Founder @ Drilldown | Custom-designed business dashboards for B2B SaaS that deliver insights in one click, eliminating the need for complex spreadsheets in just 60 days.

We help B2B SaaS teams build an owned data system - so metrics align across the organization and growth decisions are based on evidence.

This might resonate:

As B2B SaaS companies scale, it becomes harder to understand on where growth comes from and what to do next.

Most teams already have dashboards, data integrations, and the technical ability to build new ones. 

Yet they still struggle to agree on what metrics mean, explain drivers of revenue, or produce reliable forecasts.

What you need is one set of accurate, explainable numbers that your team can rely on.

Our work focuses on the data system underneath dashboards: the definitions, structure, and logic that determine whether analytics can support decision-making at scale.

If you’re trying to make decisions based on data but the numbers don’t line up, this explains why: https://thomasvarekamp.substack.com/p/you-have-dashboards-why-are-decisions

Thomas Varekamp

2025 in a nutshell (the good, the neutral and the bad):

The bad:

- marketing & positioning is still a challenge.
- life was very unbalanced → more stress.
- wasted a ton of money (but learned a lot).

The neutral:

- moved to Amsterdam (for a couple of months).
- got a bigger office (which we closed down).
- updated our website (like 20+ times).

The good:

- helped 11 companies with data & analytics.
- revenue grew by +30%.
- hired first full-time employee.
- got clearer on what I want from life.
- grew as a person (I feel more peaceful).

All in all, 2025 was a good year. But my goal is to make 2026 even better.

So this is what we will be doing in 2026:

Change 1: we’re becoming remote-first.

I want to travel more and have more control over my time. Everyone that works for Drilldown can work wherever they want.

Change 2: a new offer.

A recurring theme from clients was how much they valued that their teams could own and maintain the systems after we were done.

Our new offer is much more focused on transferring knowledge, not creating dependency.

Change 3: make things simpler.

From now on we're only going to focus on:

- 1 client profile: B2B SaaS leaders >$1M+ ARR.
- 1 outcome: helping you see what’s driving ARR.

I genuinely feel the right foundations are in place to make 2026 our best year ever, both personally and professionally.

Huge thanks to everyone we worked with in 2025.

Hope to build more together next year!

Best,
Thomas

ps. here’s a photo from my first surfing lesson, a fitting way to wrap up a year of trying new things, failing, and learning :)

Drilldown | Helping B2B SaaS leaders regain control by turning data into direction.

I spent €20,000 building a data platform. This year, I’m shutting it down.

Most of our clients use Dutch software to run their business.

To build great dashboards, we need to pull this data out of the tools.

The common data extraction tools do not support these sources. 

So I decided to build our own extraction tool called the Drilldown Extraction Hub: 

- fixed price.
- unlimited data.
- custom support.

On paper, it made sense. 

We onboarded a few customers and within a short time it was doing around €400 MRR. But then sucky part started.

Connectors started breaking, APIs changed, edge cases appeared…

Everything required constant custom work.

Problem #1: data extraction is not an easy one-time build. You need permanent maintenance.

Problem #2: Instead of fully focusing on what we are actually good at (analytics for B2B SaaS), I was now splitting attention between client work and engineering work. 

Not good.

By the end of last year, I made the call to stop. 

We still support existing customers, but for new clients we use existing tools.

My big lesson: focus is extremely important. Especially in the stages we’re at (~€220k revenue / year).

Keep building!

Most people know HeyReach.io as the LinkedIn tool that sprinted to $10M ARR in 29 months. Few know the real story of how they started.

- before the 2,900 monthly trial signups.
- before the 4,000+ paying customers.
- before the 8-figure revenue.

---

The founders actually began their journey in Macedonia, an place they described as "prehistoric" for startups.

Their first venture, Howitzer, burned through $500k as they fell into the "White Knight" trap: trying to hire expensive managers to fix their problems.

It didn't work. 

So they decided to build a product where they owned the growth. 

That was v0 of HeyReach.io.

---

In 2023, with only 3 months of cash left, they negotiated a life-saving AppSumo deal at 2:00 AM in a club.

That cash injection allowed them to answer the question:

“𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘥𝘰 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘴𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘦 𝘰𝘶𝘵𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘤𝘩 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘺𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘯 𝘱𝘢𝘪𝘥 𝘢𝘥𝘴?”

They positioned themselves as the LinkedIn layer of the modern sales stack (Clay + Smartlead + HeyReach). 

They exploded.

Between 2023 and 2025 they saw:

→ 10-15% Month-over-Month growth.
→ A surge to 2,900+ free trials per month.

Then, data visibility became the bottleneck.

