Do you want to be Vindje’s CEO?

The idea. Become the next Tikkie or Stekkies, for finding used things.

Tikkie turned “send me the money” into a verb. Stekkies made house hunting in a crowded market bearable. Vindje (“find it”) wants to do the same for second-hand: you say what you want in plain words, and it finds the listings that fit. Today that is smart search on Marktplaats, a daily hunt for undervalued vintage, and email alerts for saved searches.

• 1 to 2 months Have fun building and promoting something useful.
• 12 months A brand people in Amsterdam recognise.
• 2 years and on A brand known outside the Netherlands, the way everyone knows Vinted today.

The philosophy. Run the company unreasonably in the open.

• Codelive Public on GitHub. Anyone can read how it works.
• Roadmaplive Public on the ideas board. Users suggest and vote, we build in the open.
• Analyticsnext Traffic and usage numbers published on the site.
• Moneynext A public bank account that pays for hosting and AI tokens, with every transaction visible.
• Updatesnext Weekly posts on what shipped and what people searched for. Monthly posts on the team, revenue and costs.

Why work this way: it gets attention, it builds trust (it is easy to trust a company that hides nothing), and it pulls in the people who share the vision, both contributors and, later, investors.

The market. Millions of things change hands every year, slowly.

Second-hand in the Netherlands is huge and mostly runs on Marktplaats, with Vinted for clothes, Facebook Marketplace on the side and Catawiki for curated auctions. The problem is liquidity: good items sit unseen, buyers scroll past hundreds of near-misses, and the price someone pays depends on luck. Five groups live in this market, and each one has a reason to use Vindje.

• Buyers Want one specific thing, nearby, at a fair price. Today they type Dutch keywords and wade through junk. Vindje: describe it in any language, get only the listings that fit.
• Flippers Buy undervalued items and resell them: designer lamps, vintage bikes, mid-century chairs. Their edge is being first and knowing what something is worth. Vindje: a daily list of finds priced below resale, spotted from text and photos.
• Vintage sellers Shops and dealers with real stock. They source on Marktplaats too and need their own pieces in front of the right buyer. Vindje: sourcing alerts now, a direct line to motivated buyers later.
• Casual sellers An attic, a move, a renovation. They list once and hope. Underpriced listings are the flippers’ profit. Vindje: help them price and describe things right, so they sell faster.
• The platforms Marktplaats, Vinted and the rest own the listings. Vindje sits on top as the layer that matches intent to inventory, the part none of them do well.

Ownership. No money in, so time is the investment.

We use a simplified version of Mike Moyer’s Slicing Pie. Every week someone works on Vindje, the pie grows by one week. Your share is your weeks divided by all weeks ever worked by everyone. Stop working and your weeks stay the same while the pie keeps growing, so your share shrinks. Keep going and it holds.

• Start Pavel works 2 weeks. The pie is 2 weeks, Pavel owns 100%.
• +4 weeks, 4 people Pie: 2 + 4 × 4 = 18 weeks. Pavel 6/18 = 33%, each of the others 4/18 = 22%.
• +48 weeks, 1 leaves Pie: 18 + 48 × 3 = 162 weeks. Pavel 54/162 = 33%, each person who stayed 52/162 = 32%, the person who left 4/162 = 2.5%.

An example, not a contract. The exact rules get written down together with the first team.

The odds. Said plainly, so nobody is surprised.

• 95% It does not become a financially successful project.
• 4% It becomes locally popular, but never makes a profit.
• 1% It becomes a global phenomenon and gets acquired for a billion by eBay or someone like them.

So why join? To have fun. To play a game others don’t play. To be part of something new in the Dutch scene, and to lead it.