It’s not been easy, I had lost my inspiration a little bit before the holidays.

I didn’t know any more what I should share publicly and what I shouldn’t.

And, most important, who am I shipping to?

Who is my user?

My first reaction to complexity was to find a compromise.

Share a bit but not all.

Write for everyone.

Even giving in to rage baiting a few times 🙈.

That was so out of character for me, I lost the motivation to write further.

Compromise is where excellence goes to die.

A camel is a horse designed by a committee.

From now on, I’m writing this newsletter for you, fellow Catonians.

As if only you read it.

You showed me the way out of my impasse.

And it’s going to be shipped on Saturdays at 11am, in honour of an old tradition of ours.

My strong opinion about the calendar

Bossy is hardcore, and I’m addicted to it.

While many of us, including me, were on holidays, he went to San Francisco for his first time.

It must have felt like coming home to a place he'd never been.

Still, nothing is more anti-fragile than what has weathered the test of time.

In more technical terms, the life expectancy of an idea is equal to its age.

And how long have festivities been around?

All human cultures have evolved them.

DON’T WORRY BOSSY.

What has evolved is a few days of celebrations here and there. Not multiple weeks per year.

For us it’s Xmas / NYE and Mid-August. Maybe, maybe, the April bank holidays.

What I’ve always loved about bank holidays is the reset button.

And after lots of trial and error in Poliferie and Plug and Play, I’ve been cultivating the idea that the second piece of the combo is a retreat right after the holidays.

Now I finally got to test it.

As I’m writing this at 4.30am, in the week I’ve slept the least in my whole life, I realise that after a real reset, the restart that follows should be as hardcore as possible.

That’s why between Xmas and NYE we’re going to take a break.

Even Bossy committed to it.

We understand that our customers, present and future ones, might still be working.

But we’re doing this for them, and to do it in the best way possible, we need to step up in setting our company timeline.

Cato closes on December 24th for a week.

That’s the deadline for 2026.

But on January 6th, we’re going to spend the bank holiday together at our next retreat.

Great teams are built by working

The agenda of this retreat was a massive challenge.

I’m still in the discovery phase.

It turns out that last minute improvisation plus muscles built over a decade can be an incredibly powerful combo.

I could do what I thought that really really really mattered.

That one last-minute room pain made on Monday right before leaving.

The Hacaton rules on Tuesday at 2am for the following morning.

The best sentence of my 1-hour speech coming to my mind a few minutes before it.

Walking around the football pitch.

While listening to “Il cielo è sempre più blu” (a lucky song for Cato, but it’s not the time for this story yet).

Thinking of how Alberto played the day before.

“Tiriamo, cazzo!”.

Obviously, there were not many retreaty things.

Like team building activities for the sake of it.

We just worked and played, the two becoming the same thing.

At retreats…

Doing retreaty things is for boys.

Working at retreats is for men.

Migrating the whole platform to AWS at 2am is for Catonians.

Sacrifice

We’ve been looking at 2 variables to assess people when hiring, firing and promoting.

Competence and cultural fit.

But it was when I gave a shout out to the four heads of - Menny, Mongy, Fra and Gio.

As they were standing up in the room full of everyone.

And I started talking.

That I remembered about skin in the game.

Excellence inevitably requires sacrifices.

In the long run, decision making power, stock options and what we've given up for Cato should all be aligned.

My a** is on the on the line on getting this right.

But there is a piece of good news in this.

It’s all so intense, and demanding, and fast, that we end up getting to the crux of it all.

Understanding the real tradeoffs.

Building the most genuine relationships that can be built.

Getting a little bit closer to the black swan that is the life of everyone of us.

Heaven’s got a plan for you

Our play is complex.

Yes, it’s intellectually challenging and fun.

But complexity is the ultimate enemy of scalability.

By definition.

I’ve been worrying about this the whole retreat.

But then.

As one of the last songs was playing.

The captain was having her baptism of sweat.

And the sales and tech teams were becoming one.

I realised that we can move mountains.

Complexity gets compressed if our team is so aligned.

Only heaven has the right to make plans - not individuals, even less so groups.

And I can feel heaven, right now, is cooking a great plan for Cato.

One more thing

This week I've felt closest to who I've always wanted to be.

And I don’t think I’m the only one of us.

Thank you.

PS I’m of course happy to get questions, challenges, feedback - but will respond only if you leave the comment below on Substack.

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Well, if that means I am ambitious, ready to go big or go home, and want to build the future…

yea I’m proud to be looking at the Bay Area for inspiration.

Moore’s law. Rockets into space. The Internet.

And now LLMs - our first self-improving creation.

Science as the endless frontier.

If that’s Silicon Valley, count me in 100%.

By the way, that’s simply the spirit of explorers and builders throughout history.

Like Dante's Ulysses (Odysseus) venturing beyond the Pillars of Hercules (that world’s ultimate frontier), to “follow virtue and knowledge”.

Written when Tuscany was the world’s Silicon Valley.

But if that means instead building a company culture of alpha nerds with no empathy…

I don’t think that’s me at all.

Why I’m against IQ

The short answer is that Taleb says it’s pseudoscience and I trust him.

The long answer is that IQ tests just measure someone’s skills to take IQ tests.

They are a totally artificial simulation that ranks people for the sake of ranking.

The world is incredibly more complex than a multiple-choice questionnaire.

The best definition of smartness to me is “getting what you want out of life”.

Not easy, is it?

So, who’s an A-player?

To build a great company you need top talent, sure.

But what does that even mean?

Fit

Everyone is an A player within a particular context, it’s not an absolute variable.

Like for a startup, discovery is distinct from execution.

Finding your person-job fit is hard but essential.

And once you find it, it’s because you’re an outlier.

Like being very energetic, or very methodic, as a sales person.

Or incredibly patient in handling clients.

Or paranoid when you run the tech infrastructure.

Drive

Steve Jobs was an unchained bully.

For sure he did not have a problem with pushing people.

If he gave up on instilling drive in those who don’t have it, who are we to try?

Some people just have it in them.

Always going the extra mile.

Caring.

Getting into the flow of hard work and having fun.

Character

This is the most important one.

It’s about ethics.

Having the stomach for getting slapped in the face by the market.

Not hiding behind excuses.

Not taking it out on others.

We go back to my aversion to IQ, and to Dante’s Ulysses.

Virtue before knowledge.

The world is short on courage, not intelligence.

AI is great but the real life burden is still on us humans.

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And lots of customer love.

A lead who “cannot wait for the demo”.

