About Me
I interviewed myself. Obviously.
I’m a market researcher. When faced with an About page, I did what any researcher would do — I turned it into a structured conversation. What follows is me, asking myself the questions I’d ask anyone else. Lightly edited for clarity. Heavily edited for length, because I tend to overshare.
Let’s start at the beginning. How did you end up here?
My dad was a software programmer. We always had a computer at home — which in the eighties and nineties was not as common as it sounds. I was the first in my class to hand in school assignments that were actually typed. While other kids were outside, I was inside figuring out how Word Perfect worked. I was genuinely excited when we moved from DOS to Windows. I know.
The internet changed everything. By 1997 I was already experimenting with HTML, and our family had one of the first family websites in the Netherlands. I found a screenshot of it recently, archived by the Wayback Machine.
Guido, Marian, Jorg, Bente — and Sarah, the Labrador. We were on the internet before most people knew what that meant.
That curiosity about how things work never went away. It just found a more useful home in market research.
Twenty years is a long time. What were you actually doing?
Technical roles, mostly. Survey scripting, software training, product ownership, technical account management. I worked with agencies and corporate clients — the kind with serious questions and serious budgets. I learned that good research is methodologically sound, not necessarily complicated.
I also learned something else: the methods that work for big companies work just as well for small ones. What changes is the scale, not the thinking.
So why start Research by Bente?
Because I kept meeting online entrepreneurs who were making important decisions based on gut feeling — not because they didn’t care, but because they genuinely believed research was something that happened in boardrooms with teams and budgets they didn’t have.
It doesn’t have to be. I wanted to be the person who makes that accessible. No jargon. No 40-page reports. Just the right questions, asked the right way, leading to decisions you can actually trust.
That’s where “from guessing to knowing” comes from. It’s not a slogan I invented. It’s what I watched happen every time someone finally had real data to work with.
Who do you work best with?
Experienced online entrepreneurs — coaches, designers, strategists, marketers. People who have built something real and have been around long enough to know that gut feeling only gets you so far. They have data. They’re just not sure what it’s telling them.
They’re not looking for someone to do research at them. They want someone who can think alongside them.
Tell me about how you actually work. What’s it like to be on the other side of a session with you?
Direct. Probably quite talkative. I have a strong eye for detail — sometimes to the point where I’ll explain exactly how something works when what someone really needed was just the answer.
I’m aware of this. I’m working on it. Mostly.
I’m neurodivergent, and I don’t hide that. It shows up as hyperfocus — I can get completely lost in figuring out how something works, and I won’t always stop to ask for help when I should. I like working with people who will hold me accountable, and I try to do the same for the people I work with.
The upside of how my brain works: I notice patterns. I spot the question underneath the question. I find the thing that’s been overlooked. That’s not a skill I learned — it’s just how I’m wired.
What do you do when you’re not researching other people’s businesses?
I collect data.
That’s not a joke. I track everything I watch — films, series, all of it — via the Trakt app. My watch history is a proper dataset. I have opinions about rating systems.
I also do pixel hobby, diamond painting and jigsaw puzzles. All of them are essentially the same thing: a system, a process, a satisfying result when the pieces go where they’re supposed to go.
I walk a lot, and I track that too via the Conqueror app — a beautifully gamified walking tracker that gives you medals for virtual routes. I have walked across several countries without leaving the Netherlands.
I live in Alkmaar with my family. I drink a lot of coffee. I am genuinely happy about all of this.
Ready to find your question?
