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The Enterprise GTM Playbook That Took a Mortgage Platform Across Six European Markets

Most B2B founders agonize over their first customer for months, sometimes years. Geert Van Kerckhoven, CEO and Co-Founder of Oper, signed his first paying client in three months.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Geert Van Kerckhoven, CEO and Co-Founder of Oper, a mortgage tech platform that’s raised over $15 million, explained how his team went from prototype to paying customer in record time—and then systematically expanded across continental Europe with a surprisingly contrarian GTM approach.

The Three-Month Customer Timeline

When Geert and his co-founder went to the whiteboard in 2018, they weren’t starting from scratch. With nearly two decades of experience at the intersection of banking and technology, Geert had collected what he calls his “little backpack” of insights: deep knowledge of building technology for banks, firsthand exposure to how large lenders struggled with in-house development, and regulatory expertise from the post-financial-crisis era.

The catalyst was personal. “I did my second mortgage around that period and I couldn’t understand how slow, untransparent the journey was,” Geert explains. That frustration crystallized into a question: “How would a Ritz Carlton experience look like?” if the typical mortgage experience was “like a horrible hotel where like the bugs are crawling out of the bed.”

Three months later, they had their first paying customer. They pitched their five-star journey vision before building the full product. One prospect said, “Look, if this is what you guys are going to build, I’ll happily be your first client. And I want to act as a design partner.” That design partner remains a customer today.

The SDR Decision That Changed Everything

Fast forward to today, and Geert’s GTM motion looks radically different from what most SaaS playbooks recommend. His most important decision? Cutting SDRs entirely.

“I felt that having really junior people just cold calling everybody every day really didn’t generate any meaningful relationships,” Geert says. “And also I think you can automate so much today that today I think full stack is just a much wiser choice, especially in the segment we are targeting and the ticket size that we have with clients.”

The move reflects a deeper insight about enterprise sales in specialized markets. When you’re selling mortgage technology to European banks, cold outreach from junior reps doesn’t build the trust and credibility required to close deals. Instead, Geert’s team focuses on experienced account executives who “cover a certain region, build up the relationships and just work on accounts and make sure that when in that region, something’s cooking up that we can be there to support.”

But the more controversial aspect of Geert’s approach is his continued deep involvement in sales—something many VCs discourage as companies scale. “A lot of VC’s will tell you that they don’t like to see too much Founder driven sales and I understand that,” Geert acknowledges. “But when I started studying a lot of companies that are at the 5100 million ARR in our space, I always saw that founders were still heavily involved in sales.”

He found that founders of $100 million ARR banking technology companies “still knew all the big clients, was involved in all the big sales.” This research led to a decisive commitment: “Two founders, I mean me and my Co-Founder, we are still very involved in sales. And I mean I will never truly delegate a big client to another team and I also don’t aspire to.”

Content as the Primary Marketing Engine

Oper’s marketing strategy centers on content that gets referenced across the industry. The realization came from new sales hires two years ago. “They told us, look, when we seed, let’s say, the founding team and the product team going to clients, it’s an experience we’ve never seen. You guys really know what you’re talking about,” Geert recalls. The challenge was that “that magic only happens when you have us in a meeting room.”

The solution: broadcast their expertise. “We write a lot of reports, we write a lot of content, we go to a lot of conferences, we engage, we bring together our clients and our prospects. So we build communities,” Geert explains. The approach generated “crazy download numbers” for their latest reports.

What makes it work? “We write it with a lot of passion,” Geert says, treating content as his “weekend job.” However, he recognizes AI poses new challenges. “I think we’ve cracked it in a non LLM world. I think in the Genai world, we’re going to have to modify and adapt.”

The Pan-European Validation

For Oper, the milestone that mattered most wasn’t a revenue number—it was reaching six European markets live with a single codebase. “That was for us, like all, let’s say, mid sized to larger financial institutions. That’s something we’ve celebrated really strongly,” Geert says. “For us, it really meant that this pan european software, which has been really hard to do, got validated.”

Fundraising as Relationship Building

Geert’s approach to fundraising mirrors his sales philosophy: relationships over transactions. “Investors that are helpful when they are not on your cap table will still be very helpful when they’re on your cap table and vice versa,” he says. His most valuable learning came from joining an angel fund two years ago, which gave him insights into “how investment memos are written, how VC’s think about deal flow.”

The Airport Vision

Geert’s five-year vision is refreshingly concrete: “Every airport in Europe, I want to arrive, I want to see an ad from a bank, and I want to know they’re using oper today.”

It’s already happening in Basel and Zurich. Soon Vienna. The goal is Madrid, Reykjavik, London—every major European city. “Then I’ll know we’re truly making impact across Europe with our technology,” Geert says. He even sends photos of bank ads to his reps, asking: “Have we talked to them? How is the conversation with them going?”

The lesson for enterprise founders building in specialized markets? Forget the playbook that works for PLG SaaS companies. Cut the SDRs, stay close to sales, create content that demonstrates genuine expertise, and focus on the relationships that will sustain you through both growth and challenges. Sometimes the contrarian approach is the right one.