A new client who just signed and is “very happy and excited to be part of this”.

An existing client who spoke at our event in Reggio Emilia and said “you at Cato have so much passion, we will never leave you for who you are”.

So, who are we?

As I was writing before, I am not directly involved in sales demos any more.

This week I did work in tandem with Menny on a few opportunities (and it was fun!).

But my focus is on other things too.

And a part of this, still small for now, is our culture.

Let me vent at three types of things I hate.

Audios ❌❌ → texts ✅

How to communicate

For years, I’ve consistently refused to listen to whatsapp audios.

I was a Slack nazi also for that - Slack, in the good old days, didn’t support audios.

Last year, with the excuse of AI transcription, I relented.

AI transcription is terrible though.

I am going to go back to boycotting audios.

The truce is over!

100% tariffs on audios are back.

Am I the only one to hate them, really?

1. I am in calls the whole time, so I see you want to tell me something but I don’t know what - how can I know if it’s urgent?

2. Audios are never urgent you might say - then don’t send it! Just find the time for a call

3. Most importantly, audios put the effort of summarising and retaining key info on the receiver, while the etiquette should always be the opposite

Write things.

Write them well.

Write them structured.

Or write them simple and fast.

And please, not AI slop, but that’s for another time.

Meetings ❌ → proposals ✅✅

How to discuss

Most companies run on large meetings with lots of words and little action.

In Italy at least, they often start late.

They finish late.

There is no agenda.

They are in the middle of the day so nobody acts on what has just been said.

And, worst of all, the person who feels the problem / wants something done starts by asking an open-ended question.

I see this especially in some young people in our team: they ask what to do.

Well we hired you to tell us what you would do!

The escalation ladder should be like this:

• solve the problem

• if you need someone’s feedback or approval, ask by text

• if it’s complicated, place a call

• if you need multiple people

  • if urgent, call an impromptu get together (here being in person in the office helps a lot, but it can be a Slack huddle)

  • otherwise, set a call for Saturday’s proxy for the office

  • and above all, question why multiple people are needed → segway to the next section

Compromise ❌❌❌→ ownership 💚💚💚

How to decide

Let’s go through some negative examples in detail.

• “Humans are status seeking animals, not truth seeking animals” [motivation]

Bezos said this very well.

Standard organisations work like this:

→ growth is moderate

→ you rise, your peer falls

→ politics

→ decisions are about status

Startups are the opposite.

And that’s why I love them!

Growth is fast if decisions are about finding the truth, not defending your status.

• “A camel is a horse designed by a committee” [process]

This is an all-time favourite of mine.

Camels have lots of cool features, like stamina in a desert, but they are very ugly.

Horses are beautiful and fast.

One person can achieve greatness.

A group of people will find lowest common denominator compromises.

Or the one holding out the longest will exhaust the other.

This doesn’t yield excellence.

The owner should decide and have his a** on the line for it.

• “I told you so” [outcome]

After endless meetings, the losing side will be there waiting to have their revenge when things go south.

Great organisations do the opposite.

“Disagree and commit”.

→ two different view points

→ rough honest argument about the truth

→ owner decides

→ other person roots for them and does everything to support it

Ben Horowitz is a good read about this.

Cato will be a generational company.

Not just building at the AI frontier.

But doing so at the forefront of culture.

Because what we do is who we are.

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Instead, the sales team is on fire.

The ARR already grew 10% since last week’s announcement.

The team has been closing at least 1 deal every single day this month.

Including last Saturday!

Demo in the morning and signature before lunch.

In between, Andrea Menny found time for one of our Saturday calls 😂

However, what really made our week was this piece of feedback from a lead:

“Look, I don’t know how long it will take us to buy Cato, but I was talking about it with other companies yesterday, we saw your banner at Milano Centrale, we are all rooting for you”

The banner is part of a campaign by JetHR, which we are proud and happy users of!

The devil is in the details

Once something is working, it’s always easy from the outside to discount how much work goes into so many details.

Actually, people fail to grasp that even within the company.

Myself included.

There are always new ideas and what would be needed to make them work tends to be underestimated.

Refining and doubling down are instead often more powerful than it seems.

Just to give you some highlights of what we’re improving at the moment:

• going from quantity to quality when booking demos, making a much bigger effort to bring decision makers to the call, since this increases the conversion rate to signature by as much as 20x!

• tweaking our pricing and business model by

  • splitting the product into different modules

  • setting prices depending on the number of tenders participated rather than AI credits (too obscure to understand)

  • limiting the credits to the agentic flows

• implementing a series of automations to make the customer success team more scalable

• measuring our NPS (“how likely are you to recommend Cato to someone else?”) and building into any product feature a better way to collect feedback

As you see, none of these change the core of what we do, either who we are selling to (market) or what (product).

But all of these tweaks are hard work that compounds and makes a big difference.

My main mistake so far

I’m again in charge of marketing because I got my first hire wrong - great person, but in the wrong role and context.

(We actually had lunch on Monday and his new project started off very well, watch that out!).

To grow as much as we aim to, marketing is going to be key.

What is more, you can see from the feedback we get that there is a lot of potential.

Tenders have been handled the same way for a long time, AI promises to change that, and Cato is building that AI at scale.

It’s a new category.

And with our launch in April and following initiatives, I think we laid very strong foundations for leading the new category.

But this is a full-time job.

That requires a lots of specific expertise.

I think I have some good instincts, having my own scars with marketing; still, that’s far from enough.

My team itself sees it that it’s the one area where we’re punching below our weight.

Good news is that I fully completed the sales handover - this is the first month where none of the new deals came from me.

This gives me some extra time to rebuild marketing.

We certainly feel the responsibility that comes with having an entire sector rooting for us 😉

We won't stop until we've built this new category 💪

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Deal closed by the other Andrea, the first employee to join Matteo and myself in late December before we’d even signed the pre-seed term sheet (but with Irene giving helpful assurances).

It took us 6 months to reach this key milestone.

Sure, as explained before, we already had a handful of testers in late ‘25 but those were mostly pilots, contracts still to go live and monthly rather than yearly contracts.

So yea we were faster than 95% of B2B SaaS startups globally.

We are not good at celebrating though.

The stress about the next ambitious targets is real.

But we we can make it.

The way our culture is evolving makes us confident.

Saturday calls are back

Quite a few people did miss them.

We have an all-hands on Mondays at 12.30pm like Lexroom now, but it’s quite operational.

The weekends give you way more headspace for brainstorming and deep dives.

So I’m bringing Saturday calls back, with a twist.

