Last Tuesday, 27 March, another StartuppaMI monthly meetup took place in Milan. Similar to the last time, the event was hosted at the beautiful TAG Milano co-working space with more than 130 participants.
As with every event, three startups pitched their business and this time they did not disappoint!
One of the most interesting pitches was by Luca Panzarella, co-founder of Yoogoin. We interviewed him after the event to gather more information about their events search engine application.
How can you describe Yoogoin in a couple of sentences?
Yoogoin is a smart events search engine. You log in with Facebook, we understand your interests and you get all the events around you that you might like. Simple.
How does it works?
Once you log in with Facebook we discover something about you. Don’t worry, we just want to know if you are that kind of person who like concerts or sports; business meetings or arts; food or technology.
Different from the other apps, we do a real-time crawling from more than twenty important event sources on the web and then display the results, filtered by your location and your interests.
The app is already available on the iTune AppStore. Is the coverage of the service already worldwide?
Yes, we have been covering events worldwide from day one, and this is actually the biggest difference with other options – we cover twenty million events each year. It sounds a lot, but we aim to cover one billion by the end of the year. The more events we find, the more difficult is to show a custom list that is interesting for our user. But we like challenges.
Yoogoin is not the first event discovery application. Why do you think yoogoin is better than its competitors?
My iPhone is full of event discovery apps. Some of them discover Facebook events. Some other works only in few big cities.
But let’s make a bet: go to a new city. Any city of the world. Open one of these apps. Any one.
Do you feel you have the most complete scenario of what you can do? No, you don’t.
This sensation is what every other app is missing. And that’s what exactly we want to achieve.
What about the next milestones? Is there anything big on the horizon?
While we are talking with some investors who already believe in our vision, our next milestone is to let users connect to each other through Yoogoin. Discovering events might be cool, but meeting new people you share interests with, that’s magic.
This is not your first startup. What about your previous adventures?
Please help me, I have this problem. I’ve been selling things since 2005; a mobile school, a literature contests platform, a mobile agency, even a rough version of what Yoogoin is now.
I sold two of them to an Italian and an American entrepreneur. I still run the literature contests platform with almost no time spent on it. It makes less than 10K per year, and no investor will ever put some money on it, but it’s my oldest baby. Can I please keep it with me?
Yoogoin is “proudly made in Italy”. In our country a lot of young professionals are loosing their jobs or are not able to find it. Have you got a message for them?
The job situation in Italy, like some other countries in Europe, is a disaster. I know many friends who went to Germany or England, leaving families and friends. But I’m not feeling luckier than anyone: I left Sicily nine years ago and worked abroad for two years.
My solution? Aim for quality. Extremely high quality. If you are a young professional you can use your time for travelling, meeting new people and trying something new. These will help you to make your job better. Your personality better.
We need quality, and the only those people who understand this will be able to convert our crisis to a success.
Thanks a lot for your time!
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