Blake

Everything creators need to build a successful business.

Founder

The Cirqle

The Influencer Platform for Performance Marketers.

Founder & CEO

Forbes Agency Council

Founder of The Cirqle | Official Member of the Forbes Agency Council

Official Member

SALLE PRIVÉE - 

Favouring a seasonless approach over trend-driven fashion, Mr Patrick Munsters founded Salle Privée to create the ultimate functional wardrobe. Each piece combines quality materials with meticulous Italian craftsmanship.

Advisor

Emerce

I write monthly columns about topics related to technology, innovation, marketing and entrepreneurship.

Columnist

Fray

Fray is a marketplace that allows users to buy and sell goods and services with people from their local community. Fray is the solution for the working mother who needs a babysitter, the homeowner who needs a handyman, or the small business that needs an errand completed.

Republish

Republish offers document digitization tools for publishers/businesses, hospitals and governments to transform paper-books into a reflowable format to revolutionize the ways content owners edit, access, retain, publish and monetize content.

Co-Founder

Kauffman Foundation

For six months, Kauffman Global Scholars study, exchange ideas, and work with U.S. entrepreneurial experts. The groundbreaking program offers aspiring entrepreneurs:

Direct access to American researchers, business founders, and policymakers who give scholars the insights to foster entrepreneurship in their own countries and to transform their entrepreneurial dreams into reality.
Mentors who individually guide and coach each Scholar throughout the course of the six-month program.
Visits to leading American universities like Harvard, MIT and Stanford to exchange ideas with faculty, students, and those engaged in innovative, entrepreneurial work.
Three-month entrepreneurship internships at innovative entrepreneurial companies. Here, the Scholars experience the real-life challenges and rewards of entrepreneurship and, in turn, share their skills and talents with the mentoring companies.

Kauffman Global Scholar '11

Adobe Systems

Developed business strategy for a seed product in the display advertising, consumer loyalty and data privacy space. Determine target markets, necessary features and functionality, and go-to-market strategy for an early-stage software project.

Intern at Advanced Technology Labs

Erasmus School of Economics

Deze functie bestaat uit het uitvoeren van activiteiten ten behoeve van de werving van nieuwe studenten en het mede organiseren van een aantal voorlichtingsactiviteiten, waaronder de EUR Najaarsdag en het Proefstuderen.

Student Assistent Onderwijsmarketing

Steven Lammertink is a serial entrepreneur and the Founder & CEO of The Cirqle, the world's first conversion-driven influencer marketing platform. With over 9 years of experience in leading and growing The Cirqle, he has raised $2.5 million in funding and secured partnerships with global brands such as Samsung, LG, Scotch & Soda, and Manchester City. He is also a Kauffman Scholar, a prestigious program that selects and trains the most promising entrepreneurs from around the world.

Steven's mission is to enable advertiser to create, distribute and scale creative for performance through 1 million influencers, amplify into niche audiences and drive revenues. He is an expert in social media marketing for the largest companies on the globe, and online advertising, and specialist in technology-driven software businesses. He also served as an advisor to numerous brands, including Salle Privée, a luxury fashion label that favors a seasonless approach over trend-driven fashion.

Going through bankruptcy would have been easier.

That's the harsh reality of my agency-to-software leap.

Since my last post about going from 75-person agency to 10-person SaaS with @The Cirqle, people have been asking:

"How did you actually do it?"

People told me it was going to be hard to transition from an agency to a software company. I learned just how hard…

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗱𝗶𝗱𝗻'𝘁 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸 (& 𝘄𝗵𝘆):

At first, we tried to retrofit our agency people into software people – that was wishful thinking. It doesn't work.

Agency people are great at client management, campaign execution, and building relationships. But building scalable software? Completely different skill set. You can't train your way out of this fundamental mismatch.

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘄𝗲 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗵𝗮𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗱𝗼:

Strip everything down. We went from 75 people all the way down to 10 - almost all technical people who could build our software.

𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲:
The transition took us about a year. Then letting go of a lot of people took another whole year.

𝗜𝘁 𝘄𝗮𝘀:
• Painful: Letting go of great people who'd been with us for years
• Expensive: Maintaining two business models during the transition
• Emotionally draining: I found myself questioning everything during this phase

Honestly, I often think in hindsight we should have just gone through bankruptcy.

But in the end it was the best decision I ever made.

Because out of the destruction came crystal-clear focus: we were going to solve the measurement problem that brands desperately needed.

Instead of managing 60 people doing manual campaign work, we built technology that does what agencies can't: track revenue down to the dollar, predict creator performance, and scale without adding headcount.

