Overview
Nicolas Jacobeus is the founder and chief executive of belighted, a company he founded in January 2008 and where he serves as founder and managing director. He is based in Dubai and states expertise in SaaS, content marketing, product development, community management and product design.
He has founded several further ventures: SaaSpirin, where he has been founder and CEO since June 2020, MicroSaaS.org in June 2024, RightSpot, concerned with HubSpot systems architecture, in November 2025, and ProofFlow, a HubSpot-native customer proof platform, in January 2026.
From August 2005 to July 2007 he was a PhD researcher with the UCLouvain Crypto Group. He holds a Master of Engineering in computer science from the Ecole Polytechnique de Louvain at the Université catholique de Louvain, studied there from 1999 to 2004, and a Master in Industrial Management, Information and Communication Technology from KU Leuven, taken in 2004 and 2005. He later completed a postgraduate degree in finance at ICHEC Entreprises and the Solvay Entrepreneurs programmes Création & Croissance and Scale Up at the Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management.
Career history
In the news
- Three questions worth answering plainly, for anyone looking at connecting ProofFlow to HubSpot. 1️⃣ Does it touch my existing data? No. ProofFlow adds a Review object and syncs 7 contact properties (rating, review URL, submission date). Your existing deals, contacts, and company records stay untouched. 2️⃣ Is the data safe? ProofFlow is hosted entirely in the EU on Hetzner Cloud, GDPR-compliant by default. HubSpot OAuth tokens are encrypted at rest, video and images stored on Cloudflare R2. Disconnecting is one setting away in
- Garo's post on Teamwork is worth a read. Pulling projects, docs and tasks into HubSpot makes sense, work shouldn't live in five different tools. We keep seeing the same thing with reviews. Companies have great G2, Google or Capterra profiles and none of it shows up when it's time to close a deal. Feels like the same problem, just with proof instead of tasks. 👉 Kind of why we started ProofFlow | Hubspot-Native Customer Proof Platform.
- 5 places where a customer review closes a deal. 1️⃣ In the first email. Not a generic quote. One from a company the prospect would recognize, in their exact situation. 2️⃣ On the discovery call. A prospect asks for an example. The answer needs to match their industry, their size, their objection. In five seconds. 3️⃣ In the competitive conversation. A prospect using a competitor asks why you. Not a feature list. A story from someone who made that exact switch. 4️⃣ Before the champion's internal pitch. They're selling this to
- Our first power user never collected a single review with ProofFlow. He arrived with 473 Google reviews already sitting on his listing. Years of customer proof. Zero of it usable in sales. So on day one, he did something that changed how we build: he imported all 473 by CSV. Not to put them on a website. To make them searchable, organized by theme, and visible inside HubSpot, where his deals actually live. That day taught us the thesis behind ProofFlow: Most B2B teams are not short on proof. They are short on proof their sales
- 6 moments in a deal where customer proof changes the outcome. Most teams use proof in exactly one: the website. 1. Discovery. The prospect doubts the problem is solvable. One quote from a lookalike company does more than your pitch. 2. The objection. "We tried something like this before." Show a customer who said the same thing, then stayed 3 years. 3. The comparison. They are reading you against a competitor tonight. Which reviews will they find, and who chose them? 4. The security and IT review. Slow, skeptical, allergic to
- The hardest product decision we made with ProofFlow: building INSIDE HubSpot instead of next to it. Next to it is the easy road. Your own dashboard, your own login, a sync, a Zapier recipe. Ship fast, demo well. We took the other road: reviews as native CRM data. A custom workflow action inside HubSpot's own workflow builder. Widgets and review requests driven by what already happens in the portal: deals closing, NPS scores landing, lifecycle stages changing. It cost us months. Here is why I would do it again: - A tool next to the
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