GondolaShare

The closest project to a startup that I did as of now is GondolaShare, an app that allowed people to share gondola rides in Venice. I was in my first year of uni at the time and making an app seemed like black magic to me, which meant I wanted to learn. So I decided to start by building something that could be somewhat useful. I had an iphone 7+ (i still do) and IOS development appeared as the obvious choice. Ignoring Matlab, Swift was the first programming language I learnt; I was lucky enough I could learn Swift instead of objective-c. While the tech-stack was questionable, the idea was actually somewhat reasonable and I didn’t come up with it out of nowhere. In my highschool summers I used to work as a bartender in my uncles’ bar in Venice. Many people had come up to me saying they couldn’t get on a gondola ride because it was too expensive (80$), while 2 thirds of spots were empty. Since price was per ride and not per person it was obvious they would have gladly shared the experience with others if that meant splitting the cost in half. The idea wasn’t new, I had already observed encounters at gondola stations (the bar was right next to one) of people agreeing to share a ride. Software would have surely scaled that!

Off I went and followed a Stanford course on Swift and some tutorials on YT, with the latter being surely more useful. When I first released the app, users could only search for gondola stations and book rides with others. Later on I added new features: chat groups and navigation. I should have pushed further on the idea of connectivity, I have the feeling I would have noticed some unexpected behavior in how people on holiday may connect. If anything, it would have been a nice social experiment.

I found that shipping a product, from start to end, does take discipline. I remember having to force myself to work at times but I am glad I went all the way. Sometimes work felt frivolous compared to what was required for my uni classes, which I had little time to prepare for. Looking back, I am much more impressed of GondolaShare rather than being able of finding the resonant frequency from a Bode plot. Nobody is at fault here, I am glad I learnt a lot from university and they were teaching me the correct things, however I learnt how important having a big picture is. When there’s a big picture, spending hours changing the color and size of buttons becomes meaningful. The big picture, there, wasn’t GondolaShare, but rather the start of a journey in trying to build valuable things. I’m still early on that journey.

If I could go back I wouldn’t learn Swift but web-development first and then some cross-platform language (flutter). I had 0 clue about distribution, if you remember, I was just curious about how developers made apps that I could download on my iphone. I figured later that iphone users had more money to spend on gondola rides than android users. Even if it may have been expensive for some iphone users, at least they could take nice pictures to post on instagram. Poor picture quality meant smaller ROI for android users. I payed Apple 100$ and published on the AppStore on May 2019, right on time for the summer, hoping for it to blow up while I had to prepare for my exams.

If I could go back I would have done much more of things that don’t scale. I was studying in the Netherlands and had spent just 1 month in Venice during that summer. While walking around, I went up to people that could have been users but, wrongly, I was focusing more on the gondolieri (gondola riders). In fact, my “business plan” was centered on trying to close partnerships with them. I quickly learnt that people could only be steered with the right incentives.

I went to many gondolieri and figured they didn’t appreciate what I did, they were very quick in shutting me off when I showed them GondolaShare. Some friends/family suggested they didn’t want an app tracking how much work they were doing and possibly how much they were charging tourists. Apparently fiscality is a big topic in Italy, plus, I was basically trying to sell coals to Newcastle. Never once had I heard a gondoliere (they often came drinking at the bar) complaining about having too few customers, usually the opposite. Despite Venice thrives on tourism, unlike the older days when it thrived on commerce, locals are not too fond of it. I never really understood that…

Now I know, I should have focused much more on the users, the people who’d have taken the rides; value was being provided to them. I didn’t let that take me down and I came up with a new business plan. The app was free, but the idea was to make money offering external services. I thought people could order drinks/snacks to take on the ride and I would personally deliver them from my uncles’ bar. I had a grand marketing plan, buy cheap goblets from alibaba with my logo on them and voilà, from an app that saves you money to a brand new venetian experience people would have to do and share on social media. At the end of the day Starbucks rose on the social media effect, they didn’t have to invent coffee. This was also more aligned with the choice of going for iphone users, I reckon in hindsight.

I was preparing the plan for spring 20, in fact summer 19 had already passed. I guess I can say, as many others, I was among the businesses victim of covid-19. Quarantine had obliterated my users’ graph, which was already very thin (~60 people used the app during summer 19).

Eventually I decided to shut GondolaShare down. It didn’t get much traction in the first place, nobody knew when quarantine would be over and I was still at university. I cared about the problem but I guess I didn’t become passionate enough along the way. It wasn’t an important problem either and I still had achieved the original goal, I was now kind of proficient in black magic.

I decided to focus on my undergrad and try to get into the best college I could for my masters. I was still working on side projects but nothing like a product, I figured I should learn Python and machine learning.