We are deeply grateful for the commitment shown to the MeasureMatch marketplace in the first three months of 2021.
On behalf of the team here, many warm thanks go to each of our three customer constituents - buyers of services, providers of services and a brave group of early adopter technology vendors helping us to discover and master go-to-market value together with channel partners.
So, what happened in Q1?
Well, a growing number of ambitious business leaders engaged superbly talented systems & data consultants, consultancies and agencies to get more important work done. And, I’m happy to report, that work was done brilliantly.
Together, through the MeasureMatch platform, clients and service providers solved for heaps of marketing, commerce, customer experience and many other business advisory and execution requirements.
Here are a few Q1 stats we’re pretty excited about:
The Work
As we expected, services for advancing CRM systems and data management capabilities (including dashboard reporting, analytics systems configurations and data pipeline automation) were very much in-demand in Q1.
Here are some of the specific requirements that were fulfilled via the platform in Q1:
For startups to large enterprises, MeasureMatch is the marketplace platform connecting business leaders with amazing consulting and professional services partners.
Ratings & Reviews
In line with what we saw in 2020, the average star rating across all completed contracts was a solid 4.94.
These reviews below reflect the sentiment of pretty much all MeasureMatch clients:
“Fran was a game changer for our team and this project was completed successfully. With his help we can now save 1 hour per day of manual work, and use this time to focus on more relevant activities. He delivered everything we have agreed on, and not only reached our expectations but went beyond them. Power Automate is a very useful tool, and now that we have learned how to use it, we can expand its usage for other segments of our company.”
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“The team did a great job and consistently met the timeframes for the short sprints over the duration of the project. They also provided useful guidance and recommendations on the best way to deliver the requirements both from a business process and system design perspective. Very happy with the outcome.”
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“Timo is the right person for the job we needed. He brought with him the professionalism, skills, and understanding to succeed. We'll be working together for a long time.”
The Platform
Not including bug fixes (oh boy did we have a fair number this time), we refined and added gobs of platform features and functionality to the tune of 30 times in Q1, for an average of 2.5 pushes to production each week.
From our lead engineer, Antonio, “We also spent a lot of time cleaning, refactoring i.e. optimizing the platform. And many of these improvements were in the admin console which no doubt increased our "management powers"”. Yes, they did!
It was especially satisfying to see us solve for Brexit. Ok, not the whole enchilada, just some pretty important invoicing elements that now make payment collections process super seamless (i.e. one-click). Yeah, we were partly broken by Brexit, too.
New Entry Budget
In mid-Q1, around 9 months after we lifted the platform’s minimum budget requirement from $500 to $1,000, we upped the minimum commitment level again, this time to $3,000.
Importantly, this move to a $3,000 minimum budget is in line with our business plan to be THE marketplace platform for the kinds of digital transformation and related professional services that are truly substantive and even game-changing for clients, not to mention material revenue opportunities for service providers as well.
It’s a risky move, but we’re confident it will help us to serve all of our customers even better, and dedicate even more time to creating a mindblowing platform experience.
Seed Round
It’s no small feat building a platform business with ambitions like ours - to transform the buying, selling and scaling of enterprise professional services. But we love what we’re achieving and we’re fully excited and committed to continue building on our successes.
If you’d like to learn about our Seed financing round, get in touch. We’re limiting participation to private investors with deep domain expertise in enterprise consulting services or SaaS/enterprise software and data solutions.
Bring On Q2
Our product roadmap and business goals remain both fascinating and super ambitious. Below are a few things we’ll be tackling in the coming three months:
It turns out there are a lots of cases for businesses to participate across 2 or more sides of the platform, and they want their colleagues, clients or partners to have different levels of access in each account.
Boy did we underestimate the opportunities to create value here. Thankfully, we have a very vocal set of customers asking - ok, demanding - more. And we’re happy to make more of that happen in Q2.
Really importantly, we learned that Partner Exchange accounts are valuable for a LOT more than software vendors. What’s even better is that as we onboard different types of organizations into the Partner Exchange, they feed each other new value opportunities. We’re especially excited by how this part of the platform is evolving.
As platform participation grows, so does our data collection. This means we’ll be making bigger and smarter product development commitments - leveraging the signals in our data assets - that get us closer to truly tailored platform experiences for everyone, including even better matching.
We’ll also put a ton of effort into evolving the reporting layer in Partner Exchange accounts into a full-blown analytics dashboard and more - the potential here is really exciting.
All of this data also means that we’ll also be investing heaps more into platform & data security. The number of bad actors out there isn’t small and we’ll be doing everything we can to protect what we’re building, for everyone involved.
It wasn’t long ago that we introduced a Client Platform Fee that works on a sliding scale i.e. platform fees drop as each client grows her/his spending over each calendar year. We like the success of the model so much that we’re planning to apply it to Service Provider Platform Fee as well.
While the first move meant that we were creating an opportunity to make more money, this supply-side change could potentially mean that we’ll make less. We’re ok with that. Our aim, of course, is to make MeasureMatch attractive to, and useful for, a much larger number of customers across all three sides of the platform. We subscribe to the aphorism, “A rising tide lifts all boats”.
At the same time, we’re keenly aware of the network effect opportunities inherent in our model, so we’re purposefully taking these risks with a view to maximizing broad-based economic growth and prosperity opportunities.
On a parallel track, we’ll continue to evolve the Partner Exchange account fee model. We’re learning a lot from the pricing we have now, which is very much a v1. Watch this space.
Lastly, I'd like to share a short passage from Chairman and CEO of IBM, Arvind Krishna's call to arms in his LinkedIn note yesterday, "My confidence in our future together".
In it he calls out the "transformative power of hybrid cloud and AI" and that "75% of enterprise workloads have yet to move to the cloud". These are BIG parts of the opportunity we will solve for - together with amazing partners.
Thank you again for making Q1 a hugely motivating success.
James Sandoval
Founder & CEO
MeasureMatch
Your success is our success. It's trite and a truism, we know, but important all the same. Just like "the customer is always right".
The opportunity for working mothers to be a driving force as equal contributors in the global economic recovery is ripe thanks to professional services marketplaces like MeasureMatch.
