Bart-Jan Leyts

Bart-Jan Leyts speaks in the register of someone who backed into entrepreneurship rather than planned it, and that origin story shapes almost everything else he says. Otamiser was born because "ik vond niets, dus ben ik het eigenlijk zelf proberen doen en zo is het een beetje uit de hand gelopen" ¹ — not a grand vision but a gap he noticed in his father's Bruges B&B, where existing hotel pricing models assumed demand was constant and ignored that ranking position on Booking.com fundamentally changes what a price even means ¹. That practical, almost accidental beginning is why he frames Otamiser's approach as rebellious but grounded: "Wij gaan nu eigenlijk de rebel zijn en zeggen hoe het anders moet, maar toch de space claimen" ¹.

Confidence, bordering on deliberate arrogance, is a recurring theme. He describes pitching a skeptical hotelier as a student with nothing but nerve — "Ik was een student die zei ik ga je omzet met 30 procent doen verhogen door je hoger te gaan positioneren. Hij geloofde het niet. Ik zei: let me try it." ¹ — and generalizes this into a philosophy: "Bij ons is een sky the limit, om het eigenlijk een beetje arrogant te zeggen" ¹, paired with "De limieten kan je zelf eigenlijk gaan definiëren waarin dat je wilt presteren" ¹. This isn't just rhetorical bravado; it maps onto concrete tactics. Facing veteran hoteliers who didn't believe young founders could deliver, Otamiser gave the product away for free to build cases, making it hard to say no and converting skeptics into paying customers later ¹. The same expansive self-belief shows up in his read on market scope — "De wereld is onze markt eigenlijk, om het zo te zeggen" ¹ — a claim he backs with the company's actual footprint across ten countries.

Leyts is notably candid about the grind beneath the confidence. Before any structured sales process existed, he spent about 1.5 years doing odd jobs — building websites, installing cash register systems — just to fund product development ¹. This bootstrapped patience contrasts with the "sky the limit" language and suggests his ambition is paired with a tolerance for slow, unglamorous groundwork. He credits "learn by doing" as a core belief, not a slogan: "Wij geloven enorm in learn by doing: je leert iets door het te doen" ¹. His co-founder relationship illustrates this same experimental, trial-based logic — Corneel started as a skeptical cold-email recipient who tested the 30%-revenue-increase promise himself before joining to commercialize the product ¹, mirroring the same "let me try it" pattern Leyts used on hoteliers.

On growth and culture, Leyts is specific rather than abstract. He says hiring and firing decisions hinge primarily on culture fit, because people with a corporate mindset struggle in a startup where a Monday process can be discarded by Tuesday ¹. He's also learned from mistakes here: after extending trust too quickly to new hires who then failed, Otamiser installed checks and balances so trust is granted at the right moment, independent of a hire's background or qualifications ¹. This is one of the clearer instances of his thinking evolving through direct experience rather than theory. Similarly, he notes that employees who proactively give feedback grow fastest, because their role can be tailored to them, and insists that coaching has to be individualized since one management style inevitably leaves people behind ¹.

Leyts also reflects on the emotional texture of fast growth, which he frames as something requiring active practice, not something that happens automatically. Otamiser only recognized certain milestones months after hitting them, and he draws a direct lesson from that: "Het is pas doordat je het viert eigenlijk dat je succes begint herkennen" ¹. Celebration, in his account, isn't a reward tacked onto success but the mechanism that makes success visible in the first place.

Finally, he's clear-eyed about the limits of community support as a company scales. The Ghent startup scene, he notes, offers abundant free guidance at the early stage, but once a company moves into pre-scaleup territory, relevant peers and advice become much scarcer ¹. That scarcity seems to inform his closing observation about leadership itself: "Ondernemen is een alleen journey met je management team" ¹ — entrepreneurship as solitary, but not solitary alone, carried instead with the small group who share the specific, less-charted stage of growth he now occupies.