This week more than 3,500 individuals will travel to Amsterdam to discuss the latest web trends, learn about best business practices and meet the world’s influencers of technology & innovation. Since 2006 The Next Web conferences have been known for bringing together the world’s leading thinkers, promising international startups and the most inspiring brands to do business and share their ideas. This year Luxembourg will be reprensented by SponsorMyEvent. The startup has been elected to pitch and will HAVE THE CHANCE TO a EUROPEAN – exposure. We asked CEO Peter Pöhle what he expects from this event and how his business is expanding.
You will pitch this week at The Next Web event, what is the purpose of this event?
TNW is one of the most prestigious tech-events in Europe that brings together the tech-(startup)-scene, investors and top-class speakers. We have been invited to be part of TNWs’ Boost-programm and in addition have been elected among 75 other startups to present SponsorMyEvent on stage.
What do you expect from this presentation?
It will give us exposure, visibility and feedback. As a startup you are constantly pitching your company in front of clients, investors and others. Every single pitch brings you a step forward because you always get valuable feedback that makes you progress. Another goal is to build up good relationships with investors who might be interested at a given time to become part of SponsorMyEvent and to help us building what we want to achieve: a company operating on a global scale.
It means SponsorMyEvent is growing fast, how is the business going?
For a little over a year, SponsorMyEvent helps organizers to find sponsors by matching them on SponsorMyEvent.com. Also thanks to the partnership with Eventbrite.com it became easy to publish events on SponsorMyEvent.com.
After we managed to quickly become the leading platform for sponsorships with events in well over 1.000 cities mostly in the US and the UK, we are now heading for the next iteration of our platform. We have spoken with many event-organizers who signed up on our marketplace to find sponsors. We learned that discovering new sponsors is great, but to add tools to manage relationships with sponsors that organizers invite themselves would simply be AWESOME.
So we went back to our drawing-board and streamlined the workflow of SponsorMyEvent so that organizers can be given a true 360° solution for sponsorships. The result is a solution for all event-organizers whether they already have a pool of potential sponsors and want to manage their relationship with them or if they need to find new potential sponsors.
What are the main achievements since the last 6 months? And your goals for 2015?
Over the last 6 months we managed to build up an excellent reputation on the UK market and to gain considerable traction both in the UK and the US. Even though we haven’t made any marketing efforts on the US market, not less than 30 events are created every day from the US. And this shows clearly that our next step will be to actively develop this huge market.
From a technical point of view it’s all about making SponsorMyEvent even better and to implement functionalities that improve the overall experience. Just as during the last months we will keep on working with our clients, listen to them and to be two steps ahead of what others might expect.
