“We help people manage their finances”: WieBetaaltWat success story

Below, you can find the whole recording of the interview with Matthijs along with a transcript.

Please introduce yourself. Who are you and what’s your role in the company?

My name is Matthijs Piëst, I’m the COO of Splitser/WieBetaaltWat.

I’m responsible for the daily operations at the company: finance, strategy but also emerging partnerships like the one we’ve got with The Software House.

Can you describe your product, WieBetaaltWat, using one sentence? What exactly a “bill-splitting app” means?

Splitser is an application which helps people manage their shared finances. Think about shared households or people who are travelling together. Thanks to the app, it’s easy to track all the expenses and, at the end of the day, pay off debts to each other.

How did you start your partnership with The Software House?

It all started with an Android application. Actually, the mother company WieBetaaltWat was part of had worked with The Software House on other projects before.

That’s how the whole contact started. We started with only one guy and he is still involved in the project, so it can give you the impression of how the project evolved. 

Before, we had our own team in Amsterdam, but we soon found out that it’s difficult to find the right people locally. Amsterdam is a quite competitive technology market. That’s also why we grew our partnership with The Software House.

We’re not looking for junior people who only do what they’re asked to, we rather look for smart people – let their voice be heard, let them be proactive.

Over the course of the last year, we’ve grown the team from 1 person to 7 people. It’s quite an extensive growth. Currently, we have 2 people for each of the operating systems – 2 Android developers, 2 iOS developers – also 1 frontend developer, 1 backend developer and, recently, we’ve started creating our own design team together with The Software House.

What are the effects of this collaboration? How popular is WieBetaaltWat?

It’s pretty successful. We’re leading in the cost-splitting area in the Netherlands. In the near future, we’ll be reaching a 1 million app downloads milestone. It gives you the impression of how big it is.

We know that the name – WieBetaaltWat is really difficult to pronounce for many people who are not living in the Netherlands. And one of our biggest ambitions is to become an European application in the game we’re in – sharing finances and peer to peer payments. We thought about a good name and we came up with the name Splitser. This is the brand we want to roll-out in different parts of Europe. It’s one of our big ambitions for the upcoming year, for the years to come.

What do you like the best about The Software House?

I think it’s a couple of things.

• The most important thing is quality.
• The second one is seniority and the people who are not only following the tasks to do but can work as a team, together.
• And the third thing is a cultural fit. Although we’re a Dutch company, the Polish culture in the way of working is also a “no-nonsense” one. We, Dutch, tend to be direct and that’s what we appreciate in the way Polish people work as well.

These three things are the most important for us when we look for a partner – and we found all of them in The Software House.

Make sure to check out WieBetaaltWat website.