Damiano Ramazzotti is a Non Profit sector expert. Some days ago, during an event in which he was pitching his interesting startup, WeTipp. Entrepreneur and vc Augusto Coppola introduced him to me. We quickly turned to speak about his ambitious project, the solution, the team and the resources they need to realize it.
FinSMEs: Hello Damiano. Can you tell me a little bit more about you?
Damiano: I’m a budding entrepreneur from Italy! Before WeTipp I worked internationally as a trainer and facilitator in the Non Profit sector, and managed international youth projects on active participation and intercultural dialogue. You can check my Linkedin profile here.
FinSMEs: Let’s speak about WeTipp. What is it?
Damiano: Volunteer based groups struggle to keep their members involved, while users creating events have a hard time finding people to join them. WeTipp is an online platform that connects through interests and skills to help groups engage their members and help users engage their passions in interesting activities.
Our initial target is Non Profit organisations: they have a base of 140 million volunteers constituting the 9th biggest nation in the world!
We already have dozens of organisations throughout the world who support WeTipp, helped adapt it to their needs and will be it’s early adopters.
FinSMEs: How does it work?
Damiano: It basically does three things:
– Helps groups map the passions and skills of their members, making it easier to identify trends and available resources
– Allows to share events and messages by interest, only reaching people who are potentially interested and avoiding the typical spam of Facebook groups, forums or newsletters.
– Suggests activities to create and the people to do them with, drastically reducing the hustle of creating an event.
FinSMEs: What’s your business model?
Damiano: Our business model will be based on the sale and crowdfunding of events created by users or groups. It will help monetize initiatives and reduce risks in creating them since they can be set to start only if a sufficient quota of paying users is reached.
FinSMEs: Who are your team members?
Damiano: We have Evgeniy Lahansky who is both a software engineer and project manager in the Non profit sector in Belarus, and Stefano Ortona, phd student in Oxford, also software engineer.
We also have two great advisors:
Nicola Mattina, who is a notable entrepreneur with a strong experience in corporate communication, and Giuseppe Fabbri seasoned entrepreneur with 25 years of experience in corporate governance and financial planning.
FinSMEs: You just come out from the Italian chapter of the Founder Institute. What can you tell me about this experience?
Damiano: It was gruelling but awesome. At the beginning we were 21, and at the end only 10 survived.
It helped us identify a business model which would be coherent with user’s needs and provided us mentors on any possible aspect of building a Startup.
A cool info is that as graduates we now share an equity pool: if one goes big we will all be rewarded for the mutual support and collaboration that we have put so far.
FinSMEs: Are you seeking funds?
Damiano: Yes. We are about to negotiate an investment and are looking for co-investors. The lead investor from Italy will put 70% for each 30% put by co-investors (even foreign ones). We already found a co-investor who will put €60k and are looking for more interested angels and funds. Our goal is to reach at least €100k in co-investment for a total of €330k. (We are a London based LTD, operating in Italy).
FinSMEs:…future plans?
Damiano: We are building collaborations with notable organisations to make WeTipp their platform of choice.
We already have groups with more than 50k users who agreed to use WeTipp and are just waiting for our MVP to be ready. Our private beta will be ready before August and in the meantime we are trying to create some buzz with cool content such as the one you can find below!
FinSMEs
17/06/2013