Let me paint you a picture. It's Tuesday afternoon. You're three coffees deep. Your inbox has 147 unread messages. And you just got pulled into an "urgent" meeting where someone Very Important has decided that your company needs to "do more on sustainability." Which... okay. Sure. Great. But what does that actually mean? This is the moment where everything gets weird. The Pattern Recognition Problem If you've worked in corporate sustainability for more than five minutes, you've noticed something strange: every company thinks their challenges are completely unique. Unprecedented. Never-been-done-before territory. And then you talk to someone from another company, and they're dealing with the exact same thing. Just with different acronyms and slightly different org charts. Everyone's trying to measure carbon footprints without reliable data from suppliers. Everyone's struggling to make the business case for circular economy initiatives. Everyone's trying to figure out if their biodiversity commitments mean anything or if they're just... words on a webpage? The problems are actually pretty similar. The solutions exist. But somehow, companies and solution-providers just... don't find each other. It's like everyone's shouting into the void, hoping the right echo comes back. B2B Marketplaces: Sexier Than They Sound (I Promise) I know, I know. "B2B marketplace" sounds about as exciting as enterprise resource planning software or quarterly compliance reports. Your eyes are already glazing over. But stay with me. Think about what marketplaces actually do. They solve a matching problem. Buyers need sellers. Sellers need buyers. Everyone's wandering around separately, wasting time and energy, when they could just... find each other. In one place. With some structure to help make better decisions. For sustainability challenges, this is huge. Because right now, if you need help with, say, setting up a Science Based Target, you have to:
Figure out what a Science Based Target even is (fun!) Determine what kind of expertise you need (climate science? Carbon accounting? Strategy consulting?) Find people who have that expertise (Google? LinkedIn? Throwing darts at a phone book?) Somehow evaluate if they're actually good at the work Negotiate terms, scope, pricing... Hope it works out
Steps 1-6 can take months. Months! And that's before you've actually done anything. What If It Was Just... Easier? With iWinForest, you skip most of that nonsense. You post your Challenge. "We need to set Science Based Targets for our operations across EMEA." Done. That's it. The experts come to you with proposals. No more guessing who might be qualified—you see actual proposals from people who work in this space. No more negotiating with seventeen different consultants—you see proposals side by side. No more wondering if you're even in the right ballpark—the structure helps you compare options. It's not magic. It's just... efficient. Which honestly feels like magic when you've been doing it the hard way. The Discovery Problem Here's what keeps executives up at night: not knowing what you don't know. Launching a sustainability initiative that flops. Making claims that don't hold up. Working with someone who sounds great but can't actually deliver. In sustainability, credibility matters. One mistake—one poorly calculated carbon footprint, one offset project that doesn't deliver, one biodiversity claim that falls apart under scrutiny—and suddenly you're not just behind on your goals, you're a case study in greenwashing. That's terrifying. So companies get conservative. They hire big names (expensive but safe). They move slowly (careful but inefficient). They avoid innovation (boring but defensible). What if the process itself helped you make better decisions? How iWinForest Works Look, we're not going to pretend we have some magical solution that eliminates all risk. We don't. Nobody does. What we have is a structured process that makes matching better. Our platform looks at the type of challenge you're posting, the expertise providers claim to have, their track record on similar projects—and helps surface relevant matches. Think of it like a really good filter. You still need to evaluate proposals, ask questions, make decisions. But you're starting from a better place than "I found this person through a Google search and their website looks nice." The experts who show up? They're choosing to be here because they specialize in sustainability challenges. They're building their reputation through the work they do on the platform. That doesn't guarantee perfection, but it does mean everyone has skin in the game. Real Talk: Why This Model Works Better Traditional consulting has this weird dynamic where everyone pretends to know everything. Consultants can't admit they're not experts in something because then why would you hire them? Companies can't admit they don't know what they need because then they look unprepared. So everyone bluffs. And sometimes it works out! But often it doesn't. You end up with solutions that sort of fit but not really, delivered by people who are competent but not specialists, at prices that reflect the inefficiency of the whole dance. The marketplace model cuts through this. Companies post specific challenges—the real problem, not some sanitized version. Experts apply with specific solutions—what they'd actually do, not generic capabilities. Everyone can be more honest about fit and scope and price because the structure supports that honesty. It's B2B dating for sustainability problems. And yes, that sounds weird, but also... it kind of works? The Meta-Problem Here's something that occurred to me the other day (and maybe this is obvious but bear with me): we're asking companies to transform their entire business models to be sustainable, but we're using a totally unsustainable model to help them do it. Inefficient procurement processes. Duplicated effort across industries. Experts recreating the same solutions over and over. Companies learning the same lessons in isolation. It's wasteful. Ironically wasteful, even. If we're serious about accelerating the sustainability transition—and we should be, because the timelines are terrifying—we need better infrastructure for making it happen. Not just better technology or better policy or better finance. Better ways to connect the people who have problems with the people who can solve them. That's what iWinForest is trying to be. Infrastructure. Boring, essential, get-out-of-your-way infrastructure that just makes everything else easier. So Yeah, Marketplaces I'm not going to pretend that B2B marketplaces are going to save the planet. That would be ridiculous. But they might help sustainability teams save some time. And reduce some friction. And find better matches faster. And work with specialists who really know their stuff instead of generalists who sort of know enough to be dangerous. And if that helps even a handful of companies actually hit their targets instead of just talking about them? That's something. Not world-changing. But definitely company-changing. And right now? We'll take it.