I’m resurrecting an almost 10-year (in)famous habit from Poliferie.

The proxy for the office is not a meeting.

It’s a blocker where specific meetings can be set.

No attendance required.

The leadership team will give the example.

Anyone can ask to join or propose topics.

But it’s not compulsory.

Each meeting has to be set so if one weekend there is nothing to discuss, we won’t waste anyone’s time.

Founder mode

You know those meetings where everyone should agree something should be done but nobody ever takes ownership of it?

When Matteo is involved, the opposite happens.

He just ships it within a few days.

Sometimes a few minutes.

Not tolerating management debt

This is a concept I learned from Ben Horowitz a long time ago.

It says that in running a company there are many hard, unpleasant decisions that usually get postponed.

But then down the road you have to pay for that, with high interests.

We don’t do that, rather the opposite:

• feedback is direct

• the bar is high

• people are let go sooner rather than later

• we keep working on better structure and more clarity

“A client churning is like losing an arm”

This is what Francesca, our founding customer success manager, told me a few weeks ago.

Strong words!

But we do take our work very seriously.

In the interest of our users.

And for sure this is why more and more new clients come through inbound.

It went from a previous record of 39% in June to a whopping 62% for July (currently)!

Top 3 sources are people googling our brand directly, word of mouth and LinkedIn.

It’s crazy to see these stats when the first few deals were so hard to close.

And that really feels like yesterday.

As I told my team the other day, today we can walk holding our heads high.

Tomorrow, we should stress over the next milestone.

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We announced our first Acquihire, welcoming Riccardo and his amazing tender search aggregator, Avvista, to Cato.

The second event in our roadshow around Italy was a resounding success, with 35 people (95% turnout).

Thanks a lot to our investors at Vento for hosting us in Turin!

And I was finally back in London.

First time since 2019, which is crazy given I lived there for years.

Caught up with lots of people, including my ex flatmate.

Paid a visit to my favourite bookshop in the whole world.

Walked 30+ kilometres at my high pace from one meeting to the next.

And dropped by the Treasury - 10 years after since I started working there.

But most importantly, the Bending Spoons IPO on the Nasdaq made history.

The company is now worth more than Stellantis, formerly Fiat, once one of the three largest car companies in the world, and the poster child of the post-war economic boom.

This week Italy finally entered the 21st century.

Goosebumps.

What happened to Italian capitalism?

10 years ago I was lucky enough to attend a lecture by Giuseppe Berta, one of Italy’s best economic historians, specialising in the 20th century, car manufacturing, Foridsm and, indeed, Fiat.

I then read his book “What happened to Italian Capitalism?”.

It’s a question I’ve been asking myself since then.

Seeing our industrial decline.

Remembering professor Berta’s warning against copycatting Silicon Valley’s brave new world.

Bending Spoons provides an answer, with a very original market and financial positioning.

Italy can scale international tech companies too.

A contrarian view on Italy

• the “China shock” is behind us: our mass manufacturing has been wiped out long ago and, unlike Germany, we’ve had to cope with the transition for much longer

• my generation is coming back: us millennials and genZ went abroad much sooner (during and not after university), so we get homesick before we settle down

• small is antifragile: I’ve hated the “small is beautiful” narrative for a long time but it’s also true that “big is fragile”, as Taleb says (see Volkswagen’s 100,000 layoffs announced this week!); Italy’s network of high-end SMEs in niche but often luxury sectors is very well differentiated on the global scale; remember we are the world’s 4th largest exporter after overtaking Japan (!!!) some months ago

• underdog mentality: we grew up hearing Italy is Europe’s backwater and we have no chances - this sent away many of us but it motivates a small but growing group to prove everyone wrong

LFG

Italian brands are famous all around the world but in tech it didn’t seem possible before Bending Spoons.

Yet it happens to be, according to Claude, more valuable than any French, German or Spanish company established after the year 2000.

Crazy!

Now all of us startup founders need to build international companies from the very beginning 😉

Sadly, professor Berta is no longer with us.

But I hope he can see from the above this new dawn on Italian Capitalism.

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Ok, not that many… but still appreciated.

Attaching proof for those who won’t believe it.

It’s been a very intense week.

First of all, I could barely walk well into Tuesday due to the Sunday run forced by with Matteo.

And Monday started with a 4.45am alarm for an early flight.

On the plus side, this is the week where we reached 100 clients.

100!

It was 10 just 5 months ago.

Also, I closed two important negotiations / projects I had been working on some weeks, held our first in person all hands, and let go of 3 team members 😢

On top of this, events in the evening, working late and - of course - the unbearable heat!

For sure, if Musk asked, I would be ready to answer.

I did manage to get the urgent things right.

But lots of important stuff is falling through the cracks.

The time has come for… more structure!

I have to switch from salesman to CEO.

It was great to get some inspiration from Diego, Lexroom’s chief of staff. Very interesting to hear about their management principles.

This is the initial laundry list to bring more order in the Cato world.

1) Notion

It’s been there since the beginning but very few people actually use it.

We need to document things more.

I’ll lead by example.

2) OKRs

I need to provide more clarity on the general direction, demand everyone to set their own quarterly objectives and then hold them accountable.

And again, I’ll also have to set my own.

3) All hands…

…during the week.

Even though I’ll miss them on Saturday mornings, like this:

Any other essential management tool?

In fact, I used to be known as “Mr Structure”.

Probably more at Poliferie than Plug and Play, where I didn’t have control on the centralised corporate functions of the company.

But then in my first startup I never got to the point where structure was any useful.

The last couple of months instead led to an explosion for complexity.

Now it’s about time I got on top of it.

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At the end of the panel, we asked our users to describe Cato in 1 or 2 words.

The best answer was “essential”.

Then she added: “if the take Cato away, I’ll stop working”.

And this is someone who for months vocally complained and pushed us to build a better, more reliable product.

We’ve come a long way

It’s exactly one year since Matteo and started working on what became Cato.

June 15th we bought the original domain and a few days later we started our one-week hackaton together.

After that, we never had a moment where we asked ourselves whether we should continue or not.

We naturally kept going.

Then in late September we actually incorporated the company, found the perfect product-market wedge and then in October signed our first 5 customers.

Today we’re getting closer and closer to an important milestone - stay tuned.

Becoming an horizontal platform

The best thing though is that Cato is evolving naturally into the go-to tool for a much bigger variety of customers.

We started from tender offices within medical devices’ SMEs in Italy.

