01 The setting
The event brings startups, investors and corporates together for a day. Its matchmaking session gives each investor and corporate representative a run of short one-to-one meetings with startups they chose themselves.
02 The challenge
Done by hand, this means collecting applications in a form, sending a spreadsheet to dozens of representatives, gathering their picks by email and then building a timetable in which no startup and no representative is booked twice at the same time.
With 42 representatives and 16 slots each, the timetable is the hard part, and every late change starts it over.
03 How it worked
- Applications became profilesStartups applied through the event's program page on StartupDeal. Each application created a startup profile with what a representative needs to decide: what the startup does, its stage and its team.
- One shared boardEvery applicant landed on a deal flow board shared with the 42 representatives, who read full profiles there instead of a list of names.
- Representatives pickedEach representative marked on the board the startups they wanted to meet.
- The timetableThe StartupDeal team turned the picks into a timetable. Each requested meeting went into the first 15-minute slot that was free for both sides, across 16 slots in four blocks with short breaks. Meetings the organizers had already fixed stayed where they were, and requests that did not fit were flagged to them.
- Personal schedulesEach startup received an email with its own schedule: the time, the company and the person it would meet. Each representative received the same for their side, with a link to every startup's profile.
04 The result
The organizers ran matchmaking from one board instead of a spreadsheet passed around by email. Representatives chose from full profiles, and every scheduled meeting had a time that worked for both sides.
Requests that could not fit were known to the team before the event, not discovered on the day as a double booking.
05 What they used
- Program application page
- Startup profiles
- Deal flow board
- Matchmaking support from the StartupDeal team
We tell this story without the organization's name.