Hi, welcome to this special session of the platform thinking MOOC. Today here with us there is Alessandro Cadoni, who is a co-founder of Friendz and founder and CEO of Atlantix. What would you tell us to introduce yourself? Who are you? Hi Daniel, my name is Alessandro, I am 32 years old and I come from a small town near Milan called Varese. I never liked the idea to having to look for a job so I always tried to invent it, meanwhile I graduated here, as I'm an ambulance engineer, but I always have been involved with communities. My goal was to find new ways to let companies use communities inside their business and the first project, my first startup, in which I tried to do this, is Friendz. So, you were mentioning Friendz, your first entrepreneurial venture, your first project... What is friendz? What is it about? The idea of friends is about connecting people with their favorite brands, so let people monetize their influence or how they do word of mouth in social media, so we created an application that led people to earn money just making pictures, collaborating with their favorite brands. You know, it's interesting for me having you here, you were one of the very first people I met when I started studying the platforms and I've always been very fascinated by the idea of Friendz and when I present it in class when I tell it to people I think it's always quite complicated to actually explain what you do, that in the end it's not that complicated but it's kind of strange for people. Alessandro was so kind to bring here one of the videos they actually use to present Friendz to their investors, to the people that want to know them, so there we go with the video and then we come back with the interview. Have you ever bought a product simply because you saw a picture posted on a friend's social media? Did you know that whenever branded content appears on your social network you are indirectly endorsing the brand and promoting its values? Friendz is the perfect link that connects brands with their targeted funnel users all around the world. We've developed a new digital advertising tool based on peer-to-peer communication which capitalizes on the best marketing channel ever: word of mouth among friends. So, how does Friendz work? Brands buy advertising campaigns from Friendz, the campaigns are shown in the app, the users choose a campaign, take a picture and upload it in the app, the picture then goes through a validation process, which if it passes then is published on the user's social media profile. All those who take part in this process receive rewards in terms of Friendz coins. The simplicity of the process is our key to efficiency. Friendz has made outstanding achievements since it was launched in 2016. The company's been providing services to well over 200 multinational brands with the help of its community of more than 200.000 organic users who published more than 3 million pictures leading to a revenue collection of up to 1.2 million in 2017 alone. When we look at the future of Friendz, we see a much stronger and better performing company with clear-cut services that would be purchased by the use of our own cryptocurrency, the Friendz coins. Friendz tokens will become the standard tool used by brands to activate campaigns, a true multinational community with representation worldwide. We are integrating our platform on the blockchain decentralizing the digital marketing and making it accessible through a single traceable currency with the power of the blockchain system. Friendz will become the safest most democratic and trustworthy tool for connecting people with their favorite brands what started as a simple dream project by three young and motivated entrepreneurs has finally become a reality where 30 highly creative and intelligent people work day by day to deliver disruptive, pace selling projects in the digital marketing arena. Okay, so this is Friendz, but how was it born, so how did you create it? What's the idea, where is the idea coming from? Friendz was born in 2015 at university and together with Daniele and Cecilia we created the idea and presented the project to the first investor that financed the project with 60k euro. It took eight months to get the funds and first we had to prove that our idea was sound before applied for funding and to do that we did some crazy things, for example, we went to large companies to offer our service before even creating it, we created a fake app to present the service to brands and to get the feedbacks to create the real one correctly. Okay, so I can imagine that for young people like when you were in those days was kind of strange to go around present an innovative service and actually be, you know, taken into consideration. How were the first phases? When you actually launched it? How was it? In the development phase we chose to create a product together with the community formed by the first users using a facebook group. Also the launch was made possible by a gamification strategy and growth hacking techniques. I mean, instead of paying for advertising to give visibility to the app we ask our users to get new users rewarding them with the credits that they can spend inside the app in their favorite brands. These allow us to reach in show time more than 300 000 users in the app and in a few years to build a team of 60 employees in three countries. In three countries as you actually spread outside Italy. Yes. And what were the main