GreenGlimpse at the Unknown Community Celebration in The Hague

GreenGlimpse took part in the Unknown Community Celebration at Titaan in The Hague.

It was a great opportunity to meet young founders, students, mentors, and other people from the startup community. The event had a very open and energetic atmosphere, with many people working on different ideas, businesses, and early-stage startups.

What made the event especially interesting was the environment around Unknown University. Many of the students are not only learning about entrepreneurship in theory, but are already working on their own business ideas while studying.

That practical approach makes a big difference.

Instead of only talking about business models, marketing, or innovation in the classroom, students are actually trying things out, meeting customers, testing ideas, making mistakes, and learning from the process.

For us, that made the conversations much more interesting and relatable.

Meeting people who are actually building something

One of the best parts of the event was meeting young entrepreneurs who are already working on their own projects.

Everyone had a different story and a different idea.

Some were still in the early stages, while others were already developing their concept further and thinking about how to grow it.

We had the chance to speak with Thijs Louter, Jethro Tieman, Riven Straathof, Astrid van der Niet, Mark Rudnyanszky, and several other entrepreneurs during the event.

What we liked most was that the conversations were not just about presenting a startup or trying to sell something.

They were more about sharing experiences.

What are you building?

Why did you start?

What problem are you trying to solve?

What has worked so far?

What are you struggling with?

These simple conversations can be surprisingly useful, especially when you are building a startup yourself.

Sometimes another founder sees your idea from a completely different angle. Sometimes a small comment makes you think about your product differently. And sometimes it is simply useful to hear that other founders are dealing with many of the same challenges.

Sharing what GreenGlimpse is building

The event also gave us the opportunity to talk about GreenGlimpse and explain what we are currently building.

GreenGlimpse is focused on helping e-commerce businesses find and connect with more sustainable solutions.

There are already many companies offering better alternatives in areas such as packaging, logistics, returns, and other business services.

The problem is often finding them.

For a small or medium-sized business, searching for sustainable alternatives can take time. It can also be difficult to understand which solution actually fits the business, what the real environmental benefit is, and whether the provider's sustainability claims can be trusted.

This is where GreenGlimpse comes in.

Our goal is to make that process easier by bringing sustainable providers and their services together in one place.

A business should be able to discover suitable providers, understand what they offer, compare different options, and eventually make a better-informed decision.

For example, an e-commerce company might want to reduce the amount of single-use packaging it uses.

Instead of searching across dozens of websites, GreenGlimpse should help that company discover providers offering reusable, recyclable, or lower-impact packaging solutions.

The same idea applies to logistics, returns, and other parts of e-commerce operations.

Sustainability should be easier to act on

One of the topics that came up in our conversations was the gap between wanting to operate more sustainably and actually taking action.

Many businesses are interested in reducing waste, emissions, and unnecessary resource use.

But interest alone is not enough.

Businesses also need to know what options are available and whether those options make sense financially and operationally.

Changing a logistics provider, switching packaging, or introducing a return solution can affect costs, customer experience, and internal processes.

That is why we believe sustainability information should be practical.

It should help a business answer questions such as:

Which options are available to me?

What will it cost?

What could I save?

How much environmental impact could I reduce?

Is this provider suitable for a business like mine?

These are some of the questions we want GreenGlimpse to help answer over time.

Listening is as important as building

Talking about GreenGlimpse with other entrepreneurs was also useful for another reason: feedback.

When you work on the same startup every day, it is easy to become very familiar with your own way of explaining it.

You know the problem.

You know the platform.

You know why a certain feature makes sense.

But someone hearing about it for the first time does not have that context.

That makes these conversations useful.

If someone immediately understands the idea, that is a good sign.

If they ask a question that you did not expect, that is useful too.

And if something sounds confusing, it shows that there is still room to improve the way the product or the message is presented.

For us, building GreenGlimpse is not only about adding features to a platform.

It is also about listening.

We want to keep talking to e-commerce businesses, sustainable providers, entrepreneurs, and other people working around sustainability.

Their feedback can help us understand what is actually useful and what is only interesting in theory.

Reconnecting with people from the journey

The event was also a nice opportunity to reconnect with people we already knew.

We had the chance to speak with Dr. Pourya Darnihamedani and Assistant Professor Ahmad Namdarian.

Reconnecting with people who have been part of your entrepreneurial journey is always valuable.

A startup changes quickly.

The idea you were working on a year ago may look very different today.

Talking again after some time gives you a chance to reflect on what has changed, what you have learned, and what direction you are moving in.

At the same time, events like this are also about forming new connections.

Not every conversation needs to lead directly to a partnership or business opportunity.

Sometimes it is simply about meeting someone interesting and staying in touch.

Over time, those connections can become valuable in unexpected ways.

Why startup communities matter

Events like the Unknown Community Celebration also reminded us of how important startup communities can be.

Building a company can easily become very focused on day-to-day work.

Development.

Sales.

Content.

Customers.

Funding.

Meetings.

Deadlines.

It is easy to spend most of your time working inside your own business.

Being in a room with other founders breaks that routine.

You hear about other industries.

You learn how other people approach problems.

You see different ways of thinking about products, customers, and growth.

And sometimes you get reminded that a problem you have been overthinking may actually have a very simple solution.

This is one of the reasons we want GreenGlimpse to stay active in the startup and sustainability communities in the Netherlands.

We do not want to build the platform in isolation.

We want it to grow through conversations with the people who may eventually use it, provide services through it, collaborate with us, or simply challenge our thinking.

Building GreenGlimpse one conversation at a time

We left the Unknown Community Celebration with new connections, new ideas, and a few new questions to think about.

And that is a good thing.

At this stage, GreenGlimpse is still growing and evolving.

We are continuing to add sustainable providers and services to the platform, improve how businesses can discover them, and work on tools that can make sustainability decisions easier.

At the same time, we are learning more about the real problems businesses face when trying to become more sustainable.

Every event, meeting, provider conversation, and piece of feedback adds another small part to that understanding.

That is why we value opportunities like this.

Thank you to the Unknown community for creating a place where founders, students, mentors, and entrepreneurs can meet and exchange ideas.

And thanks to everyone we had the chance to speak with during the event.

We are looking forward to staying connected, continuing the conversations, and seeing where all these different ideas go next.