Now Cato is getting pulled into 3 different directions by market demand:

• to multiple geographies - our very first Italian client is also a multinational and asked us to test the product for one of their foreign subsidiaries;

• within companies - sales people are falling in love with the new business intelligence features of our product;

• across sectors - any kind of supplies and services (facility management, security, garbage collection, travel, welfare, you name it) plus construction.

What’s next?

There are even more bets we could try.

At the same time, focus is everything.

Sales alas will quieten down as we head towards the long European summer.

But it’s a great chance to think through what the priorities are for the second half of the year.

Let’s go! 🔥

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At least it gets you to the White House, these days.

Or what’s left of it…

My thesis here is slightly less ambitious.

That is, a big ego will get in the way of building greatness.

What do I mean by ego?

Not selfishness.

Striving for excellence is an ambitious endeavour, and ambition tends to be selfish.

That is necessary, like it or not.

I guess the closest synonyms to what I mean by ego are pride and vanity.

Shoving one’s own need for attention and recognition down people’s throats is the most extreme version I guess.

But there are a lot of other forms.

Who, or what, is serving the founder?

The CEO has a fiduciary duty to the shareholders.

And to maximise their interests, the company must be making money.

And to make money you need to serve your customers and keep your team motivated.

This is pretty general.

But for a startup, the hard part is challenging the status quo.

So I like to think of founders as the first custodians of the mission.

The CEO above all, having the most power in the company, should be the first to sacrifice their ego in the interest of the mission.

Any example from the week?

Learning

The other evening I caught two of our SDRs at 7.30pm watching a masterclass by the one and only Wolf of Wall Street.

By the way, this week the team broke an absolute record of demos booked!

Gabriele and Luca started one week and have already booked 20 and 11 demos, respectively.

Changing one’s mind

As Bezos says, we are status-seeking animals, not truth-seeking animals.

But if you want to build something great, what matters is feedback from the market, not your peers.

Asking for help

This sounds simple but can be hardest.

Especially when you need help from someone you are compared to and feel in competition with.

I led by example on this one yesterday by acknowledging the following in an email:

The ultimate test

My friend Tommaso and I some years ago would judge ambitious young people by one metric: are they more arrogant or ambitious?

In the latter case, even the cockier types learn to hold their egos in check.

The former ones usually get slapped in the face by the market, one way or another.

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This is about those occasions where things work out the second time.

A few days ago our new account executive, Davide, brought on board his first client.

I was happy to call him to congratulate.

This happened on his 10th day with us.

Good job also to Francesco who booked a difficult demo with what turned out to be a perfect fit to us.

On what was his first week.

This is the type of fast onboarding we like.

Congrats to sales leaders Andrea and Matteo for bringing new hires up to speed like this.

But in the case of Davide, actually, we go a long way back.

When I was bringing Plug and Play to Italy, in 2019, Davide was about to join my team.

He was working abroad for Denmark’s main energy company and I was trying to launch a sustainability vertical.

In the end, that took some months longer than expected, as it often happens when selling to corporations.

And by that time my friend Tommaso was doing a great job covering that space too.

For 7 years Davide and I didn’t talk.

But when Cato launched he got back in touch.

Within a few weeks we had hired him.

Apparently we had both left a great impression on each other.

Sometimes things work out immediately.

In other cases, they will down the line.

Not just with hiring.

With VCs too, some investing in Cato but not my previous startups.

Or clients, of course.

In that case, I guess my record is Barilla: 4 years from the first email to the actual signing!

I still remember very well that Friday afternoon, in October 2018, when my contact Michela, who was keen on working with us, told me that it was probably not going to happen.

It was tough but I understood it.

We built a good relationship.

So good that she helped me bring on Esselunga as a founding partner for our launch.

And then we kept in touch over the years till it was the right time to work together.

I see people taking it personally when they get a no or simply the match doesn’t go through.

It makes no sense cause circumstances matter as much as the people.

Not always it’s the right time.

But one day it could be 😉

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A friend joked they were betting what color I would wear.

It was red, of course.

And red I did wear yesterday too at the 2 events I attended in Padova.

First, we kicked off our roadshow around Italy by hosting around 20 people working on healthcare tenders.

Including Valentina and Marco, some of our very first clients!

All registered people showed up - 100%! (All but one on time - the guy living next door, of course 😂).

Never seen something like this in my life.

Congrats to Ludovica for organizing it, Simone for moderating the client interview, Matteo (Mongy) for entertaining our guests, and our legal advisor Carlo from CRCLex for the location!

Next, I spoke at the Tech & Tonic event at Le Village together with Giovanni from Techshop.

Eda is fun on stage and, together with Chiara, keeps hosting what I hear is the best startup event in northeastern Italy.

I was there last year, right after my failure, and it was great to be back.

Also, I am amazed at how many people in the audience worked with tenders - they are everywhere!

Including the founder of a company whose tender manager was at our event earlier in the day.

Repetition helps 😉

Anyway, back to my t-shirt/pullover (depending on the season).

Let me use it to share a few lessons learned about marketing.

The story behind the red

About ten years ago, I was attending a lecture on public speaking, and the professor was going over some tips for being recognizable.

He joked that if you wore a color like red, you’d immediately stand out.

I don’t even remember how many years after that I gave it a try.

Marketing was definitely not my thing back then, but its most basic law was clear: it’s very hard to catch attention.

And it seems it got even harder since then.

4 things followed from that:

• simplicity: colors are some of the most basic markers

• controversy: there isn’t much of a dress code in the startup bubble, but at Plug and Play, we would sell to large enterprises - some of their managers, wearing sleek dark suits, found red shocking

• consistency: at events, I’ve been wearing the same color (not the same pullover or t-shirt! I have more than one) for many years now

• offline: the online world is so crowded that nailing a stunt in person is super effective

What this means for Cato

Same 4 techniques:

• AI is the new thing in the world of tenders, and Cato is that AI → that’s it

• Not everyone agrees on this, but we are not afraid to fight for our mission

• We are going to share our message over and over again across multiple channels

• In-person events are very important, and we are doubling down

Wait, but why red?

It wasn’t just instrumental.

I liked red for other reasons.

Over time, my favorite one became the Golden Gate Bridge.

In a way, it’s the essence of California.

After getting there, humans had to go beyond the standard physical world.

Moore’s law, the Internet, space exploration.

The endless frontier.

As Dante’s Ulysses said when he sailed beyond the Middle Ages frontier, the Strait of Gibraltar: “you were not made to live as brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge”.

The obvious conclusion

Buying 10+ t-shirts and pullovers of the same color.

Ideally, the same red shade of the bridge.

