Stefan Debois and the Seven-Year Question

The birthday quiz was supposed to be about Pauline. Her father, Stefan Debois, made it for an iPad, with pictures, videos and trivia about his daughter. A child’s birthday supplied the brief; an engineer supplied the software. Nobody needed a procurement committee to decide whether the guests were having fun. The quiz had a pleasing bargain built into it: answer a question, get something back.

That bargain survived the party. Debois built Tabletquiz so other people could make iPad quizzes without programming them. A small personal project acquired users with rather different purposes. Teachers found it useful. AT&T used it at HR events. The audience had moved beyond birthday guests, and Debois started asking users what they were doing with the tool. Their answers made a business seem possible.

He had wanted to start something of his own for years. Software was familiar territory, but the particular opportunity emerged through use. In July 2012 he resigned from his job; by September, the paid version was ready. Survey Anyplace had begun. A free experiment had become a commitment with customers, payments and a future to work out. The party was over. The questions were only beginning.

An engineer learns to ask about the business

Debois traces his enjoyment of mathematics and science to a passionate schoolteacher, whom he remembers from around fifth grade. It is a small detail with a long tail. Before the software company, before the consulting projects, there was someone making a subject worth paying attention to. His later interest in engineering had an early human introduction.

He comes from Leuven, Belgium, and studied engineering. In the late 1990s he entered consulting at Price Waterhouse, which became PricewaterhouseCoopers. His career included IBM and CSC, with roughly 15 years spent around enterprise software. This was the world of large implementations, systems such as SAP and Oracle, and multinational clients. The task was to get substantial machinery working inside substantial organizations.

The experience gave him a close view of professional services. A firm sold expertise, but delivering more of it generally required more people. There were projects to implement, teams to coordinate and customers to understand. When Debois began making his own product, he brought that knowledge along. His future customers’ routines were already familiar to him. He had spent years on their side of the table.

Leaving the famous name at the door

Starting a company meant discovering how much of a consultant’s credibility had belonged to the employer. Debois has described the difficulty of leaving a recognizable corporate brand and introducing a business that nobody knew. A personal network helped with the first conversations. Reaching people beyond that network was a separate job. The software could work perfectly and still require an introduction.

Mark Penson became his co-founder and commercial counterpart. Debois concentrated on product and marketing; Penson handled sales and customer service. The pairing gave the business a division of labor grounded in their experience. Penson later moved into a board and advisory role, handing operational responsibilities to CCO Bart Vanden Wyngaerd in late 2023.

By 2017, Survey Anyplace had six employees alongside its two partners. Half worked on product development; the others covered marketing, sales and customer service. Debois described a company financed by its founders, with help from grants, subsidies and support programs. Increasing online customer acquisition was a priority. An entertaining questionnaire was the offering. Getting enough people to discover it was the daily business.

He also learned to write for that discovery. His published pieces included using quizzes in content marketing and collaborating with other businesses on promotion. These were practical subjects for someone trying to get a small software company noticed. There is a certain economy in a founder writing about a problem he is working on himself: the lesson has somewhere immediate to go.

Seven years, then the answer after the answers

The early proposition centered on the person filling in the survey. Mobile design, interactivity and game elements could make participation more enjoyable. That mattered because a more willing respondent could give a company better information. It also attracted competition. Other tools improved the experience, and a pleasing interface became harder to defend as a reason to buy.

Debois and the team tried narrower uses, including training and event surveys. An idea might look promising until enough work had gone into it to expose its limitations. Customers existed throughout this period, but the company was still searching for a use that would justify a clearer position. Seven years is a considerable amount of time to spend learning which part of your product people value most.

The recurring request was for a personalized report. Customers wanted the questionnaire’s answers to produce something useful for the respondent. In 2019, the team introduced that capability. A consultant could configure questions, scores and rules, then deliver recommendations automatically. The document could carry the consultant’s branding and reflect the individual answers. The person completing the assessment received a next step.

The distinction is easy to miss if you look only at the form. Both versions ask questions. Both collect information. But the new version gives the respondent a reason to care about the result beyond having finished. An expert’s method can reach someone without requiring the expert to assemble each report by hand. The birthday quiz’s original bargain had acquired a professional purpose.

