How we turned a crazy idea into a €1M revenue company in one year Friendz Follow Oct 23, 2017 · 7 min read

Friendz wasn’t born in a garage or in a incubator in the Silicon Valley, like the majority of other startups did. We started our journey while having a cup of coffee with a slice of cake in my grandmother apartment, in a countryside village close to Milan.

I know, the choice could sound unusual, but where else three entrepreneurs “in the making” were supposed to start?

In that cozy environment, my high school friend Daniele Scaglia, a young and perky girl called Cecilia Nostro and I, designed an app with the will of revolutionize the way companies would have communicated on social media.

We were using social media on our own, you know, and we felt that the traditional way of doing online marketing was not effective anymore. Banners were annoying and the message that the companies wanted to convey, completely lost. We wanted to change it all, making branding campaigns interesting again.

The idea behind it was simple: providing common people with the possibility of being ambassador of their favorite brands.

How to do so?

They take pictures aligned with the company needs and share them on their personal social media profiles.

That is how Friendz was created.

Friendz Founders

After the initial adrenalin rush, we realized that the best had yet to come! The work to be done was huge and we felt like our idea was on the high seas.

How to create a business model? How to code an app? How to become a wise entrepreneur? We kept on asking ourselves those questions day and night….

At the end of the day we were just 25-year-old engineers, we wanted to create something revolutionary in one of the most competitive market in the world and the only resources we were counting on were our passion and attitude. Admirable, of course, but very hard!

We didn’t let anything or anybody to stop us and we fully dedicated ourselves to the project.

Even if that meant quitting our jobs in multinational companies.

At the beginning, everything was a challenge! That is why we spoke with every relevant person in the field, we took part in startup competitions, we filled white papers with ideas and we improvised ourselves as skilled graphic designers, developers and salesmen. We improvised and we tried, a lot.

Initially, one of the biggest issue was getting the attention of big brands and marketing managers: we didn’t have a track record or a product yet, but we had the courage to dare and to try every route. Stalking? We tried that too (and it worked!). We stationed in front of the headquarters of big brands, close to the smoking areas, hoping that someone at some point would have left the door open for us to enter and meet all those people we emailed who never answered back. And finally, the lucky day arrived: we were able to sneak in unknown corridors and nobody never noticed us or called the security (fortunately). Directly knocking at the doors, we were able to tell managers what we wanted to do and ask them for feedback in order to develop a service that could perfect answer the needs of future clients.

From that day on, nothing scared us anymore: looking so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed we won the “Web Marketing Festival” competition. There we were awarded two prizes for a total amount of € 20.000 in front of 2.500 marketers and a jury of potential future investors. The victory drew more investors and one of them funded our idea with the first € 60.000, making the development and the improvement of the app possible.

So, we started.

The app first appeared in the Android Store in its beta version during the spring of 2016 and the downloads were, from the beginning, numerous. Friendz users were publishing a lot of pictures, day after day. We were happily surprised of this success, even more, when the first big brands reached us, asking for our services!

In October, we decided to move to Milan, home to the most vibrant Italian businesses. We needed an office and a house too. Why not combine the two things together in the “Friendz style”? So we moved together in an office-house, that we call Friendz-House.

Initially we worked in this apartment

Working and living together was an extraordinary experience that allowed us to deeply know everything about the other members of the team (maybe even too much!). We worked together, we breathed together and we grew together.

Not just our business grew, but also the number of people inside our group: without noticing, we became ten.

How did we find all these passionate people and how we did it so fast? We are famous for innovating whatever process, not just the ones related to our business. So, we decided to create a new method for conducting interviews, avoiding the usual and impersonal “cv screening”.

Consequently, we decided to invite the potential candidates to a surprise party where, with a couple of beers, they were asked to prove their skills, creativity and public speaking. The final touch? Closing them in an Escape Room with just 60 minutes to find the way out.

Probably they took us for crazy, but we were looking for people that were on our same page, who were able to express themselves in different contexts and to have fun with us.

In this way, Luca, Melissa and Stefano got on board.

In the following months more and more clients have been asking for our product and we got a victory in another startups competition: the “Wind Business Factor”. As a reward, we have been sent for one month in the Silicon Valley to learn how to be perfect entrepreneurs.

Our business was becoming more and more ambitious, and we needed further financing to boost it up and reach our goals. We received the second round of funding with € 400.000 from a major player in the digital marketing in Italy. Eventually, we were ready to scale up our business.

Our crazy users

Riding the wave, in 2017 we consolidated the Italian market creating a community of nearly 200k users, with a Monthly Active Users (MAU) of 27%. Last summer we organized the “Friendz tour”, offline meetings with our community in several Italian cities where we had picnics together and spent some afternoons talking about the app, pictures, their life, pictures, their interest and pictures again (we talk a lot about pictures!).

In the last months, we have been working with more that 200 clients, mostly multinational enterprises (FMCG). We made more than 200 brand campaigns and published in total more than 2 million photos and over a million euro in revenue.

A short list of our global clients

Our business has grown, Friendz family has become a team of 35 young tigers that want to conquer the world!

The last crazy idea we had was to follow the trend of unusual recruiting and hire three junior salesmen after practical challenges in which they had to sell bikes, get ice-creams for free and other sales-related tests we will tell you about in a special article.

As of today, we are distributed in the following internal divisions:

Development (System/Backend/Frontend/iOS/Android)

Operations

Community

Marketing & Sales

Administration

But the thrill never ends: from October 2017, the app is also available in Spain! We began to cultivate the Spanish community and already launched the first campaigns.

Here at Friendz we believe in innovation and we love to do everything we can unconventionally. That’s why we thought to incorporate in our system a token model.

Why does Friendz need it?

We are introducing the use of tokens in order to become a reward-based community in which people can take part to the activities proposed through the mobile app, creating and posting photos and receiving tokens in exchange.

Our idea is to introduce a payment system that will be regulated through a decentralized blockchain technology which acts as a guarantee for the safety of the fund transfers and the completion of services. Friendz platform will become even more trustworthy and technologically advanced, protecting the interests of our community and clients.

A lot to process, we know. But don’t worry, we will explain everything in details in the next articles.

For the moment, we hoped you enjoy our story!

Alessandro

Co-Founder