MeasureMatch in Berlin. Auf Geht’s!

I love Germany. For lots of reasons: I lived in Germany during my formative years; my mother lives there now (she’s French; long story); I very much enjoy speaking and listening to German (call me crazy); and I love, love, love to drive on those Autobahns. For those and many more reasons, I visit Germany regularly.

And then there’s Berlin. I’m attracted to the creative edge of it (kinda like why I’ve lived in Brixton and Hackney during the twenty-ish years of my London residency). I love the melting pot population, and the ultra-dynamic startup community. Those things and many more keep me coming back time after time - for business and pleasure.

So, this past week I “hijacked” my co-founder’s visit to Berlin (his girlfriend lives there). It had been a little while since I was last there, so figured this was a great opportunity to soak up more of the atmosphere, spend time with a few friends and test our pitching skills!

We flew from London’s Stansted airport on Wednesday morning, landed at Berlin’s Schoenefeld airport at 1:30pm, went straight to our first meeting at 3pm and didn’t stop until our 12th meeting late on Friday.

Phew! That was an intense stretch, but we had a great time, we learned a lot and we came away really motivated about doing business in Germany.

We met with marketing, analytics, commerce and other business leaders (i.e. MeasureMatch Buyers) and we were fortunate to meet with a number of consultants as well (both new and already active on the platform).

The discussions we had focused on the common challenges of executing data and technology-driven marketing & CX optimisation projects, and how MeasureMatch helps fill a critical gap in the market.

Here are a few highlights from our conversations in Berlin:

1. It remains very, very hard to find high quality, trusted data, analytics and technology talent for both full-time and project/contract work
2. MeasureMatch is an excellent solution, especially for mid-market companies in the DACH region looking to tap into much-needed skills for important micro and macro project/contract work
3. Knowing that all MeasureMatch consultants and consultancies are screened via interviews was seen as very positive (note: the outstanding results per project to date suggest we’re absolutely doing the right thing to interview/screen all new prospective experts)
4. A MeasureMatch Buyer, who just wrapped up a contract, had tried to go down two different routes to find a service provider only to find both pricing and quality were a poor fit before progressing with MM (both he and the consultant were very pleased with their MM experience, end-to-end)
5. The MeasureMatch platform looks great (Tom, Co-Founder/Head of Platform, was especially excited to hear this…it’s very much his UX/UI design, although much credit also goes to our software dev team for turning his designs into software that works wonderfully)
6. Our approach to commercial transparency (across both the demand and supply sides of the marketplace), plus our manual and automated email communication and notifications were seen as both useful and containing nice human touches, but we need to add more!
7. We want to send additional notifications to Experts when a project has gone into contract; specifically to those Experts who submitted project Expressions of Interest (EOIs) and were not selected (more and better comms are on the way)
8. Our commitment to building a dynamic, healthy marketplace and preventing an environment where pricing is a race to the bottom, is very much welcomed by both buyers and experts
9. MeasureMatch Service Packages are great, but they could use some further development to be more flexible and easier to create (pricing Service Packages is an interesting challenge for many experts); we were asked several times for Service Package examples. Here’s one to tickle your taste buds.
10. The post-a-project flow is good, but it’s too simple. We were asked about adding targeting filters to ensure project notifications reach only specific experts with specific skills in specific geographies and more; we’re working on a revamped post-a-project experience, which we will release soon

And that’s it for now. We are very thankful for the time we were given in Berlin.

We’ll be back. And better than ever.

Mit herzlichen Grüßen,
James Sandoval