A (successful) entrepreneur and a bootstrapping believer. This is Lorenzo Viscanti, CEO, of Bologna, Italy-based Mapendo, the digital media company behind GetMyApps, a self-sustained mobile application that daily presents free apps and deals. He answered our questions about his project.
FinSMEs: Hi Lorenzo. First, can you tell us a little bit more about you?
Lorenzo: I sold my previous company two years ago. Mapendo, my current company, has been created in that period. We’re at the intersection of social & advertising, working with publishers and media companies. The web now is about getting users’ attention and distributing your content to millions of people, in an highly competitive market where newcomers get more and more difficulties to earn the space they deserve. It’s the same for publishers, media companies, e-commerce services and for app developers too.
FinSMEs: Let’s speak about GetMyApps. How did you come up with the idea of creating it?
Lorenzo: Some five years ago I was asking my friends in Milan for a screenshot of their iPhone’s home screen to get the list of the most used apps. It took five years to get where we are now. GetMyApps is native advertising for mobile apps. A collection of deals & free apps you can download to get great content on your phone.
FinSMEs: Tell me something more. How does it work?
Lorenzo: Our users get every day a new app for free. We deal with publishers & developers to make their best content free for our users. We send tens of thousands of notification & emails every day to inform our users in 100 countries about the deals they get. In every country they can get different deals in their own language.
FinSMEs: some numbers?
Lorenzo: We started small some six months ago. In January we went viral and our site & app got over 1 million users. In March we had almost five millions users and since then we’re growing 20% week over week. 60% of our users are in Asia, 20% in North and South America, 20% in Europe. We are rapidly becoming leaders in Asia and South America, where there are more than 1 billion mobile users and the market is growing very fast. Managing all this growth isn’t easy: we’re investing hard and, as an example, our tech team spend 20% of their time on monitoring and expanding the servers. When you have thousands of users online every minute scalability becomes a serious task for the tech team.
FinSMEs: What’s your business model?
Lorenzo: Facebook makes more than 1$ billion per month by helping users discovering mobile apps. We’re in the same business. Publishers, game developers, b2c companies strive to get users’ attention on mobile platforms. We help them by seeding their content to the users. We are native advertising for mobile apps.
FinSMEs: Can you introduce the other team members?
Lorenzo: Mapendo, the company behind GetMyApps is a kind of little incubator. We come up with the idea, then we design and write the code for a new project in a few days. This is how our team of 6 person created GetMyApps. We have three founders, me, Marco and Chiara. Each of us is responsible for an area, me I’m working on products, Marco dedicates himself to technology, while Chiara leads the marketing team.
FinSMEs: funds…have you raised some funding so far? bootstrapped?
Lorenzo: Mapendo has been profitable since day 1, almost two years ago. Our big bet is to reinvest the profits trying to improve our products and grow our revenues. Bootstrapping a business is tough, but you learn quickly how to get along and survive. I think that looking for funds is often a waste of time. It’s easier to go online with a prototype, start making at least some money and then iterate on the product to make it better. Then you can start looking for money. ça va sans dire, you need a great team to do that.
FinSMEs: Are you seeking vc?
Lorenzo: Right now our business is self sustainable. We’re planning on expanding worldwide by investing a lot of the money we earn. We’re in touch with some foreign investors, but for the moment we don’t need that money and we won’t be closing an investment deal soon.
FinSMEs:…future plans?
Lorenzo: We’re about to enter the European market. It’s different from fast growing markets. In Europe everything is about having great content. That’s why we are about to sign at the first two partnerships with big publishers. Publishers and content producers need to distribute their content on mobile platforms, we are the solution ‘cause we know how to do that. At the same time we’ll make our users happy by giving them great content.