Point Nine Marketplace Meetup 2017 in Pictures

Last week, in Berlin, we hosted the third Point Nine Marketplace Meetup.

The idea behind our marketplace meetups is to bring together the founders and CxOs of our portfolio companies that run marketplaces, strengthen the community around the marketplaces theme and enable them to learn from one another.

We believe in the impact of learning by sharing experiences with fellow founders and CxOs operating in similar areas and want to facilitate this exchange, both for marketplaces and for SaaS.

The event in numbers:

• 100 guests, mainly our portfolio founders and a handful of special guests, people we worked with before in the marketplaces space;
• 22 sessions, most of which were run by Point Nine portfolio companies;
• 15 hours, including dinner, i.e. one full day;
• NPS of ca. 75 — looks like we have to do it again! :)

I hope everyone enjoyed it (I definitely did!) and learnt something useful. Photos best reflect the spirit of an event, so have a look below.

Talks by Iñigo Juantegui (Ontruck, talking about starting a marketplace 2nd time) and Philip Huffmann (Helpling, sharing experiences around internationalisation) started the day.

After that, Stefan Smalla (Westwing) talked about ‘building your management system’, while Oliver Rivera (Mangopay) held a presentation on scaling payments for marketplaces.

After the first coffee break, we continued in two tracks. In the first session, Doreen Huber (Lemoncat) talked about scaling sales and supply of marketplaces, while Tim Stracke (Chrono24) shared his experiences around pricing.

Then, Jakub Skoczylas talked about balancing supply and demand at Docplanner’s SaaS enabled marketplace, while Deepti Sahi (Deskbookers), lead a discussion about marketplace product automation.

Just before lunch, Mats Diedrichsen talked about how Delivery Hero scales and manages marketing, while Mengting Gao shared Kitchen Stories’ experience around mobile product design and strategy.

After lunch we continued with what we called P2P sessions, i.e. smaller group discussions around a specific topic led by founders, running in three parallel tracks. The first ones were around demand generation by suppliers (moderated by Stefan Feirer of Eversports), lessons learnt from M&A early in the life of a startup (Mohamed Haouache, Storefront) and jump-starting an enterprise B2B marketplace (Johannes Schlingmeier and Christian Roeloffs, xChange).

The next three P2P sessions were around ranking sellers (lead by Dmytro Voloshyn of Preply), culture (Mikko Petäjä, Yogaia) and transitioning from a free to subscription based product by Marnix Broer of Studocu.

The P2P sessions ended with a chat about running quick demand experiments, lead by Sebastian Winkler of Thalamed and a session around do’s and dont’s for people operations for marketplaces ran by Jenny & Jenny :-) (Jenny Jung, EyeEm and Jenny Buch, Point Nine).

The day ended with two sessions lead by our fellow marketplace investors at FJLabs (Jose Marin) and Piton (Andrin Bachmann)…

…and two sessions around the future of marketplaces and how it can be impacted by the raise of crypto and blockchain technologies. One of them was a talk by Radoslav Albrecht of Bitbond, while the other was a panel discussion, with the participation of Radoslav, Anna Rose (Parity), Miriam Neubauer (Catena), Toby Coppel (Mosaic) and Philipp Banhardt (BlueYard), moderate by Louis Coppey of Point Nine.

The day ended with a dinner at Hallesches Haus.

Last, but not least, many thanks to:

• everyone who participated and contributed to the content — it would not have been possible without you!;
• Ricarda, Karo and Robin for helping organize and run the event;
• Carolin for taking all the great photos;
• Mangopay for running a session and contributing to the cost of the event;
• and Haus Ungarn and Hallesches Haus for hosting us in their venues.

See you next year!

P.S. here are some impressions from our previous marketplace meetups in 2016 and 2015.