Building a $15M+ ARR SaaS from a gap he found at his brick-and-mortar

Roy van den Broek started an AV rental company when he was 16 years old, and was frustrated by the available software. So, he built his own. Now, Rentman is on its way to $20M ARR.

Here's Roy on how he did it. 👇

On the way to $20M ARR

I'm Roy. My background is in event services and AV production, so I've spent a lot of time on the operational side of live events. That's where I discovered the problem. The tools the industry was using were either spreadsheets held together with tape or software built for other industries and bent into shape for ours.

Today, I'm building Rentman, an operations platform for the event and media industry. It handles the messy middle of running a production company: equipment rental, crew scheduling, quoting, logistics, invoicing. Our goal is to give companies in this space one system that fits how they work, instead of five that sort of do.

We serve rental and production companies, AV, lighting, staging, broadcast, and film. This applies anywhere gear and people need to show up at the right place at the right time.

We're currently between $15M and $20M ARR.

Fixing something that was broken

I started DJing when I was 12, and by 16, I had my own AV rental company. Running it, I repeatedly hit the same wall: the software we used was either built for other industries or was expensive, clunky on-prem stuff that nobody liked. Everyone complained, but nobody had a better option.

So, I built something for my own company. That was my sole goal. I wasn't trying to start a business or sell software. I had a problem to solve, enjoyed building, and it felt natural.

Other rental companies heard about it and asked to use it too. Five of them liked it enough to back the idea early. But even then, I considered it a one-time project: Build it, ship it, go back to renting out speakers.

The opportunity slowly became clear. People kept asking for more, and the product kept growing. Eventually, it was obvious this was bigger than my own rental company and a side project.

That's how Rentman became Rentman. But the starting point wasn't ambition; I just wanted to fix something broken for me.

No grand plan

I didn't have a grand plan. No roadmap, no team, no pitch deck. I just built features as I encountered problems in my own operation.

That became a big advantage. I knew exactly which functions mattered because I used them daily: equipment availability, quoting, crew scheduling, and project planning. I didn't have to guess what rental companies needed. I was one.

Once other companies started using it, the work grew beyond what I could handle alone. I hired programmers to help. We kept the feedback loop tight: I'd talk to rental companies, we'd build, ship, and iterate. The five companies that backed it early were our first design partners. They told us what was broken, what was missing, and what didn't fit their workflow.

Two principles shaped it from day one. Simplicity, because the existing tools were overcomplicated and nobody liked using them. And cloud, because the industry wanted to work from anywhere, and the software at the time forced them to sit at a desk. We were one of the first cloud-based rental tools in the Netherlands, and that became a big part of why it spread.

Tech stack

On the backend, we primarily use modern PHP, with MySQL as the main database and MongoDB for a particular microservice, all running on AWS.

On the frontend, we use Angular with TypeScript.

For infrastructure, we rely heavily on AWS: RDS, S3, CloudFront — the usual suspects.

Bootstrapping for eight years

We're a SaaS business. We have multiple products, and each has its own per-seat subscription. Customers pick the products they need and pay per user for each.

For the first eight years, we were fully bootstrapped. No VC or outside money. We got to tens of thousands of users across 70+ countries before we took outside capital.

Because of that, I was always my own biggest challenge. Bootstrapping meant I played every role as the company grew. I started as the developer. Then I did sales. Then I handled hiring. Then I learned how to lead a team, how to build a management layer, and how to be a CEO. Each of those was a different job I learned on the fly.

Every time the company hit a new stage, my adaptation speed was the bottleneck. The product could scale, the market was there, the team was ready, but I needed to grow into the next version of the role. That took time, mistakes, and a lot of unlearning. If I could have made those transitions faster, we'd be bigger today.

A straightforward flywheel

Growth was mostly organic. These were our initial channels, prior to being funded.

First, community. The AV and event production world is tight-knit. People work with each other, meet at trade shows, and refer jobs back and forth. We've spent years showing up in that world, not as a software vendor, but as part of it. We go to industry events, run webinars, sponsor things, and stay in real conversations with users. When a production company recommends Rentman to another production company, that's worth more than anything we could buy.

Second, word of mouth compounds in this industry. Freelance crews work for multiple rental companies. When someone learns Rentman at one job, they want their next employer to use it too. That's a natural flywheel we lean into, rather than fighting it.

Third, product-led growth. Anyone can start a free trial, set up their own account, and be running real projects within a day. We invest a lot in onboarding, documentation, and making the first experience smooth. Most of our customers find us, try us, and decide on their own. Sales follows — to help, not to push.

Fourth, customer feedback as a growth engine. Every feature request, every support ticket, every user interview feeds the roadmap. When customers see the product evolving around their needs, they stay longer, use more, and tell others. Retention and expansion are the quiet engines of SaaS growth, and we take them seriously.

The flywheel was straightforward: Build something the industry genuinely wants, make it easy to try, let users onboard themselves, and keep the product good enough so they stay and bring others in.

The challenge of growing a team

Growing the team from a handful of people to over 100 was a huge challenge. What worked at 10 didn't work at 50, and what worked at 50 didn't work at 100. Bootstrapping made it harder because we couldn't afford to over-hire. We had to earn every new leader and structure from revenue.

The book Scaling Up gives us a framework with good guidance — I recommend it.

Build for what you love

Here's my advice: Do something you like. Not something you think will make you money, not something that looks good in a pitch, not something trendy. Something you genuinely enjoy working on.

Because it's going to be hard for a long time, and any other motivation will run out before the company does.

And if it didn't work out, at least you had fun while trying it.

What's next?

First, winning the US. We're the worldwide market leader in our category, but we still have a lot of room to grow, specifically in the US.

Second, AI. The world is changing fast, and I want to make sure we turn that into an advantage for our users, not a threat to our business. We have an opportunity to rethink how operations software works. AI in the loop can dramatically improve a lot of what our customers do today: the planning, the quoting, the coordination. If we get that right, we don't just improve the product; we change what the product is.

That will probably mean disrupting ourselves. Our current business model might not be the right one for an AI-native product. Per-seat pricing, how we package things, how we deliver value; all of it is on the table. I'd rather kill our own model and build the next one than protect what we have and let someone else do it to us.

You can follow along on my LinkedIn or our website.