My wife Chiara keeps vetoing this, though 😅

Will I ever change her mind?

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We have more than doubled the number of clients since our launch last month.

50% ARR growth MoM for 5 months straight, since January.

80% of weekly active companies use the products daily.

95% retention.

Yesterday, we hit an all-time high for public tenders processed in a single day, with more than 110.

The market is pulling us.

In fact, it’s at an inflection point, as I should write about soon.

Our only job is to ride the wave.

And the secret to doing it well is to do something a bit unnatural.

Especially to Italians, a conservative bunch if you think about it.

Which is…

Instead of minimizing the downside, you win big by betting on the upside.

Over and over again.

Taking commitments that are hard to deliver to clients.

Hiring top talent sooner rather than later.

Trying new things all the time.

Let me share some examples.

IFF

When we pitched Cato to Italian investors last November, they were all trying to poke holes in our arguments.

I took it as a given that it was their job to do it.

Not Irene, though.

She challenged us the opposite way.

“How do you go faster?”

“It’s a pre-seed, of course 💩 can hit the fan, but what if it works? Are you able to take off?

You can tell she worked in the Bay Area for years.

By the way, she is hiring.

I know you can’t tell from the pic, it’s a bit subtle - just like our launch.

My cofounder

Matte is incredible.

99% of product / technical challenges for him are like “yea we can do it”.

One week, maximum two.

I know that when he’s more skeptical about a feature's feasibility, it’s really not something to build now.

It’s funny to go down to the -1 floor in our office to visit the techies (yes, the SDRs have taken over the room upstairs).

Stefano joined this week, and he’s already working on a big project.

Supposed to take weeks.

Then we promised a potential client it’d be ready by next Wednesday.

Stefano was a bit shocked.

Giovanni, used to Matte’s crazy timelines, rolled his eyes.

I know some people think that burning the midnight oil in the office is toxic.

But it’s simply that we’re having the time of our lives.

We want to build the best work of our careers for our clients.

Yours truly

Looking back to the past year, what I’m most proud of is how I left the failure behind me.

Not simply building another startup.

But always aiming high.

You could argue that we have a good business now, and I should be conservative.

That doesn’t work, though, when the market opportunity is big.

The greatest risk is to take no risk at all.

Our market has strong network effects, and we have to go all in; there is no alternative.

And so at every fork in the road…

With any important decision on my plate…

I shoot for the fences.

That’s how we quickly grew to 26 people, I guess - when did that happen?

Plug and Play is starting to complain about us, as we did about Pillar in January…

On another note, Matteo managed to hire two other Matteos on the same day!

Now it’s 4 of them, plus 2 Andreas, 2 Leonardos, 3 Simones, 2 Francesco / Francesca.

TBG

Onno, Cillo, and Nic did an amazing job with The Bologna Gathering.

Best edition to date, truly impressed.

Who would have bet on it just a few years ago?

I know I’m a week late to this, but last weekend Stefano (Cubbit’s cofounder) swore that mine is the only newsletter he always reads.

So let’s test it!

Jokes aside.

Gianmarco Carnovale wrote that he has been trying to do something similar in Rome for a while but has never reached that level.

Big round of applause to him for the candor!

And to the TBG team for the remarkable feat.

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One from someone active in the startup ecosystem.

One from a legacy player in the world of tenders.

This shows we are catching more and more attention, which is good.

But aside from that, let me address both of them.

In different ways.

The startup ecosystem

Alberto Trevisanato from Unlear came to our office to shoot a video on Wednesday.

Check it out, he’s great at this.

In the video, we talked about our recent fast growth.

Someone on Instagram said that the “trillions in ARR since our launch yesterday” narrative is broken.

I think he has a point.

Let me just be factual:

• in April 2025 I had lunch at OGR with Diyala, Isabella and Tommaso from Vento, that evening I went to check out the latest YC batch as they pushed me to, and read for the first time about AI for tenders startups → I think it was April 8th, I don’t have access to the work calendar from my previous startup, but it was definitely around that time

• the third week of June, Matteo (whom I had met in January) and I started working for real on this idea → before that, we just had a couple of chats, did some research, maybe I did 10 user interviews

• on September 26th, right after the liquidation of my first company, we incorporated → all in a rush to sign our first customer

(as an aside, the run and exercise placeholders were working back then, but have since miserably failed)

• within 3 weeks in November, we raised and signed the term sheet with IFF; by December 16th, we went to the notary public; by mid-January, we had cash in the bank

• till Jan 19th we had the first 11 clients, most of which were not live in adoption yet, and it was just Matteo and I

• today we are 20+ people and since yesterday, 70 clients → well done Fil!

  

Make of it what you will.

I think in 2025, we validated quickly; since January, we have been building momentum, and since the launch, we have taken off.

That’s what matters.

And it’s not us.

It’s the companies that have been fighting with tenders for decades and are now finally getting the revolution they deserve.

3 extra points:

• Re: retention, sure, many clients have recently joined. But 40+ of them have been using it basically every day for between 1 and 6 months, and that’s not easy at all. Also, 80% of our weekly active companies are active every day! That’s a crazy metric in SaaS.

• Re: TAM, at least 10% of European GDP each year is allocated through tenders; that’s obviously not our ultimate market, but it’s a very big ocean.

• Re: prosumer, why that label lol? We are a sales tool. Pure B2B AI.

Anyway, thanks for pushing us to clarify. I agree that many founders are stretching this too much.

And to the dear friend and fellow founder, who was joking that I changed my tone of voice on LinkedIn recently: well, I didn’t have much to say for a long time.

Now I’m excited, and so are my clients and colleagues, and I’m happy to share it.

And ok yes, I also have to throw some red meat to investors! Let them have it. 😂

They want ARR, we provide it, and in the process, become addicts together.

The more you have, the more you need it.

The legacy player

I’m not going to give them free visibility.

Plus, we are solely focused on our customers.

Let me just address what they got right.

1. “They (Cato) never won a tender in their lives.”
   We are not experts in tenders; we are experts in how AI can make tender applicants' lives easier.
   Our customers own the problem; we own the solution.
   We spent months working every day with the best tender offices in Italy.
   People who have been doing this for decades consistently tell us our product seems to be exactly what fits their workflows.
   Creating a new category requires not being overly anchored to past processes.

2. “We (legacy player) offered the first training course in Italy on AI for tenders.”
   Could be, certainly that’s not us.
   We believe the best way to learn is by using the best tool on the market.
   And in Italy, that’s Cato, by far.