Today we're going for 300% growth year-over-year, while fully bootstrapped, with a product that would have been impossible to build as an agency.

→ Thinking about making a similar transition? I'm always happy to share more details in private with other founders. The brutally honest version - DM me.

Steven Lammertink

7,000 influencer platforms worldwide, but only a handful with Meta's stamp of approval – we're one of them. ✅

Here's the story of how we got it:

"Meta Marketing Partner" status is a big deal. A ton of our clients now directly come from Meta referrals. 🙏

It took me 3 years to get that badge for The Cirqle | Meta & TikTok Marketing Partner:

- 3 years of knocking on Meta's doors to prove we were fundamentally different from every other influencer marketing platform

- 3 years of demonstrating the infrastructure we'd built that lets you run ads from a creator's account in a seamless way

- 3 years of showing we are the only one really focused on bottom of funnel performance

Most platforms just help brands create a campaign, do a bit of contracting, creator identification and that's about it.

The starting point with us is integrating your Meta ad account (or your @TikTok ad account, or your Shopify store).

We use that to build infrastructure and lay the plumbing for brands, agencies and advertisers to be able to run ads from the creator's account, not just from your own account.

That's the system we've built. At scale. Our account tracks $100 million in ad spend across our customer base. 

And these platform partnerships, like with Meta, matter:

When you're one of only a handful of companies in the world with this level of platform access, it changes everything.

I'll be speaking at Meta's Creator Summit in New York this Thursday October 9th. If you're going, let's connect – drop a comment or DM me. 👋

The wait is over: brands can now turn influencer content into sponsored ads - without ever leaving The Cirqle.

Until now, influencer marketing stopped short of its true potential. Brands invested in creators, saw organic traction, and then lost momentum chasing permissions, exporting content, and trying to scale what was already working.

With our new in-platform Creator Ads integration, that entire process is seamless. From AI discovery, to contracting, approval and automated ad creation, you can now request permissions, launch Instagram and Facebook (!) Partnership Ads, and track performance directly inside The Cirqle.

This is a fundamental shift in how influencer ROI is achieved. Our AI pinpoints which creators drive sales, and in the same workflow, you can amplify their best content with paid spend, combining authenticity with precision targeting and real attribution.

The results are undeniable: $8x return (revenue!) for every $1 spent in influencer marketing, with some campaigns delivering as high as $33. With The Cirqle | Meta & TikTok Marketing Partner, those results are no longer the exception, they’re scalable, predictable, and fully performance-driven.

A huge thank you to our partners at Meta and specifically Marc Milowski, Joana Rocha, Reyna Baker, and Orgil Batzaya for your collaboration in bringing this to life.

The Cirqle is the only AI-backed performance influencer platform with 1st party data. And now, it’s the only place you can take creator content from discovery to paid amplification in seconds.

Huge thanks to our incredible team for the launch Jean de Bressy, Mat Jenkins, Prerak Sola, Mikel Porras Hoogland and Jesse Dijkman

At The Cirqle, we're targeting 300% growth by EOY, all while bootstrapped. Here's what's driving our momentum (it's probably not what you think):

1. Solving the Right Problem: While most platforms focus on creator discovery, we solve the real problem brands desperately need solved: revenue growth and measurement

2. Product Moat: We've built the infrastructure that lets brands track creator campaign revenue down to the dollar. So they know expected ROI before they even contract a creator

3. Meta/TikTok Partnership: We're one of only a handful vetted Meta/TikTok marketing partners globally in the influencer space. Many of our clients now come from Meta referrals across the globe

But here's what makes this more interesting and special (in my opinion anyway!):

We're fully bootstrapped. We've never taken outside investment or loans at @The Cirqle, and we've been profitable from the very beginning of our SaaS journey.

Being bootstrapped made us much more conscious about costs, choices and what we're investing in - you can't afford to waste money on nice-to-haves when every bit counts towards your survival and growth.

Right now we're investing heavily in product – because that's our moat. And once our product's even more solid than it is already, we'll invest more in growth.

The advantage is we have a very clear line of sight into revenue and profit. Being bootstrapped forces us to focus relentlessly on what matters: building something customers actually want and will pay for.

Our internal North Star metric is to drive exponential revenue growth for our customers, as per the graph below. We have a very simple thesis: if our customers are successful with the software, so are we.

And the results already speak for themselves. We're at 175% mostly organic growth already this year, and expect to end somewhere around 300%.

Would I do it again bootstrapped? Maybe, but it's also freaking hard! (but that’s a story for another day)

→ Are you bootstrapped? What do you think is the biggest (dis)advantage?

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