Bram Vermolen, founder of Space’M Online, leads with a sharp vision for digital growth. He combines deep SEO expertise with hands on entrepreneurial experience, helping eCommerce brands scale through sustainable, international strategies. His leadership is built on clarity, performance, and long term impact.
Company: Space’M Online
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company
Bram Vermolen: I am Bram Vermolen, founder of Space’M Online, an international SEO agency based in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. I bring 13 years of hands-on SEO expertise combined with entrepreneurial experience, and my work focuses on helping eCommerce brands scale through sustainable international strategies built on clarity, performance, and long term impact. Space’M Online supports brands that want to dominate globally by driving organic traffic and revenue, offering services such as international and multi-geo SEO, on-page and technical SEO, linkbuilding, local SEO, market research, eCommerce SEO, and instant indexing.
Can you take us back to the beginning – what inspired your startup, and what were those early days like?
Bram Vermolen: The inspiration for Space’M Online came from seeing too many strong eCommerce brands lose international organic visibility because their SEO was handled as a collection of disconnected tactics instead of one coherent global strategy. In the early days I worked directly with clients on audits, keyword research, and technical fixes, proving value through hands-on execution and measurable results rather than promises. The operation was lean, so every process had to earn its place and every client win had to be repeatable.
What was the biggest turning point or breakthrough that helped you scale from a small operation to a growing business?
Bram Vermolen: The biggest breakthrough was replacing custom, one-off SEO projects with a repeatable international SEO framework that combined market research, technical SEO, on-page SEO, linkbuilding, local SEO, eCommerce SEO, and instant indexing into a clear delivery playbook. That framework let Space’M Online serve multiple countries and website types without rebuilding the strategy from scratch for every client, which made quality more consistent and delivery more predictable.
Once we could document results at scale, such as helping a client grow from €400K to €4 million in three years and ranking a client number one on Google for a major keyword within three months, the business moved beyond relying on referrals and started attracting larger eCommerce brands that needed multi-geo execution.
How did you handle the toughest challenges during your growth phase – whether financial, operational, or personal?
Bram Vermolen: The toughest challenge was operational complexity, because growth created more clients, more markets, and more moving parts than a small team could manage informally. I handled it by documenting the core SEO processes, defining clear ownership for each stage from market research through technical implementation and linkbuilding, and hiring specialists who could execute inside that system instead of depending on founder heroics.
That change reduced delivery risk and made quality more predictable as the client base grew, because the team was following shared standards rather than improvising for every account.
As your company grew, how did your leadership style evolve to meet the demands of scaling?
Bram Vermolen: My leadership style evolved from being the person who solved every SEO problem directly to building clarity and accountability through frameworks the team could own. I focused on defining what good looks like at each stage, setting priorities around sustainable long term impact, and letting specialists execute with autonomy inside those standards.
That shift was necessary because scaling depends on repeatable decisions, not on the founder being in every detail, and it allowed Space’M Online to grow while keeping delivery quality consistent across international clients.
What advice would you give to entrepreneurs currently in the “garage” stage, dreaming of going global?
Bram Vermolen: Prove that your offer wins in one clearly defined market before you try to go global, because international expansion multiplies complexity and does not fix weak positioning. In the garage stage, focus on producing one repeatable, documented client result that you can explain clearly, including the baseline, the interventions, the timeline, and the outcome, then use that proof to refine your process and choose the next market deliberately rather than chasing every opportunity at once.
