Mint Link is a partnership platform for the Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Exhibitions (MICE) industry.
• Agencies and Buyers: Find partners, search for deals, run tenders and manage your workflows.
• DMCs and Suppliers: Present your services and get bookings from buyers and agencies.
👉 Mint Link is an easy and fast cloud-based solution that allows meeting planners, agencies, and suppliers to manage everything in one place. Learn more at mint.link
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Hello, fellow MICE professionals, I'm eager to learn what you think of Mint Link.
We're building a platform to help MICE professionals bring corporate events to great new destinations.
How come? We've been running a MICE agency of our own and over the years have identified several problems we felt limited our productivity. We've developed an in-house solution and now have decided to share it with the world, to help other companies struggling with similar challenges.
What's in it? The idea behind Mint Link is last-mile digitalisation. I'd better illustrate it with a case. Say you have a MICE agency and have to create an event in Kyoto, Japan for 50 persons. Usually you find a DMC and work with it the old good way, via spreadsheets, calls and emails. You create tasks in Asana or something to keep track. And the story repeats itself with most other events. There may be some confusion and some things may get lost, but most times it works.
Obviously if your MICE agency had all the events in one place, and all the interactions about those events in that same one place, things would go much smoother. The agency could have an easy overview of its workload: what are the current events, at what stage they are, what suppliers do what, who's delivered and who's not. So that's what we're doing at Mint Link.
Say you're a DMC - you get a request from an agency above and delegate specific tasks to your suppliers, keep track of their progress and translate it to the agency, which translates it to its corporate client. Wouldn't it be easier if your DMC could have all the status reports from suppliers gather in one place, so that you'd have good oversight? And if the progress reports could automatically translate to the agency and up to the end-client.
Once enough DMCs get on board, Mint Link can serve as a marketplace where a MICE agency can go beyond the limitations of its usual suppliers network and find great new destinations to bring its clients to.
👉 If you're a MICE professional, please comment what you think of the concept.
Any feedback would be most welcome. Or follow me so that I can follow you back and we can start a conversation about how you think Mint Link would or would not fit the needs of MICE.
Hi Ilya, thanks for sharing Mint Link with the Travel Massive community.
This looks like a solid product, so congrats on what you’ve created.
Since this is literally a global and gigantic market, what’s your strategy for growing and scaling both sides of the marketplace? Will large suppliers (the likes of convention centers etc) come on board easily?
thank you Ian for the encouraging words. surely, onboarding first participants is the main challenge at the first stage, so we're focusing on a limited number of primary markets first. and even then, it is not easy to explain in a few words how we're different from what is already on the market.
with large suppliers it seems especially challenging, as they appear to have less time to try a product in the making. though, on the other hand, one could expect they may be open to becoming design partners, should they see potential value. yet, we haven't had the luck with that so far.
so we keep talking to people, and the upside is that we learn something about how we do or do not meet the industry's needs each time we get some feedback.