3. “AI can’t replace people.”
   That’s true!
   But companies that adopt the best AI tool will soon win more tenders than those that fall behind.
   Man + machine always beat both men and machines alone.

It’s a big market.

There are lots of experts on tenders.

We keep learning from them.

But re: building THE AI for tenders…

That’s the only thing we do, and we work hard every day, including weekends, to do it excellently.

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First of all, this overwhelmed our customer success leader Francesca, who really didn’t see this coming so fast.

Also, the four that joined this week come from a variety of sectors: stationery, facility management, electrical systems, and education.

Medical devices were a great starting niche, but thanks to the launch, we now attract a bit of everything.

The tender workflow is the same across sectors, so our product works horizontally.

And this is accelerating our growth.

In the past 2 weeks, we added as much ARR as in the first 4 months.

Why is it working?

We tackled a painful problem and built something some people really want.

It’s really that simple.

It’s really that hard.

And this fact has some very important implications.

Traction beats any skill or plan

Sometimes I am amazed at how many things we are doing at the same time, at high speed.

Selling.

Building.

Hiring.

Communicating.

And a thousand admin things in between.

And we’re still very small.

Think of companies in the scale-up phase where complexity is orders of magnitude bigger.

Are the leaders of those companies superheroes?

Do they know exactly what they are doing?

Are they super careful to avoid mistakes?

No, none of those.

I think simply when there is a big demand for what you’re building, there is a higher tolerance for imperfection.

The best builders in the world are not great at building everything, they are great cause they are building the right thing.

The best plans are pulled, not pushed

I remember how painful it was in my previous startup to decide what to do.

We were constantly trying to push our ideas onto the market.

Here, it’s the opposite: the market keeps pulling ideas out of us.

Private tenders, insurance, even tenders in other countries (ie Spain).

When you solve a problem well for people, they ask for more.

Free markets usually get a bad press.

Cynical people will say that they show humans are selfish.

As an optimist, I see the opposite in them.

Markets are just the expression of what people really want when they are free to choose.

So they push humans to do their best to serve others rather than themselves.

Why Italy is the best launchpad for us

Consider what are arguably the two breakaway growth stories of the past five years in Italy—and now, us.

We benefit from an exceptionally high concentration of target users, on a per capita basis, compared to any other European country:

Unobravo → psychologists

Lexroom → small law firms

Cato → public procurement professionals (both sides of the market)

The pain drives the growth.

Italy is the best country in the world to build an AI startup for tenders.

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Instead, it’s already been our best one yet.

The level of inbound in the past 10 days has been overwhelming.

And I’m proud of how we dealt with it.

What did we do especially well?

Everyone is selling

SDRs and AEs, including me, are spending the days on calls.

But this week has been exceptional.

Simone, our marketing guy, was also selling at our first trade fair.

Matteo, my cofounder, is taking some demos.

And we closed one!

Where can you find a CTO who is also selling?

No chance I’m going to code (or better, watch Claude code 😂).

And then Saul, who started as an intern in January, closed 3 deals in a row this week.

2 in person at Exposanità.

I let people prove me wrong

I was very skeptical of getting a stand and hosting a side event at a trade fair so soon.

The week after our launch!

But Saul took ownership of it.

Simone prepared all the material.

We helped as the rest of the team.

And it’s been great.

3 deals signed - we had to run around to find a printer to get the paper copy of the contracts.

We filled in the numbers with a pen, shook hands, and took pictures.

Yes, I’m wearing red at the trade fairs too.

And not the best shoes apparently.

Anyway.

Moving on.

Our stand was in the startup section, the furthest away one, still, we got lots of traffic.

Lots of people at our demo.

A client of ours has been our best salesman.

We embrace the enthusiasm

Our fight to make tenders more accessible has struck a chord.

So many people telling us they’d been waiting for this.

Lots of curiosity.

Amazing people from all over the world are keen on joining us.

Like this guy based in Chicago:

To keep the focus on sales during working hours, I’ve been interviewing candidates in the evening.

We’re all a bit tired, I guess, but we’re so pumped up we don’t notice it.

This is our new SDR, Francesco, who’s taking a gap year from his master's to jump on board.

Let’s go! 🐎

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A goal of Q1 was to have Italy’s best stealth launch of the year.

I think we set a pretty high bar.

I’ve seen it many times - crowdfunding campaigns, product launches, and any kind of announcement.

The first day, if not the first few hours, makes all the difference.

Better to concentrate 95% of resources on that.

I was asked which agency we hired.

None!

Here’s a post-mortem with marks.

Taking over LinkedIn: 9.5

No launch video, which is all the craze these days.

Still, we went viral within our bubble.

All organic.

I sent an invite to our investors and angels at Xmas about the launch announcement (which was later moved by a few days to sync with the release of the Made It Podcast).

In the days leading up to it, I sent multiple emails with instructions and reminders, including a last-minute one regarding the absolute fricking pain of finding pages to tag on LinkedIn.

The other coup was closing down the whole team in a room for an hour to like, comment, and post together.

It was fun too.

If you didn’t follow us yet, DO IT NOW!

Getting covered on traditional media: 4

We should have hired an agency for this.

Still happening, should be interviewed by Radio24 today.

A bigger splash would have helped with our ICP, though.

Thanks to Edo G. from Compri for the feedback on this.

Brand: 8

We sweated through the choice of a new name.

Hearing our client, Giorgio, praise it on stage unprompted was great. “I’m a Roman history geek”.

I love our logo, it’s like a simple ✅ - everything is ready for submitting the bid.

The website looks beautiful and well-articulated, though some parts were not well thought through, and tech had to fix them in a rush, an hour before we went live.

Too bad we didn’t get our signature marketing gadget, as it was perfectly in line with our slogan: “gare d’appalto senza stress”.

It was annoying that we had to rename the LinkedIn page from Cato to Cato AI; we couldn't tag it any other way.

Things can be improved for sure.

But we laid solid foundations.

Consider Simone, our marketing guy, officially started 1 week before the launch…

Positioning Matteo: 7

This was something I thought I wouldn’t crack.

There are lots of podcasts and outlets that business profiles follow, like startups and VC.

I already have a track record in this circle.

Matteo is young.

A hidden gem.

Plus, it’s harder to establish a personal brand within tech and product, compared to business.

I heard lots of feedback that his interview with Giulio at Cosa Sposta was a blast.

Working hard: 10

It’s the second night in a row I’m closing my laptop at 2 am.

The flow of inbound messages, emails, and notifications has been crazy.

On top of launching, we had a standard sales week.

Which, for me, is spending the day on calls.

