Toine Habets

Toine Habets talks about BubblyDoo's growth almost entirely in terms of removing friction, whether that friction sits inside the founding team, in negotiations with licensors, or in the company's own cash flow. When the four co-founders disagree, he does not default to majority vote but pushes toward the underlying reasoning behind each position, and if that fails to resolve things he prefers a real-world test over further debate, such as putting three students on three different sales channels to see which one actually lands a deal. This instinct to test rather than argue runs through nearly everything he describes: a practical, empirical approach to decisions that could otherwise become abstract disagreements ¹.

That same pragmatism shows up in how he handles rejection from the entertainment licensors BubblyDoo depends on, Disney, Paramount, Studio 100. He refuses to treat a 'no' as final, describing it instead as information: "Soms kreeg ik wel een nee, maar die nee gaf mij vaak een richting van waar de ja zou kunnen zitten" ¹. Deals with giants like Disney US or BBC's Bluey remain open precisely because he keeps re-approaching with adjusted pitches rather than walking away. Where he cannot influence a slow-moving licensor's own pace, he controls what he can, namely his own responsiveness, replying within a day to their ten-day review cycles so that BubblyDoo is never the bottleneck ¹. The payoff of these licensing relationships is concrete: launching a Paw Patrol book just before Christmas quadrupled the following week's revenue, and licenses more broadly give BubblyDoo instant credibility when entering new markets, letting them launch a narrow product range with broad advertising and iterate from there ¹.

On team-building, Habets draws a sharp and deliberately unsentimental line. He rejects the popular framing of a startup team as family, arguing "Een team is geen family, want een family is onvoorwaardelijk en dat blijven dezelfde mensen forever. Terwijl ja, een team is als een sportsteam" ¹. The implication he draws out is that performance matters and that people who do not fit or perform should be let go quickly, a hire-fast, fire-faster posture that he presents as a necessary discipline for a scaling company rather than a harsh one ¹.

His view of company finances follows the same logic of avoiding compounding weaknesses. He frames fundraising as a matter of timing perception against need: "Als mensen kunnen zien dat het goed gaat en je hebt geld nodig, is dat geen probleem. Als mensen kunnen zien dat het niet goed gaat, maar je hebt geld genoeg, ook geen probleem. Maar als beide tegelijkertijd vallen, dan heb je een probleem" ¹. He treats managing that overlap as one of the central jobs of a scale-up founder. This ties into how BubblyDoo's own business model works: because books are printed only after they are sold, the company collects revenue before it owes its production partners, inverting the usual e-commerce cash flow and giving it room to grow faster while also refining print quality continuously ¹.

Habets is candid that BubblyDoo's moat is not really its product category but its accumulated capability in direct-to-consumer personalization. He argues that Disney has no incentive to compete because licensing itself is a low-risk core business for them, and that traditional publishers, though theoretically capable of entering the space, sell B2B through retailers and lack the D2C personalization learning BubblyDoo has built over time ¹. He is equally clear-eyed about who actually buys the product: 85% of customers are moms or grandmas, which is why Father's Day products, launched first, generated more than €1M last year, while Mother's Day is now getting heavier investment. He frames the real product as something more emotional than a book: "happy kids" and beautiful family moments ¹.

Looking forward, he ties growth to four deliberate pillars, improving the core unit economics, landing more global licenses, expanding into new markets, and expanding the product range around family occasions ¹. The next big step he describes is a shift into personalized interactive and audio digital books, launching in the US, positioned explicitly as a healthier alternative to YouTube Kids at a moment when children under eight average 2.5 hours of daily screen time on short-form content he sees as harmful to literacy ¹.

Underneath the operational detail, Habets returns repeatedly to a theme of underestimated ambition and underestimated patience. He admits plainly, "Ik weet niet hoe ambitieus dat is, maar waarschijnlijk mag ik nog veel ambitieuzer zijn. En dat geldt denk ik voor best veel mensen," suggesting his own targets, even at 95% annual growth, might still be too modest ¹. He pairs that with an observation about how people misjudge effort over time: "Bijna iedereen onderschat... overschat korte termijn impact... maar onderschat de lange termijn impact en dat is het compounding effect dat gewoon consistent effort wel met zich meebrengt" ¹. His closing advice to would-be founders is characteristically unadorned, urging people to start during their student years because it is one of the best times to take the risk: "Begin gewoon en geloof in jezelf" ¹.