It all started in 2019, pre-Corona, that Philip Meier (PHd Researcher on Platforms), Carsten Hahn (Prof. in Karlsruhe for Platform Economics) and Bernd Weidmann (Co-Founder of Wind-turbine.com platform) initiated the Slack community “Plattform Macher”. Aim was to bring together like minded people and platform builders to give them a space to interact and exchange their experiences.
Key Takeaways
- A new key event in Europe / Germany about platforms & digital ecosystems is born
- >100 participants came together to exchange their experiences in building & scaling platforms
- Europe is in a much better position then everybody things
- The community of platform experts is growing
- There will be another edition of the event in 2023
A short recap of the leading platform economy event in Germany
It all started in 2019, pre-Corona, that Philip Meier (PHd Researcher on Platforms), Carsten Hahn (Prof. in Karlsruhe for Platform Economics) and Bernd Weidmann (Co-Founder of Windturbine.com platform) initiated the Slack community “Plattform Macher”. Aim was to bring together like minded people and platform builders to give them a space to interact and exchange their experiences.
Shortly after the foundation, we from fastbreak.one / Platform Innovation Kit joined the young group as we believe in the strengths of openness and knowledge sharing.
After several online community meetings we also felt that it would be great to meet in person – the idea of the “Plattform.Macher Tage” was born. Due to Corona it took a while, but in June 2022 we made it happen.
At the Gut Hühnerhof, close to Frankfurt am Main and within the Kinzig Valley, more than 100 Plattform builders and pioneers came together. The event brings the perfect mix of conference (learning) and networking together. About 50% of the time is available to meet and talk to other founders, researchers and platform experts.
And of course, the time to party was there too. 🙂 As it is our goal to make the event fun to come. Learn, share, network and party. There are no reasons not to come.
At the two days great sessions where given by excellent people. Here an excerpt:
The sessions in a nutshel
Platform Navigator in Action
Prof. Dr. Carsten Hahn gave an introduction to the new ideation framework from St. Gallen. A card set helping you to brainstorm new platform ideas.
The Story of Wind-turbine.com
Bernd Weidmann, Denis Tischler and Dragan Popovic shared the story of their platform wind-turbine.com and how agility, braveness and entrepreneurship are more important than business plans and the best developed platform strategy.
Insights into B2B Platform Building
Matthias Walter, Co-founder fastbreak.one / Platform Innovation Kit, shared insights from their study of over 400 B2B platforms in Europe. Who do platform create value? How do they earn money and many more insights.
You can download the study here:
Industrial Data-Ecosystems
Marc Brechtel from Freudenberg Filtration Technologies talked about the challenges and approaches to build winning data platforms in the industrial space. He also shared insights into their case of “Collaborative Condition Monitoring”.
Customer Relationship for Platforms
David Odenthal explained how to create continuous glue to keep the users stuck to the customer journey. It’s always about give and take, give and take, …
Ecosystemize your Business
In this workshop our venture partner Julian Kawohl introduced his new book “Ecosystemize” and his methodology for corporate strategist. With the ecosystem map you can better analyze your business portfolio to discuss strategic moves like buy, build, partner or join.
Matching Processes of Platforms
In this technical session Aleks and Filip from Randevue, our tech venture, showcased different ways of matchmaking and how to technically solve them.
Growth Hacking for Platforms
Pascal Lehnert and Fouad Soultana mainly explained what growth hacking is … a series of experiments and how you can run them with a Kanban structured process. Very interesting to see. The approach is very generic for lead generation and therefore also applicable for platforms.
How not to fail with a platform
In the last workshop on day 2 Nicolas, Max and Gregor the trio talked about a failed platform project and drew some conclusions you should consider to avoid such a situation for yourself. Then it comes to 2-3 main factors like value proposition and network effects.
As you can see, a bigger bandwidth of topics to learn. Each session was about 90min long and gave every participant the chance to ask questions and go into a deeper discussion with the hosts.
Conclusion & Outlook
For me it was the right mixture of learning, networking and party. Yes, party. As Europe really can be proud of the expertise in the market and more than 1.000 B2B platforms out there. The market here in Europe is very different and not comparable to US and Asia and therefore all the hyped “market maps” based on valuations give a wrong picture. Especially the hidden champions investing a lot and you will see more success cases in the upcoming years.
For everybody interested in joining the Plattform Macher Tage next year … yes, there will be a 2023 edition. In the next weeks we will kick-off our planning sessions to make 2023 the next big step forward to establish the event as a major one for the platform economy in Europe.
In the meantime, join our Slack channel to stay connected.
If you have any questions regarding platforms, our B2B study or just to exchange thoughts on platform venture building, please feel free to connect.