Plus, we are interviewing candidates.

To make this an even more American week, the SDRs moved to the room upstairs, and I spent some time observing them in the sales pit.

Cold calling and pushing clients to book demos.

Matteo: “Hello, I’m the head of Italy for Cato”.

Saul: “We just launched, you know, and got so much interest, we are giving priority to companies like you”.

And Leonardo radiating charisma like DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street.

Ours is the more handsome Leo, of course.

In-person events: 8.5

It’s a massive coincidence that the five degrees pitch event was on Tuesday night.

I’m happy with my pitch, I was high energy.

But the competition was tough, I can learn a lot from the other founders (like Paolo’s slide about Italy having so many lawyers and Gabriel’s €10 trillion market 😂).

Our own event on Wednesday was fantastic.

I am proud that I found the balance between the wow effect and very limited resources.

I got the venue at PNP, which is also our office, booked the catering, sent the invites during the Xmas holiday, organized the panel in the days right before, ran the IT checks, and prepared my slides an hour ahead.

My wife says it wasn’t my best speech.

Not everything was perfect.

But…

Enthusiasm: 11

The hype was sky high.

Giving Tommaso some long overdue acknowledgment of his work leading Plug and Play Italy was emotional - did anyone catch a pic of our spontaneous hug?

It’s the first event I've hosted where I didn’t have to chase people to show up. And the room was full.

Our clients sold us very well on the stage.

Angels that invested in my previous startups too were cheering for us - they are calling themselves “legacy capital” now.

Matteo’s parents and brother played with my kid Marco.

Chiara from Moonstone made my week when she said, “The best thing is seeing all your colleagues’ eyes sparkle.”

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It’s never enough.

Sweet or savory, warm or cold, from any veggie to pizzas and cakes - he wants it all.

His signature pose is lifting his clothes and showing his big belly.

With big pride, of course.

If he’s going to be like that in business, he’ll make a great entrepreneur.

It might sound like a joke, but yesterday Leonardo, one of our most promising SDR interns, told me something similar.

“What I love about Cato is that everyone wants more all the time - you ship a big feature, you close a major client, and after a few moments you’re like, ok, what’s next, how do I push harder tomorrow?”

Things are going well, but we want to take it to the next level.

There are two key ingredients to it.

1) The bets

Right now, we can grow in five directions.

• noisier: test marketing and GTM on more channels, such as SEO and fairs - we’re going to be at Exposanità later this month, for example;

• broader: expand to more sectors (this week we signed the first construction company) and to more functions within a company, especially salespeople;

• faster: try partnerships with different types of actors;

• higher: go upmarket and sell to enterprises;

• deeper: build features that lead to automatic upsells for our heavy users (e.g., a credit-based system for the agentic chat; connection with insurance providers specialized in public tenders).

2) The owners

Our founding team covers all key functions across the funnel, from hearing about us to getting a lot of value.

• Simone makes us known

• Saul identifies the right clients

• Matteo leads the charge in reaching out to them

• Andrea closes them

• Francesca onboards and manages them

• Nicolas refines and optimizes the UX/UI of our core features

• Giovanni makes sure the whole system is solid, fast, and secure

This is an abstraction - in reality, all tech people are full-stack, and Matteo and I are pretty active in the funnel.

But it’s important to know that all our initial hires are top-class in their respective areas.

This means they can take care of the “business as usual”.

Doubling down on what’s working.

Independently, with clear ownership.

And so I can focus on leveraging them for the different bets I listed above.

Like Andrea (Menny) and Matteo (Mengy) are taking care of going broader, while Matteo (Bossy) and I (Zorzy) work on the credit system, and I (Zorzy) on enterprises.

Clearly defining ownership and expectations solves most of the chaos that comes with fast growth.

Let’s celebrate together 🥳

Next Tuesday, Cato is going out of stealth and announcing our pre-seed round.

On Wednesday, the day after, we’re going to host an event followed by an aperitivo in our office - at Plug and Play near the Duomo.

Thanks for supporting me by reading this newsletter over the past year.

You did contribute to the journey.

So you are more than welcome to join.

Be ready to fight with my son over the refreshments.

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It was the cherry on the cake that topped off a great quarter.

As the first part of the year draws to a close, and things are going well, it’s natural to be thinking ahead.

Planning.

Setting goals.

Dreaming big.

It’s fun, but I’m not anxious to get to the future fast.

I’m enjoying the moment.

We’re still a small team, everything is new, and excitement abounds.

It’s a magical time that we’re going to miss.

And I think this is the best signal we’re on the right trajectory.

Blasting through our goals 🎯

Sales

In early January, we aimed to get to around 25 clients by Easter.

At the time, it sounded very ambitious.

We just had 11, and we didn’t close any new clients until January 20th.

Then this Wednesday, we signed client #32.

Product

The tech team’s overachievement was even greater.

Basically, the core product we aimed to build this year is there.

Sure, some parts still need some work, but all major functionalities are live:

• screening opportunities

• summarising documents

• drafting the bid

• analysing past outcomes

• managing all tenders and people involved in the same space

User love

We got tonnes of this.

Usage has been increasing throughout the quarter.

More than 200 people use the platform every week.

We even got 3/11 companies that signed last fall to upgrade their subscription plans.

Interestingly, they are of very different sizes.

A small company where the entrepreneur himself handles tenders.

A medium-sized company and a very large one, where they brought on board their sales colleagues, in the second case, getting to almost 40 users.

Yes, the explosion in the number of clients created some issues.

But now that Francesca, the founding account manager, has joined, everything is going more smoothly.

Team

We didn’t have specific objectives, but everyone is pumped up.

The second hire referred by a team member accepted our offer this week.

Out of 8 full-time hires, 2 were former colleagues of our first sales and tech hires.

25%!

Enthusiasm is contagious.

Looking ahead 🛫

I came up with the next ARR target together last Saturday while skiing with Matteo Monge, who leads our SDR team.

He’s the most bullish member of the team.

Plus, going down the slopes always gets me excited.

So, of course, the numbers we came up with are super ambitious.

The real work, though, is to focus and find the right balance between execution and experimentation.

In planning the next term (April to July), I split our workstreams into 3 different buckets.

Business as usual

This is what’s been working so far, and we need to keep it.

The current product for SMEs' tender offices, particularly in the medical devices space.

We cold-call them, bring them to the demo, close them as clients, and finally onboard and support them.

The product powers all the standard activities that this particular type of user performs.

Bets

These are new ideas we’ve already done quite a bit of discovery and iteration on.

