10 years of Perdoo: a conversation with Henrik van der Pol

‍Key Takeaway: Strategy execution is one of the hardest problems an organization faces, but the solution itself is well understood. The challenge isn't knowing what to do. It's sticking to it. That's the gap Perdoo has spent 10 years closing for its customers.

The following is an interview between Henrik van der Pol, CEO of Perdoo, and Martin, Founder of Kraftvertising. It's been published with light edits for readability.

Martin: Henrik, you've been running Perdoo for 10 years now. That's a milestone most SaaS companies never reach. What does it feel like, looking back?

Henrik van der Pol: Honestly? Both shorter and longer than I expected.

Shorter, because so much of the early stuff still feels recent. I vividly remember working on our first prototype from a cafe in Berlin, closing our first customers. Every step felt like a major win those days.

Longer, because the company we have today is unrecognizable from where we started. The product is more capable, the team is more experienced, the market is in a completely different place. It's the same Perdoo only in name and ambition.
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Martin: Let's go back to those early days. How did you land on the problem Perdoo solves?

Henrik: It came from a frustration I kept seeing in the companies I'd worked with and advised before starting Perdoo. Smart people, ambitious strategies, real talent on the team. And yet, somehow, very little of what was supposed to happen actually happened. Strategies got presented, slide decks got circulated, and a year later most of those strategic priorities had quietly disappeared into the background while everyone got swallowed by their day-to-day work.

I started asking why. The more I dug, the more I realized this wasn't a smart-versus-dumb-companies problem. It was structural. There was a missing layer between "we've decided what to do" and "the work is actually happening." Companies were skipping that layer entirely, or trying to fill it with wikis, slide decks, and email updates that nobody read.

That gap kept showing up everywhere. And once you see it, you can't unsee it. So Perdoo became our attempt to close it.

Martin: When did you realize OKRs were the right framework to build around?

Henrik: Pretty early, but with an important caveat. We didn't set out to build "an OKR tool." We set out to solve the strategy execution problem, and OKRs turned out to be one of the 3 pieces.

Here's how I think about it. Every organization needs 3 things working together to actually execute its strategy. You need a clear strategy itself, which defines your playing field and how-to-win choices. You need OKRs, the change goals that drive specific improvements each cycle. And you need KPIs, the metrics that tell you whether the day-to-day business is healthy. Each piece on its own is incomplete. Strategy without OKRs is intent without execution, KPIs without OKRs means you're maintaining without improving, and so on.

The companies that struggle with execution almost always have a missing piece. They have a strategy deck nobody references after Q1. Or they have OKRs that aren't tied to anything strategic. Or they have KPI dashboards that are green while their strategic priorities are quietly dying. The pieces exist in isolation, in different tools, owned by different people, never connected.

What we set out to build was the system that connects all of this. So when people describe Perdoo as "an OKR tool," I gently push back. OKRs are essential, but they're only half the story. Without strategy on top and KPIs alongside, OKRs alone don't solve the problem we set out to solve. The system is what matters.

Martin: So what does your solution system look like in practice?

Henrik: The simplest way to describe it is: bring your strategy, your OKRs, and your KPIs into one place, give every priority an owner, and make progress visible to everyone who needs to see it. Then build the rituals around it: check-ins, 1-on-1s, team meetings, progress reports, all anchored in the same data.

That sounds boring when I describe it like that. But it's the boring stuff that produces results. The reason companies struggle with strategy execution isn't that they can't think of clever new ways to do it. It's that they don't stick to the unglamorous fundamentals long enough for them to compound.

When we got that combination right, customers stopped describing Perdoo as "an OKR tool" and started describing it as "how we run the company." That's when we knew we'd built something genuinely different.

Martin: What's stayed consistent through those 10 years?

Henrik: Our belief that strategy execution is one of the hardest problems an organization has to tackle. That's never wavered. The framing has matured (we used to talk a lot more about OKRs as a methodology, now we talk about strategy execution as a system) but the core thesis is exactly the same as day one.

The other thing that's stayed consistent is how we go to market. We built Perdoo on inbound marketing from the very beginning, and we've never really moved away from that. Even today, we spend almost nothing on paid ads. Most of our traffic, our trials, and our customers come through content marketing, SEO, and word of mouth.

Martin: That's striking. Most SaaS companies of your size are pouring money into paid acquisition. Why hasn't Perdoo gone that route?

Henrik: Content marketing and SEO are just incredibly good channels for what we do, even in the age of AI. When you have a product that requires education, where prospects really need to understand their problem before they can evaluate a solution, content does work that ads can't. An ad can grab attention. A blog post or a YouTube video can teach someone enough to make a confident purchase decision.

Martin: What's the toughest part of running this business?

Henrik: Convincing people to actually do the thing they already know they should do. It often feels like getting your kids to eat their fruits and vegetables.