Stripe couldn't handle the complexity of their growth and caused internal chaos. 

The CEO would see $20k in "churn" and demand answers, while it was just failed payments that would be recovered the next day. 

As Ilija Stojkovski put it: 

"𝘞𝘦 𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 𝘧𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘴 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘤𝘶𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘦𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘥𝘪𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘵𝘰𝘱𝘪𝘤𝘴. 𝘕𝘰 𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘩𝘢𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘢𝘮𝘦 𝘴𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘤𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘵𝘩."

---

That's when we crossed paths and helped them at Drilldown to build a custom data infrastructure in just 4 weeks.

We moved them off generic dashboards and built a single source of truth.

In December 2025, HeyReach.io officially crossed $10M ARR.

They’ve proven that world-class tech companies can be built from anywhere.

My 8 unpopular opinions on B2B SaaS analytics in 2026:

1. CAC:LTV is mostly a vanity metric. It tells you where you stand, not what to fix.  Cool for VCs, useless for your team. 

2. Averages are your enemy. Segment your data to find your biggest growth levers.

3. Having 100% accurate numbers is overrated. Knowing trends over time and direction is more important.

4. If you are spending $5k/month on data tools before having product-market fit, you're being robbed.

5. Using "Free" open-source tools is EXPENSIVE. Buying a managed service is almost always cheaper than your hourly rate spent debugging.

6. Founders: if you're spending Saturdays fixing broken pipelines, that is a failure of prioritization. Your time is worth more than a Weld subscription.

7. AI writes great code, but it will never 100% understand your business. Humans must be responsible for insights.

8. Context > code. The hardest part of data is not technical. It's understanding how the business works.

Data analytics can have huge impact on your business, both positive and negative.

Good luck!

Currently digging in some B2B SaaS that used analytics to reach $1B+ valuation. Did you know this about Slack?

Slack began as an internal tool for a failing gaming company. 

When they analyzed the retention data, they found a specific “magic number”: 2,000 messages. 

Teams with fewer than 2,000 messages were likely to churn, but teams that crossed this had a 93% retention rate.

They engineered their entire onboarding and “freemium” limit around this metric. 

The free plan allows users to view 10,000 messages, giving teams enough space to blow past the 2,000-message “hook” before hitting a paywall.

This retention engineering helped Slack become the fastest-growing enterprise app in history, eventually acquired by Salesforce for $27.7 billion.

Crazy stuff

After building the same dashboards, data structures, and metrics 10+ times, I stopped rebuilding them from scratch.

I call this the SaaS intelligence system. 

It gives every SaaS company the things they should already have, but often don’t:

1. accurate, real-time ARR waterfalls everyone agrees on.
2. dashboards to go from revenue → accounts → users.
3. metric dictionaries so definitions don’t live in people’s heads.

That alone removes hours of manual work and discussions.

But the real benefit comes from what this foundation enables:

1. data enrichment → reach better users.
2. marketing attribution → acquire more of them.
3. customer health scoring → reduce churn.

It gives leadership and operators a reliable system to make decisions, without needing a big data team for maintenance.

The cool part: everything runs from the data warehouse.

That’s what the SaaS Intelligence System is: the core data setup most B2B SaaS teams end up rebuilding anyway.

I put together a short doc showing the 5 dashboards we recommend for $2M–$10M B2B SaaS teams. 

This is what that foundation looks like in practice.

A Practical Dashboard Standard for $2M–$10M B2B SaaS

Michel Brok 🎯

Tracking Architects

Tracking Architects empowers eCommerce and funnel website owners to maximize revenue from their marketing efforts through advanced server-side conversion tracking and data analytics.

Eigenaar

Team6

Team6 helps FMCG and retail businesses to improve business performance with data. Our focus is to make strategies work by bringing ways of working, data and technology together.

Founder

A.S. Watson Group

Helping the marketing team to use data to 1) make better decisions in target audiences, offerings and content and 2) increase relevancy and therefore increase customer lifetime value. 

Results:

- Created and implemented the CRM Data Strategy
- Implemented cross-functional CRM data team
- Implemented the CRM data-driven process
- Implemented algorithms for optimizing promos

Data Lead CRM a.i.

Danone

Leading 2nd Digital Transformation wave of the Dutch CBU for all Danone brands (dairy, plant based, medical & baby). Build the data foundation to take better decisions and actions to drive business value for the CBU.  

* Developed the data strategy and roadmap together with senior management
* Build the cross-functional data team overseeing data analytics, data science, architecture and platform
* Managed the local data platform and architecture (Azure) implementation
* Managed the integration of all digital channels in Azure data lake
* Delivered 3 use cases: customer 360 together with CDP, Marketing Mix Modeling & MROI (causal attribution)

Head of Data

Leading the Digital Transformation for the Benelux BU with focus on improved customer experience. 

