Thomas Hysselinckx

Thomas Hysselinckx's public voice circles around one steady conviction: cash, not profit on paper, is the thing that actually kills or saves a growing business. He traces this directly to his own failure in horeca, where "mijn zaak draait goed en toch zat er nooit geld op de rekening" ⁶ despite his accountant insisting he was profitable. That gap between accounting profit and actual bank balance became the seed of Cashplannr, and the lesson has never really left his messaging. Years later he's still making the same point to a broader audience, just with more precision: a healthy-looking balance today "heeft nog nooit gehoord van de lonen op het einde van de maand," of the VAT bill in September, or the client invoice that lands "zodra het hem uitkomt" . His answer is methodological rather than motivational — project cashflow day by day, find the lowest point in the coming months, subtract your buffer, and what's left is what you can safely spend, explicitly rejecting the "het komt wel goed" mindset .

That same insistence on rigor over gut feeling extends to how he talks about entrepreneurship itself. He's candid that Cashplannr's own tool grew slowly and was built partly on instinct, and only years of conversations with different entrepreneur types clarified why they'd built what they built — some of which they've since partially rolled back once they understood it better ⁶. He treats failure as structural rather than shameful: "Falen denk ik een noodzakelijk onderdeel van succes is" ⁶, and he frames perseverance in almost Camusian terms, quoting "nul n'est besoin d'espérer pour entreprendre, ni de réussir pour persévérer" and reducing it to a personal rule: as long as you believe, keep going ⁶. He's equally blunt about the cost of not acting on that belief soon enough — he knew within two and a half years the horeca business wasn't for him but stayed nearly seven, calling the eventual exit "de beste beslissing uit mijn leven" ⁶.

On competition and positioning he's pragmatic to the point of dismissiveness toward nostalgia: when a faster-growing rival appears, "ja maar wij waren eerst — ja maar dat doet er niet meer toe. Vandaag doet ertoe, de situatie zoals vandaag is" ⁶. Being first buys nothing; what matters is how you're different and better right now. He applies a similar no-sentiment logic to team-building. Rather than chasing a cofounder deliberately, he posted a business-developer role and let a volunteer earn his way into payroll and eventually cofounder status through demonstrated enthusiasm ⁶. He also has a clear structural view on team size, arguing three cofounders beats two because two opposing opinions can deadlock a company in circular argument while a third breaks ties and absorbs pressure when everything lands on the founders ⁶. He's self-aware about his own limits too: friends told him early on they didn't see him as a CEO, a Belbin test marked him a "plant" rather than a rational decision-maker, and he holds the CEO title out of necessity, not entitlement, saying he'd hand it over to someone better suited ⁶. He also flags being "coachable" as double-edged — it got him into The Birdhouse but also invited a flood of contradictory unsolicited advice that he eventually had to filter out to find his own path ⁶.

His more recent posts show the same problem-solving instinct redirected at his own craft as a developer. He describes an initial, unusually strong reaction against agentic coding tools — "ik haatte het (en dat is een woord dat ik niet snel gebruik)" — rooted in a real love of writing code and the identity threat of watching a machine do the part he cared about. His resolution isn't capitulation but reframing: "het ambacht is niet verdwenen, het is verschoven," he still thinks through the problem, the structure, the reasoning, he just no longer does the execution himself . It's the same underlying belief that shows up everywhere else in his writing, that the craft or the discipline matters more than the tool, and that what looks like loss is often relocation of effort to a higher level.

Practically, his public activity backs up the substance: he shares small hiring asks for his network , celebrates concrete product milestones like getting Cashplannr into Exact's app store with an explicit "next stop: Nederland" , and stays visibly curious about adjacent tooling, flagging things like haptic feedback for Claude Code as "cool" . Earlier on the podcast he stated flatly that he believes Cashplannr can become the global reference for mapping a growing SME's financial future within five years ⁶ — an ambition that, taken together with everything above, reads less as bravado and more as the same cashflow-first, problem-first logic scaled up: solve the visibility problem, keep adding weight once each problem is solved, and let positioning be decided by where you stand today rather than where you started.