You constantly have to repeat, re-explain, reinforce why it matters. The research is there. The proof is there. We all know on some level that eating well leads to more energy, a longer life, fewer health problems. And yet we still need reminding. We still default to convenience over quality.

It's exactly the same with strategy execution. The "what to do" part is well understood. Set ambitious goals, attach measurable outcomes, give them clear owners, review progress regularly, course correct when needed. These are simple processes. They're not new. The research showing they work has been out there for half a century.

But humans don't naturally stick to simple-but-disciplined practices. Whether it's diet, exercise, or strategy execution, the gap between knowing and doing is enormous. And that gap is exactly where we live as a company.

Martin: So Perdoo is essentially a "stick to your veggies" platform?

Henrik: [laughs] In a way, yes. Our job is to make the right behaviors easy to do and hard to skip. If you have to log into yet another system, fill out yet another spreadsheet, run yet another standalone meeting, you'll quietly stop. So we built Perdoo to remove that friction. Strategy, OKRs, KPIs, 1-on-1s, progress reporting, all in one place. The system itself reinforces the habit.

That's the work we do every day, both inside the product and in our marketing. Make the right thing easy. Keep reminding people why it matters. Show them, with concrete examples, what good looks like. Repeat it for the next decade.

Kraftvertising: What's a misconception you keep running into, even after 10 years?

Henrik van der Pol: That every organization is unique.

The leaders we talk to almost always start the conversation by explaining why their company is different. Different industry, different culture, different team, different stage of growth. And on the surface, all of that is true. No two companies are identical.

But when it comes to strategy execution specifically, the challenges are remarkably similar. Over the past decade, we've worked with thousands of organizations in 78 different countries. Tech startups, manufacturers, professional services firms, scale-ups, mid-market enterprises, non-profits. Different industries, different sizes, different cultures. And the core problems? Almost always the same.

The strategy isn't visible enough across the organization. The priorities don't have clear owners. There are too many of them, so nothing gets fully done. Progress isn't tracked in a way that lets leadership course correct. The day-to-day work isn't connected to the strategic priorities in any meaningful way. People don't really know how their work matters. The gap between what was decided in the boardroom and what teams are actually doing is enormous. I could go on for a while…

These patterns repeat with such consistency that we can usually predict where a new customer will struggle within the first 30 minutes of an onboarding call. Not because we're clever, but because we've seen it 5,000 times before.

I think this is actually good news for leaders, even if it doesn't feel that way at first. If your strategy execution problems are unique, the solution has to be invented from scratch, which is slow and expensive. If they're not unique, the solution is well understood, well documented, and proven to work. You just have to be willing to apply it.

Martin: Why is solving this problem so important for organizations beyond Perdoo's customer base?

Henrik: Because the cost of getting this wrong is enormous, and most companies are quietly paying it without realizing.

When strategy doesn't actually get executed, you don't see a single dramatic failure. You see a slow erosion. Teams that are working hard but not on the right things. Strategic priorities that get announced and then abandoned without anyone really noticing. Talented people who quietly check out because they can't see how their work matters. Years of small misalignments that compound into a company that's busy but not winning.

And it's getting more expensive every year. The pace of change is accelerating. AI is forcing every industry to reinvent itself. Markets that used to take a decade to disrupt are turning over in three years. The companies that win the next decade aren't necessarily going to be the smartest or the best-funded. They're going to be the ones that can actually execute on the strategy they set, faster and more consistently than their competitors.

That's what's at stake. Not productivity gains. Not nice-to-have alignment. The ability to translate ambition into reality at the speed your industry now demands.

Kraftvertising: AI is changing both how companies build products and how they run themselves. How does that show up at Perdoo?

Henrik van der Pol: For us, AI kills two birds with one stone. It's reshaping how we run Perdoo as a business, and it's reshaping what Perdoo does for our customers.

On the company side, we've been quietly turning Perdoo into a small, highly efficient team. We have AI agents handling processes and tasks across the company that used to require dedicated headcount. Some of it is what you'd expect, like customer support triage, data analysis, financial forecasting. Some of it is maybe less obvious, like app translations, writing first drafts of product specs, or qualifying inbound leads. The result is a company that punches well above its weight in terms of revenue and impact per employee. I think this is going to be a defining advantage for the next decade. The companies that figure out how to operate with AI woven into their workflows, not bolted on top, will run circles around the ones that don't.

On the product side, AI lets us deliver something we couldn't have built even 3 years ago. Every Perdoo customer now has access to an in-app AI Coach (which is like having an OKR or strategy execution consultant inside the product, available around the clock, helping every team improve the way they execute) as well as an AI Assistant (which is helping with all sorts of challenges such as drafting winning strategies, identifying the most impactful goals, or flagging goals that are at risk). The capabilities of each are advancing every week.

What I find genuinely exciting is that these two threads reinforce each other. The more efficient AI makes us internally, the more we can invest in making the product smarter for our customers. And the smarter the product gets, the more it actually delivers on the promise of strategy execution that the methodology has always made on paper.

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