challenges you actually faced during the first years of Friendz? The biggest challenge is always to put together a highly unmotivated team and to do that we tried some recruitment strategies for example to hire salesmen, we made challenges with games that can highlight the attitude of the candidates. For example, in the salesman process we asked them to buy and resell a bicycle in 24 hours in Milan, just to reach the highest profit possible and another challenge that we faced is the way that we chose to raising capital for the internationalization, where we opted for a new kind of crowdfunding methodology on blockchain, called the ICO, with which we raised the 30 million dollars in 2018. Cool, Friendz is like a new service regarding what is offering to users and to brands but you also try to innovate internal processes like the recruitment. You are mentioning a very innovative way to look for funds, you were mentioning ICO, the initial coin offering, that is this process that is based on the blockchain and it's related to the emission of new tokens that can be used, holding a platform, within an ecosystem. It was very innovative when you've done it in 2018 and I'm very curious to know what you actually learned with this approach, with this different way to look for funds. With our ICO we had the demonstration that every project could be financed exclusively thanks to the activation and support of its own community and this is a great thing. I think it's incredible and for us the ICO was only the beginning. The development of the token and the related services is still ongoing and Atlantix will be the next product using FDZ, so we will see. So, what is FDZ? FDZ is the coin that we launched during the ICO, is the Friendz coin that is used by companies or users to access to our services. That's interesting, was the token we were mentioning before developed and created and offered by Friendz and the people that actually sustain the creation of this ICO and therefore funded the company are actually the people that were part of Friendz...is that correct? So, mainly of them were coming from the community. Okay, and you were mentioning Atlantix, so when we introduced yourself you're like the double job title, co-founder of Friendz and founder and CEO of Atlantix...what can you tell us about this new venture? Atlantix was born as a Friendz project in 2019 but ended up being an independent startup in 2020. The main reason for that separation is that Atlantx has an innovative organizational model that needs a new and tailor-made corporate structure and it's a very special project because in this case the community manages the entire company. We use a set of rules to guarantee honesty and meritocracy among people and it's a very complex community this time because has the shape of a city. So, Atlantix city is a digital city in which the community work among themselves in a new way. It looks like you are trying to create a kind of digital society. You were referring to digital cities... What is Atlantix doing right now? What is it about? Atlantix is a simple website to shop to buy things for the people but behind this it's a community that collaborates in the management of the stores. So, Atlantix it's a collaborative and decentralized marketplace like other marketplace but with the different rules. The Atlantix community is open to everyone, from manufacturers who want to sell something, to resellers, to marketing agencies, and even to investors interested in buying stores as a business opportunity. So Atlantics was born to solve the big problems for companies in the e-commerce industry, that is the need for skills and capital for the expansion of sales. With Atlantix you no longer need them because we take care of everything: our community choose products and do the marketing, and all the technical skills we need to sell online, every kind of product or services without asking money to manufacturers, so it's an innovation that will let people access to the e-commerce industry in a fast and simple way. After three years of construction we are almost ready for the launch, we are building the team, we are populating the community and we are preparing things for the lunch in the next weeks. Okay and so Ale you actually founded two platforms, so you were a co-founder in Friendz and you are now founding Atlantix and we've seen with the various examples we've been doing in the course that platforms somehow changed our daily life, there are many things that we used to do in the real world without digital technologies that now are always going through platforms. From someone like you that is actually really within the world of platforms...what are you seeing in their future? Where are we going in your opinion? I think we are at the very beginning of this stage, the platform industry transfer stage and I think in the next 10 or 15 years there will be many more and much bigger platforms, so what we see today is like maybe one percent of what will happen in the future, so I'm really excited to be in this industry. With platforms you can create an innovate a model in every situation or service or environment, so it lets you design and think something new. Okay, we'll see if actually platforms will rule the world. I think so. You know, with this course we kind of believe the same, so we'll see what happened. Thank you very much for being here with us and thank you for sharing with us the story of Friendz and Atlantix.
