The note on the front desk.

A man who was done with suits.

Roderick van den Berg spent most of his life in sales. He sold kitchens, owned a tennis park, and went bankrupt. At some point he was done with it. He wanted to give something back, not as a side project but as his work. In 2013 he opened a thrift shop in Rijswijk.

A thrift shop is a place where written-off things come in and someone decides they still have value. Before long, the same was true for the people: people who, for whatever reason, had fallen out of work and wanted back in. We call them talents.

What happens in a shop like that is not that someone learns to unpack boxes. It is that someone walks in on a Monday without looking anyone in the eye, and four months later is cracking jokes at the till.

What makes that difference is almost never a training. It is that someone is paying attention.

The company was doing well, and could not prove it.

Six years later it was no longer one shop. There was a bicycle repair service, a cleaning company, and the Martini factory. Dozens of people, all somewhere in a programme.

In 2019 his son Sebastiaan joined. Not sales, but technology. His first question: where is all of this kept? Nowhere, was the answer. It lives in the heads of the people who work here.

The first thing they tackled together was the name. After a few brand sessions, everything became Dude Goed. It turned out to be the first time they looked at themselves from a distance, and they never lost that habit.

Three requirements, and nothing that brought them together.

Fine, they thought. Then we will find a secure system. They searched endlessly. There were client systems for healthcare, time tracking for construction, and HR packages for offices.

But they did not just want to know whether someone was there. They wanted to know how someone was doing. And for a work-readiness programme, the municipality expects a report every four to six weeks for six months.

Attendance, progress, accountability. They belong together, they are about the same person, and no system existed that brought them together.

Three lines a day.

So it became Excel. Clocking in one system, writing in another, and on Friday someone matching the two for a report due on Monday. Around that time the idea got a name: an index of blooming. Bloeiindex.

And in that ugly file, it happened. They started writing short daily updates on how people were doing. Moments. No report, no evaluation. Three lines.

Ask a workplace guide on Friday what Pietje did this week and he will not remember, because there are thirty others. Put a few weeks of moments side by side and you see what nobody could remember: that someone always drops out on Tuesdays, or comes alive as soon as he can work with his hands.

What they were good at was not organising work. What they were good at was paying attention. And for the first time, they wrote it down.

Not administration, but evidence.

Sebastiaan and James Bal have known each other since 2014 and build everything together. When Sebastiaan said it was absurd, three systems where there should have been one, there was only one answer: let us build it ourselves.

First a test in a no-code builder, to see whether their own logic held up. Then the real work: hours, programmes, and moments in one place for the first time. And then something became visible they had not thought of.

If you know someone was there, for how long and where, and you have written down what they did, you no longer have administration. You have evidence. And nobody had to do anything extra for it.

Attendance without content is a time clock. Content without attendance is a story you cannot back up. Together they are evidence.

Pietje wants to become a bicycle mechanic.

For people without a basic qualification, for whom a full vocational diploma is out of reach, there is the praktijkverklaring: a nationally recognised certificate stating which work processes someone has learned in practice.

What a bicycle mechanic must be able to do is defined by SBB. And without meaning to, Dude Goed had exactly the information to show that Pietje had done it. On the workfloor, oil on his hands, for months, three lines a day.

Turn it around and it becomes guidance. Not: here is a development plan for six months from now. But: let Pietje do the tyres today, and notice whether he checks the spokes on his own. Those are the work cards.

They could always do it. Nobody ever watched long enough to write it down.

The best guide struggled most with the system.

Saida is one of the best guides Dude Goed has. She senses exactly when someone is having a bad day, and when to leave someone be. People talk to her.

Dutch is not her first language. Every time something had to be written down, part of her day went into sentences that had to be right, instead of into the people she was there for. So we turned it around: Saida talks to Bloeiindex, and it turns her words into clean sentences.

Sebastiaan recognised that better than most. He has dyslexia himself, and that is exactly what the reports do: turn separate moments into one consistent story, in the right order.

The two biggest features of Bloeiindex came from what its makers and users could not do.

Not a dashboard, but direction.

In 2025 we went out into the market. After more than ten years, Roderick knows everyone in this world and still opens doors today. The father builds the practice, the son builds the system, and they sell each other’s work.

There was interest, and we saw exactly where the product fell short. So we scaled it back instead of adding more. In December 2025 there was a version that was right. In January 2026 the first organisations went live.

De Binnenbaan in Zoetermeer said: there is so much in it that our guides lose the overview. They want direction. That is where the AI assistant came from, translating what is known into what you can do with someone today. A few months later, De Binnenbaan achieved the praktijkverklaring for six people. They had never done that before.

Six people with a nationally recognised certificate they would not otherwise have had. That is why you do this work.

Things also simply went wrong.

Documents were generated that were wrong. Things were built that only failed once they reached the workfloor. There were days when Bloeiindex was not there.

When our system is down, someone else’s workfloor stops. A guide cannot record their moments, and an administration has a report due on Monday. The answer was the same every time: fix it, call back, explain what happened, and make sure it could not happen again. That is why we do not exaggerate what the product does.

Who are you. Are you here. What are you doing.

All that feedback forced the most important decision: not to expand, but to go back to basics. Talent, attendance, and moments. That is all the input there is.

Everything Bloeiindex does follows from it: the report for the municipality, the evidence for the praktijkverklaring, the work cards, the signals around absence. Not one extra action is added. That is why it survives on a workfloor.

And then Pietje called in sick.

Pietje arrives on time every day, grows on his competences, and works towards his praktijkverklaring. Then he stubs his toe and calls in sick. In most organisations, that is the moment someone disappears from view and becomes a file.

Whoever knew how things were going picks up the phone. Asks how he is really doing. And hears that Pietje is getting divorced. His sick report stands and stays; that is not for an employer to judge. But now you can ask what he needs to keep coming.

Nobody is exposed and no medical condition is recorded. Someone finally asks how he is doing, at the moment it matters.