Meetberry’s Maayke Schlee talks to ITN about their partnership with Airbnb for the Summit

By @SimonCocking more at.

Who are you, what’s your background?

My name is Maayke Schlee, 25 entrepreneur-ess at heart. BBA in business Admin and Hotel management.

Where you are from? 

I’m from The Netherlands, raised in Amstelveen (like a suburb of Amsterdam)

Why are you planning to come to the Summit / what do you hope to get out of it?

I’m going to Dublin, to showcase my company Meetberry. And I’m hoping to attract an investor, or plural. My goal is to raise €250K. With that money I want to improve overall website, make it more responsive and agile. Create an easy to use app (Adroid and IOs), so that if you’re looking for a place to meet one can book it at all times. At this point it’s only me in my team. The programming I outsource to a 23-year old Wizzkid from Austria. He built the meetberry.com website from his attic, and for an amazing price. I really need to hire a someone specialized in Sales & Marketing.

Is there anyone in particular you’d really like to meet at the Summit?

I’m looking forward to meet Sarah Murphy from Airbnb. We have this partnership during the Summit where Airbnb shares one of their meeting rooms for charity on my website. She’s giving me amazing feedback already, it’s so awesome! Furthermore I love Peter Thiel. Have a huge crush, I love his book ‘Zero to one’ it’s amazing. I love the Birchbox ladies, their website is so lively and girl-ish cute, I will attend their talks. I will be going to pub crawls, attend workshops.. Basically I’m open to meet and learn from anyone.

 

What are you working on?

Meetberry isn’t like your normal venue platform, we actually open doors that have never been opened before. I contact the most amazing companies in the world, and ask them if they want to share their meeting facilities, and basically welcome other startups into their ‘home’.

Meetberry solves the problem of vacant meeting & event space by matching professionals and individuals with awesome venues.

What is awesome about it?

And once startups enter these ‘fortresses’, amazing things can happen. We see that not only the meeting facilities are shared, but also knowlegde and ideas. Which is actually beneficial for both companies. And that is something which has never been done before.

Where do you hope to be in 3 – 5 years time?

Real quick, imagine a snow globe in it’s unshaken form. It’s looking quite nice, some glitter on the floor but nothing crazy. That’s like having a meeting at Hilton. Now image you shaking the snow globe, you see the glitter and snow are coming together and forming something truly spectacular. That’s like having a meeting at the AirbnbHQ, Microsoft, Facebook. Here are some cool companies in Dublin : http://www.meetberry.nl/

In three years, I’ve probably sold this business and started all over again with a fresh idea.

How is it trying to develop and scale a project and product where you are based?

Pretty awesome, cause that hasn’t been done before. More awesome because those companies can decide to donate proceeds to charity. Win-win-win situation;-)

What is the broadband / wifi like where you are based? 

WiFi in Amsterdam/Amstelveen is very good. 4G everywhere.

Do you have any good workout rounds for power outages or other local tech restraints? (when I worked in Namibia termites were a problem, eating cables)

Well, funny you ask. Yesterday, my host experience unexpected server outages, which restrained me from getting emails. It lasted 10 minutes, then everything was solved. Things like this shouldn’t happen.

Social media, which ones do you use, what for?

I work from the cloud, a Dutch cloud provider named Seafile. My data is protected, and I can work from basically anywhere from any device. Even on my phone (no wifi) I can access all the documents that I need.  I frequently use Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn. Instagram I use for pleasure as well, love that app!

What sort of results is it bringing you?

I love Twitter, because it’s get’s my message out quickly, you can measure success in RTs and ‘stars’. With Facebook, I feel like I’m more sharing in a vacuum, it’s only my audience who sees it. Twitter is better in that way. Instagram is great for branding, people like what they see. Text is more ratio, photo’s are more personal. That also goes for Pinterest, I have quite some re-pinners daily:D

What should I have asked you?

You should have asked me if we could meet in person, I can drop a mean pitch when live;-)  Hope to see you around!