* Building the digital environment and BU digital capabilities
* Transforming marketing strategy and operating model
* Shape and build the marketing technology stack, integrate within marketing operations
* Delivering and activation of digital products & services
* Leading design, experience, digital product & engineering teams

Head of Digital

E.ON

Responsible for e-commerce and digital marketing for the residential, SME market and large enterprises.

* Development and implementation of the digital transformation roadmap for the Benelux cluster
* Development and execution of the digital marketing & e-commerce strategy to drive brand awareness, customer acquisition, retention and NPS 
* Marketing technology: implementation of the Adobe CMS and migration existing digital platform, implementation of the customer self-service portal and connection between digital platform and SAP
* Management and optimization of traffic channels  SEA, SEO, affiliates, retargeting campaigns, display advertising and online partners
* Management and optimization of webconversion with A/B testing, data analytics and UX-optimization
* Implementation of the E.ON self service portal to increase self service and drive NPS and decrease costs
* Implemented Lean wow and performance driven mindset
* Managing and coaching multi-disciplinary online team (4 fte)
* Operational excellence day-2-day optimization working method

Team Manager Online Marketing

Essent

Responsible for online sales and lead generation for residential and SME market.

	Defined and implemented annual online sales plan, defined targets, budgets and weekly sales forecast
	Accelerated performance based sales & lead generation by optimize traffic sources (display advertising, SEA, SEO, affiliates) and CRO for Essent.nl. Managed referral and price comparison websites
	Implemented marketing campaigns ATL/BTL in online channels in collaboration with marketing and sales department 
	P&L responsible for digital sales

Digital Marketing Manager

Tribal

Helping clients driving business growth with developing and executing online marketing strategy focussed on increasing website traffic and conversion optimization.   

	Development and implementation of new online advertising campaigns to increase numbers of leads and / or sales
	Managed and optimized existing SEA and SEO campaigns
	Aligned projects with usability and web analytics experts 
	Evaluated campaigns by analysis with Google Analytics
	Reporting to customers and team lead

Online Marketing Consultant

Lensvelt Medical

Improving company awareness and developing customer service proposition to support customer acquisition and relationships.


	Development and implementation operational marketing plan
	Coordinated and implemented marketing activities such as product / price promotions, trade fairs, managed and implemented online advertising campaigns, website optimization and e-mail marketing
	development of services products and related concepts and responsible for activation via website, sales channel and fairs

Marketing Specialist

Marketing Automation & Data Expert | Helping retail & CPG to drive customer engagement at scale.

Business & Agency Owners – Listen Up:

The #1 reason your ad campaigns hit a wall?

INACCURATE DATA.

It’s the frustration holding back ambitious advertisers like you — those who are ready to scale but can’t break through.

At this stage, you’re trying to lower ad costs and increase value. But if the data you rely on is off, making the right decisions becomes nearly impossible.

Here’s the real issue:

Inaccurate data doesn’t just impact your decisions — it also sabotages the advertising algorithm.

The better your data, the better the algorithm can identify your best customers.

But getting accurate data and conversion tracking right is easier said than done.

That’s where the Data-Driven Scaling Formula comes in — putting accurate conversion tracking at the core of your strategy.

The Data-Driven Scaling Formula empowers ambitious business owners like you to scale faster by leveraging the right data at the right time.

The formula is made up of three key parts:

	1.	Enhanced Performance Tracking: Best-in-class server-side tracking combined with smart data usage throughout the entire customer journey. This ensures both you and the advertising algorithm are making better decisions and taking smarter actions.

	2.	Precision Algorithm Training: Fueling your advertising algorithm with high-quality data to significantly improve targeting. Now, you’re only spending money on customers who bring real value.

	3.	Transform Data into Growth: Gain control over your business’s growth by understanding what works — and what doesn’t — in both marketing and sales.

Curious about how we’ve helped others scale smarter?

Send me a DM, and let’s chat!

-----

Hi, I’m Michel – The Conversion Tracking Guy.

With over 18 years in Digital Marketing, I’ve witnessed firsthand how advertising platforms and marketing systems are becoming increasingly data-dependent. Yet, proper conversion tracking and data architecture are often overlooked because they seem complex or costly.

I’ve helped over 250 business owners unlock the full potential of their marketing with server-side tracking and analytics. In almost every case, the results were clear: a significant boost in performance.

Let’s talk about how accurate data can transform your business.

Co-Founder

AldrichX is a data-driven marketing agency that helps 6+ figure fashion eCommerce brands to grow their business whilst they can keep focussing on building their brands.

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