Before promptsite.nl went live, BrandForge pointed its sales intelligence tool at the entire Dutch driving-school market. 752 businesses, scanned end to end. Nearly a third of them do not exist online in any findable way. One in four of the websites we did find were broken, dead, or empty. This is the story of what happened next, and why Richard Scholten and his 750-member collective CIOR now have a brand builder of their own.
The audit that started it
Richard Scholten runs CIOR, the Collectieve Inkoop Organisatie Rijscholen. 750 Dutch driving schools pool their buying power through him for fuel cards, insurance, legal cover, and the day-to-day deals a small school cannot negotiate alone. After 15 years inside those businesses, he saw the same gap in every one of them. Great instructors, no time for marketing, no budget for an agency.
So before we built anything together, we did the maths. BrandForge pointed its sales intelligence tool at the entire CIOR member list and the wider Dutch rijschool market. 752 businesses, scanned across website, social and Google Business Profile. The report came back brutal.
Cohort split: how present each business is on the open web
The social story is worse
423 businesses, 56.3% of the market, have zero recorded social footprint. Of the Facebook pages we could scrape, the oldest live-but-abandoned page was last touched on 24 May 2015. Over eleven years idle, still ranking under the business name. These are not businesses that need another “learn marketing” webinar. They need a brand, a working site, and a feed on autopilot. In Dutch. For the price of a tank of fuel.
The deal: a white-label affiliate, built around a collective
Richard did not need to find customers. He had 750 of them, pooled, trusting, and quietly underserved on marketing. What he needed was a product he could put in front of them without becoming a software company.
BrandForge dropcatched the promptsite.nl domain at auction and handed it to the partnership on day one. A short, native Dutch name is the single most expensive piece of a Dutch brand you cannot translate. We caught it, so he did not have to.
Then we built the deal around a model we had been quietly perfecting: the white-label affiliate. BrandForge sends the invoice, collects the payment, runs provisioning and support. Richard’s team owns the brand, the market story, and the sales motion into CIOR. The cleanest division of labour we have ever offered a partner.
The Dutch SEO play: niche landing pages and tiny calculators
Alongside the main site, BrandForge built out an SEO engine for Dutch long-tail. Not a dozen generic terms. Dozens of niche landing pages, each one calibrated to the exact phrase a prospect would type.
Then came the micro-apps. Tiny single-purpose web tools built to rank for Dutch intent queries and funnel visitors into promptsite.nl:
- VAT Snap: instant BTW calculator for the “btw berekenen” crowd.
- Lesson Price Lab: for driving instructors sizing up their rates.
- Chair Profit Pulse: for hairdressers running the numbers on a new chair.
Each one is useful first and conversion-oriented second. The visitor gets their answer; the brand gets another touchpoint; the funnel does its quiet work.
The CIOR member deal: lifetime €29 per month
Because the whole platform runs under promptsite.nl, Richard could put a member-only price on it that would be impossible almost anywhere else. CIOR members pay €29 per month, for life, instead of €59. The full package is included: brand, website, domain, email, social kits, and the AI credits that build them.
In Richard’s words
What this means for other channel owners
Richard did not build a platform. He turned a channel he already owned into a product line, without hiring a platform team. If you run a collective, a reseller base, a franchise or a member community in your country, the same shape of deal is open to you.
BrandForge ships in 84 locales. The white-label affiliate model works wherever a channel owner wants to launch under their own brand without carrying infrastructure. The 752-school audit now powers the personalized sales report Richard’s team runs into every outbound conversation. We can build you the same one for your market.
