I’m Giacomo co-founder of WalletSaver, an Italian startup that has just launched an App that suggests the best mobile tariff plans in according to the user’s consumption profile (phone calls, sms, internet).
Basically we analyze how much a user uses the smartphone (how many calls, how many sms, how much internet) extracting data directly from the phone and then we compare this profile with all possible tariff plan combinations in the market in order to provide a list of the cheapest offers available, taking into account also the mobile operator of the called numbers and the signal coverage of the mobile carriers in the places where the smartphone is most used. Right now we are a team of 7, besides me there are Antonio, Jacopo, Joao, Ricardo, Marcus and Mohamed.
However, before telling what we are now, I would like to explain how everything started and to describe the journey that let me see my simple idea becoming areal product.
How does a startup begin? How did you decided to undertake this adventure? Where did you find people that had the same passion? These are questions that friends, relatives, colleagues are asking me very often. What I can say, at least from my (still short) experience, is that a startup comes to life just like any other thing, from a simple idea. In my case the idea came to my mind during the year I spent in Shanghai for the Double Degree Program organized by LUISS University.
Once arrived in China, since I was going to stay there for a year, I decided to buy a local sim card, without imagining that it would have been so complicated. Choosing a tariff plan for your mobile phone in Italy is already quite confusing, but when everything is written in Chinese and nobody speaks English, the situation gets way more complex. Since I didn’t understand anything I just chose a random tariff plan, exiting the retail store with one single thought in my head: “How is it possible that in the XXI century, with all this technology, there is nothing that tells me which tariff is the most suitable for my phone usage?”
Once back in Italy after a year, I unexpectedly found myself in the same situation because my old Italian sim card was blocked for not being used. In this case, though, the problem and frustration of choosing a plan for my smartphone was not related to the language, but rather to the large variety of offer available s and also this time I chose a random one.
Luckily, during the last University year I had the opportunity to go deeper into my idea: first through an exam and then thanks to the advices given to me and my team by LUISS iLab (a facility that helps students develop their entrepreneurial projects). However we were still inexperienced and so we decided to participate at InnovAction Lab, one of the most important startup courses in Italy, which allowed us to transform our idea in a real startup, winning the second place at its national contest.
At that point we had a well-structured idea, positive feedbacks from experts in the area and a better understanding of the sector. However the only thing we still missed was one of the most important (at least for a startup): financial resources.
Thanks to the visibility obtained from InnovAction Lab and the efforts of the team (and some luck which is always welcomed) we were able to obtain two investments: one from Filas, a public investor managing EU funds, and one from an Italian business angel who was also my first employer for my internship in China.
Finally we had everything we needed. In December 2013, Jacopo, Antonio, our private investor and I funded WalletSaver s.r.l. and in March 2014, after finishing Master’s Degrees and PhDs, we started to work fulltime on our startup.
We worked really hard for months, learning and improving every day, making mistakes, helping each other’s and slowly seeing our idea build up and grow.
Even though we still didn’t have the product on the market, in September 2014 we were able to be selected to be part of two acceleration programs: UniCredit’s FinTech Accelerator in Milan and Lisbon Challenge in Portugal, which is gaining visibility and importance in the European startup scene.
Since the two accelerators were quite complementary we decided to participate to both of them, so now we are always going back and forth from Milan to Lisbon. We improved our team, hiring Joao, very skillful and meticulous Android developer, Ricardo, accurate and insightful business developer, Marcus, great German iOS developer, and Mohamed, brilliant 18y.o. crazy for hardware, and on Sunday November 23 we finally launched our app on Google Play.
I still can’t believe it. I’m happy, enthusiastic, worried, preoccupied…a mix of emotion that I really cannot describe. I really want to see how our app will be accepted and adopted by the users: will they like it? Use it? How much can it actually make them save? All things that we thought about and forecasted, but that now we will see if they will actually follow the path we programmed.
Despite all the great opportunities that arose thanks to the two acceleration programs we are attending, however, we have also discovered problems we never thought about. One of the most important issues we are facing right now is communication: being one week in Milan and the other in Lisbon may be cool to say, but it is really difficult and complicated to handle. Every decision is slower and misunderstandings happen way more often.
For this reason, once Lisbon Challenge will end, we’d like to reunite all the team in one place in order not to waste our energies and to focus all our efforts in the same goal: make WalletSaver become the first comparison platform to base its analyses on data extracted from the source in order to allow people to save money without wasting time in complex and useless computations.
www.walletsaver.com @walletsaverapp
Contributor: Giacomo Putignano, Ceo and co-founder of WalletSaver
