05. Circular Economy: how to listen to create a market that doesn't exist yet - Maayke-Aimée Damen (Excess Materials Exchange)

In today’s episode, I had the chance to welcome Maayke-Aimée Damen. Maayke has received several prestigious awards for her pioneer work on the circular economy. With her company Excess Materials Exchange, she has for mission to eliminate waste from the dictionary. They help companies turn their waste into valuable resources. Together we talked about how they developed and tuned their products according to these companies’ needs and concerns. We discussed their extremely impactful results in terms of environmental but also financial impact for these industrial companies. If you want to learn more about circular economy, to learn how they developed a high tech product using AI and blockchain, and how Maayke kept her motivation high against all advice in order to create a market that  didn’t exist yet, this episode is for you. 

In this episode you will learn:

• How she funded her company using a mix of public funding and direct revenue from companies who paid for their services (even for their first pilot)
• How the maturity of the circular economy market impacted the development of her idea until the launch of her company
• How she invented and developed the Resources Passport which helps companies to evaluate their resource assets 
• How she shifted and adapted her company pitch to her clients to get a better reaction and be able to sell her product better to corporate companies
• How she got invited to present 3 Ted talks and how she prepared them. 
• How they use blockchain technology and a new protocol to overcome trust issues and company technology secrets 
• What are the 3 cornerstones of her company product (Identity, Intelligence, Integral approach) 
• How they defined and set their 3 different revenue streams
• How they started their first pilot project with 10 corporate companies in order to develop and tune their products WITH these potential clients (and how she made it a paid pilot).
• Her tips as a CEO to get clients to jump on her journey and listen to her 

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