You may be an enterprise brand wanting to leverage your community, channel partner expertise, or a serious entrepreneur working in a vertical industry with experts within a community of practice. Near Me’s marketplace engine will help you build a People focused marketplace. Client Case Study
Upside of Talent is creating instant access to the world’s best Subject Matter Experts or SMEs. The powerful community is able to showcase and market their expertise whether to hire or simply for the good of mankind. If you are well-experienced in your specific field, UoT gives you a place to follow your passions both personal and professional.
Near Me had the expertise we were looking for. With the Adam Broadway’s background and track record with Business Catalyst, we knew he was very knowledgeable along with the technical expertise of the development team. With large enterprise clients and users such as Intel and Cisco it helped make our decision easier. The service oriented design of the platform and the underlying technologies utilized were also a huge plus. Having a customizable approach to the marketplace integration helped make for a smooth transition. And of course, having an SEO optimized marketplace platform has given us the edge needed to jump start.
First I did research to make the build vs buy decision. I pulled together a development team to assess the complexity and projected cost to build; I met with custom web design shops who clearly were struggling with all of the marketplace features for commerce. I realized what I really wanted to build was a community and not the platform so this narrowed my focus to possible marketplace vendors. Initially I couldn’t find any so I started by reaching out to existing marketplaces that had raised money to see if they were interested in white labeling their marketplace infrastructure.
Along the way a peer of mine at Microsoft said that a marketplace is really a dating pattern and I should be able to find open source components to help build the marketplace. This pointed me in a direction about the software development which led to me reading a blog that mentioned Near Me and that’s how I became exposed. I was excited because this is exactly what I was looking for. A partnership with a technical platform to provide the infrastructure while I focused on the community. I wasn’t comfortable with an open source solution because I wanted an enterprise grade marketplace.
Time to market – developing from scratch always takes longer and costs more than you predict. Also, I didn’t want to be a technology platform company. I wanted to be a specialized consultancy for senior executives who were in the final phase of their careers where they wanted independence to work when they wanted to work and on projects that were inspiring without being a full-time employee.
Simplicity, Security, Tested – marketplaces are already complex; it is nice to have NearMe managing the backend especially the hosting and security. I came to the table with a list of use cases and we quickly identified where Near Me fit and did a gap analysis to see the scope to develop the marketplace.
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