They are of different types:

• new channels (not just outbound but also marketing)

• new types of companies by

  • size

  • sector

• new users → as I said last week, we’re developing very cool features for salespeople

• new business model → not just flat subscription but also AI credits

We expect some of these bets to pay off already before the summer, while others won’t bear fruit till the fall.

Discovery

These are more outlandish ideas we still know very little about.

It’s stuff like selling to occasional/first-time bidders that know very little about how tenders work, for example.

Before working on them, we need to learn more.

Some I’m very skeptical about, but some of my team members are more keen on.

When they ask me for permission, my response is: “Look, I’m going to hold you accountable on the business as usual tasks and the agreed bets. But if you want to work on this idea on the side and prove me wrong, go ahead and try”.

Happy Easter 🕊️

No all hands taking place tomorrow.

It’s time to draw our breaths a bit.

Have a nice long weekend, everyone!

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I’ve been speaking at some investors’ gatherings, a podcast, and BabyVC’s first session in Milan.

And I’ve even given my first TEDx talk last Sunday in Alba.

Always wearing my signature red pullover, of course.

When they introduce me, the world of tenders is described as “unsexy”.

Understandably.

People laugh when I ask the audience if anyone has a burning passion for public tenders.

But actually, every time I hear it, I am happy.

One of my criteria for choosing the next startup was finding a boring, underserved sector that wouldn’t be crowded with startup solutions.

So I guess that part worked out well.

Still, hear me out.

Yes, tenders are about admin work 📝

Reading documents.

Summarising them.

Filling out forms.

Double-checking everything.

That’s what tender offices do.

And that’s what our AI has helped automate so far.

But they are also about lots of cool data 🔢

Due to transparency regulation, there are millions, if not billions, of datapoints about public contracts.

Winners.

Runners-up.

Prices.

Rankings.

Offers from your competitors.

I’ve been doing sales for almost 10 years, and in the private sector, it’s very hard to get anywhere near this level of granularity.

We built an internal dashboard, where you can see who wins the most tenders in Italy, for example.

And now we are developing something much more powerful for our clients.

Soon, we’ll be moving from helping them avoid missed opportunities and prepare bids faster to raising their win rate through better data.

Unsexy and… infamous 🚨

Better data can also be put to serve citizens’ interests.

As you can imagine, the general public hears about tenders only when crimes happen.

We had one such case in Italy this week.

The debate is always about rules and their enforcement.

A majority of Italian voters just showed up to strike down a reform of the justice system.

That’s probably the solution you’d expect from the city of lawyers - whether politicians, civil servants, or journalists, the Roman establishment sees everything through legalistic lenses.

Remember that Einstein quote?

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them

What if we used big data to surface irregularities?

Fewer rules.

Better algorithms.

I remember reading that in the early days, PayPal’s main challenge was to build an anti-fraud system.

Since then, we have made huge progress in running automatic checks online.

How many of those learnings are applied by the Italian government?

I don’t genuinely know.

But I developed a feel for how things work in our capital.

For example, the website of ANAC, Italy’s anticorruption agency that collects data on public tenders, is down on most days.

And their data is so hard to access.

Still, there is a goldmine of information there.

That is an agency that employs about 300 people.

That’s approximately the same staff size at OpenAI when they released the first version of ChatGPT at the end of 2022.

I joke that 10 of those are in IT, and the product was built by an Accenture subcontractor for millions of euros, using software development methods from the 1990s.

What if ANAC invested in just a few top product managers and coders instead of more law graduates?

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The theme is “metamorphosis”.

So I thought it’d be quite fitting to tell Cato's story.

Riding a tech wave to transform an industry.

We know who our customers are.

When they see our product, they are usually impressed, if not mind-blown.

But it’s hard for them to fully get it as it’s so new.

It’s a clear sign we’re not in a mature space; we’re building a new category.

Fighting the right enemy ⚔️

One year ago, I was admitting to myself that I wasn’t the right person to take on LinkedIn.

For sure, the frustration with it was there.

This meme recently cracked me up.

But it was the wrong challenge.

I decided to go back to B2B and to focus on tangible problems in a boring area.

Ideally, so boring that nobody is building in it, but that I would find fascinating.

It’s the wand that chooses the wizard 🪄

And there it fell on my lap.

Government tenders.

I worked in the public sector and wrote about its procurement in my thesis.

When I saw it, I was very intrigued.

Don’t reverse engineer the problem you’re going to work on.

That would make you a mercenary - big winners are missionaries.

€2,000,000,000,000 🇪🇺

That’s the contract value of tenders in the EU each year.

10% of the GDP!

If you want to radically transform a sector, it’s better if it’s bigger.

Hard challenges are motivating.

They attract top talent.

Get more access to lots of funding.

This was clear to me from the start, and it got me keen.

Ride waves 🌊

The status quo is so hard to fight.

For millions of years, we hunted and we gathered rather than planting seeds.

For thousands of years, scientists, explorers and entrepreneurs had no room to breathe - till they built modernity.

Still today, change is hard.

Technology is the most powerful enabler you can have.

LLMs complete change the problem of tenders.

90 to 95% of the work could only be performed by humans till a few years ago.

Now, a big piece of the cake can be eaten by software.

Once I saw proof of it last summer… I was committed.

Position against, not within the existing category 🤜

We started testing the right way.

Shipping and selling from day one.

And after only a couple of months, we realised what it took analogous European startups years.

It’s easy to start from the automatic search for tenders, which is an existing software category in the market.

Once we saw that, we ran away.

Early adopters have the biggest pain 🍇

I had read this for years in PG’s essays and YC material.

This time, we made an educated guess and hit the jackpot.

We found the sector that is most tender-dependent and where there were significant pain points that could be solved with a simple product.

A big, low-hanging fruit.

The combination of the right product positioning in the right niche is the thing Matteo and I are most proud of from the pre-funding phase.

Own the solution 💡

We are outsiders to this sector (more on this in a second).

Our clients have been the experts who taught us about the world of tenders.

But you can’t let them dictate the product agenda.

They became masters of an old process.

We are the experts in how technology can transform it.

They own the problem.

We own the solution.

Fast and furious 🚀

Disruption is popular today.

Everybody speaks like Silicon Valley insiders on LinkedIn.

But in places like Italy, people still think in opposite terms:

• bigger teams are better

• knowledge of a sector is the main asset

• more is more

This is true within existing categories.

When you’re building a new one, it’s the opposite:

• small teams are better

• being an outsider is key

• less is more

Metamorphoses happen when a small, hungry, fully focused team marches at full speed.

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