no app at all.

A founder learns to hand things over

There is a useful lack of vanity in van der Mijl’s account of an early hiring decision. The founders chose a relatively inexperienced development team because it cost less. Looking back in 2019, he said ten junior developers had been unable to achieve what two senior developers could have done. Headcount had looked reassuring; experience would have been more useful.

He also reconsidered the impulse to perfect a product before testing demand. Screens and clickable demonstrations, he argued, could help establish whether customers wanted something before the team finished building it. Those reflections suggest a founder willing to describe his own judgment as a work in progress.

His management advice includes delegating work that other people can handle. He has described a daily effort to distinguish tasks that need his attention from those better entrusted to colleagues. A company built to improve communication still needs its founder to let other people answer.

“If you hire smart people, then you have to trust them to execute.”

Patrick van der Mijl, in a TecHR interview

A public recommendation from former colleague Alex Henke describes an accessible leader who combines support with challenge. It is one colleague’s assessment, but it fits the practical concern in van der Mijl’s own comments: hiring capable people has limited value if the founder then insists on being the bottleneck.

The chatbot that tried his patience

His enthusiasm for technology has a useful qualification: he expects it to help. In an interview addressing the technology landscape of 2019, he recalled a frustrating customer-support chatbot. It kept asking questions without understanding his problem. Eventually, he requested a person. The proposed shortcut had developed a fondness for the scenic route.

In that same conversation, he expressed interest in virtual agents that could answer employee questions inside Speakap. The two positions sit comfortably together. He could see the purpose of automated help while being irritated by a version that failed at it. His test was the time and attention demanded from the person using the tool.

The same practical instinct appeared in his partnership with Guy Van Neck’s MobieTrain. Asked why the companies integrated their products rather than building everything themselves, he pointed to speed and efficiency. MobieTrain understood learning; Speakap understood communication. An open API allowed the two capabilities to work together without either team spending years recreating the other’s expertise.

For employees, that partnership connected communication with learning and exchanges between colleagues. For van der Mijl, it also expressed a view of company building: knowing what to build includes recognising when someone else has already done useful work.

A longer distance to the shop floor

By April 2024, Speakap was reporting roughly 600 customer companies. Van der Mijl was still talking about reaching frontline employees, now from the position of a CEO with an international business. The customer names included Bosch, Pathé and Hotel Okura. Growth in the United States remained an expressed priority, supported by a team in New York.

He was also discussing the employee experience alongside Andrea Popma, Speakap’s customer success leader, in an April 2024 webinar. The subject extended beyond sending announcements to the experience of working inside an organisation. His product responsibilities had been visible earlier too: in 2019, he was identified as Speakap’s chief product officer.

Speakap’s August 2025 account of its development described a platform combining communication with onboarding, a knowledge base, tasks and workforce analytics. That expansion carries a demanding question for its co-founder. Each additional function must remain useful to people whose attention is already occupied by customers, colleagues and the work in front of them.

Van der Mijl’s story keeps returning to that constraint. A message can be written carefully, approved diligently and published promptly, then fail to help anyone who needs it. His working life has taken him from a supermarket and a real estate job to leading a software company across markets. The measure he began with is still pleasantly unforgiving: did the person on the floor get the message?