A smaller market, a different name

Debois reported in July 2024 that annual growth had moved from about 10 percent to 40-50 percent after the assessment shift. He said the improvement followed relatively soon, rather than appearing on launch day. Existing search visibility helped the company reach assessment buyers, and paid search became viable for the more valuable offering. These are his historical figures, describing that transition.

In 2022, Survey Anyplace became Pointerpro. Dallas Antwerp worked on the new name and identity. “Pointer” referred to targeted feedback; “pro” to the professional character of the service. The old name described the questions more clearly than it described what now followed them. A rename made the company’s public introduction catch up with its product.

There is a useful restraint in that sequence. The product changed before the label did. A new name alone would have left Debois competing with the same tools for the same reasons. Personalized reporting changed what customers could accomplish. The branding then gave that change a shorter explanation. After a decade of running the company, he could introduce it with a different emphasis.

Independence, with a bank in the picture

By his November 2023 SaaS Club interview, Debois said Pointerpro had passed €3 million in annual recurring revenue and employed 29 people. Those numbers describe the company at that point. They also give the seven-year search some proportion: the business had become larger, but the route there had involved years of modest progress and decisions made within available resources.

The financing story is less tidy than a slogan about bootstrapping. Debois said early growth was too slow to attract venture capital. Later, stronger contract values and prepaid annual subscriptions made self-financing easier. The founders had become accustomed to watching expenditure. They kept that approach, then used bank debt to accelerate development of a new product around the end of 2022.

That choice leaves room for practical compromise. Independence need not require doing everything at the slowest affordable speed. Borrowing and selling ownership create different arrangements, and Debois described choosing traditional lending once recurring revenue could support repayment. In his account, the financing followed the business’s circumstances. A founder’s principles are more interesting when you can see the decisions they have to accommodate.

The kitesurfer who measures the jump

Outside work, Debois likes kitesurfing and cycling. His public biography even records a 7.7-meter kitesurfing jump and a 90-minute climb of Mont Ventoux. The engineer has supplied measurements for the recreation, too. He is married, has three children and lives in Antwerp. The software company is a large undertaking inside a life with other people and other interests.

His interest in connections also appears in marketing. He founded the B2B Bloggers Boost Group, where writers helped one another with content and mentions. Rather than making every introduction alone, he built a place where people could exchange help. It is an approach consistent with a product that asks what both sides get from an interaction.

He has described an incubator’s value in wonderfully ordinary terms: access to people, expertise, office space, and someone to talk to near the coffee machine. The coffee machine does a modest amount of work in most business histories. Here it earns its place. Coming from a two-person operation at home, having nearby peers changed the experience of building a company.

His advice about marketing has a similarly practical tone: “Double down on what works.” Experimentation still has a place, but a working channel deserves attention. After seven years of searching, that recommendation has some weight. Keeping an experiment alive and giving a successful idea enough effort are different tasks, and his career has required both.

“I think it’s perseverance. Never give up.”Stefan Debois · November 2023

Still working on what comes next

The later writing keeps returning to the professional expert. In August 2025, Debois published the CONSULT pathway, a framework for turning consulting knowledge into repeatable digital services. It addresses a problem he knew before founding Pointerpro: how to deliver more expertise without every additional client demanding the same additional hours. The product gives him a way to work on that question.

His 2026 posts discuss AI in that same setting. He argues that users should shape generated reports around their own frameworks and experience. Pointerpro’s AI prompt widget puts generation within the delivery process, with the expert’s methodology providing direction. The emphasis is on preserving the character of the advice while changing how it reaches people. The customer still brings the knowledge the tool is meant to carry.

Other updates are less glamorous and just as revealing. He has written about native integrations that move assessment data into other systems, reducing the exporting and copying that can remain after a report is automated. On August 7, 2026, he announced a rebuilt Questionnaire Builder. Reordering, grouping and structuring questions remained worth improving, years after the first quiz.

Debois’s ambition is to give professional service firms a digital companion to their human work: self-assessment, personalized advice and a way to follow progress. That asks for attention to many small steps. Someone has to formulate a good question. Someone has to decide what an answer means. Someone has to make the result understandable and useful. Software can carry those decisions, but the decisions come first.

The company began with a father making a quiz for his daughter. Its direction emerged when customers asked for more from the ending. Debois stayed long enough to hear that request and changed the business around it. The lasting question is the one waiting beyond the submit button: what does the person who just gave you their time get back?