We usually consider startup founders to be visionaries, but that’s not all. The analysis of the market and the needs of a certain category are the key tools for planning new companies. “The most important thing for a startup is timing” says Armando Biondi, CEO and co-founder of Breadcrumbs, an Italian-American company started together with Massimo Chieruzzi and Gary Amaral based on the experience with AdEspresso, launched in 2012 and sold to Hootsuite five years later for an estimated $ 40 million. Breadcrumbs is a platform for the acceleration of revenues: it analyzes the data present in the company and through artificial intelligence algorithms suggests the contacts to be activated to close contracts, avoid losing customers, sell new products and similar activities.
The timing of AdEspresso was perfect: in 2011 Facebook was growing rapidly and when Biondi met Chieruzzi, at the Web Summit of that year, the two immediately decided to bring a proof of concept developed by Chieruzzi for his own agency. AdEspresso is a platform for managing advertisements on Mark Zuckerberg’s social network, which has meanwhile become Google’s main rival in online advertising. Customers are small and medium-sized businesses. The same ones that today suffer from the lack of a system for increasing revenues, which have data unrelated to each other, and who increasingly turn to the market for growth hackers and figures linked to growth. To meet this need, Breadcrumbs was born, on the sidelines of a podcast, where Biondi and Amaral meet after leaving Hootsuite. Biondi calls Chieruzzi and the team is reassembled, even if this time with reversed roles: the CEO is Biondi, because the idea of creating a company on the product developed by Amaral is his. “And then he is more inclined to those things that a CEO has to do, such as finding investors,” says Chieruzzi.
Breadcrumbs recently closed a $ 5.4 million seed investment led by Blue Canyon, which was attended by Active Capital, Primo Ventures, Hustle Fund, Stormbreaker VC and several business angels, including many Italians (Paola Bonomo, Andrea Rota, Massimo Sgrelli, Lorenzo Thione, Matteo Daste, Simone Brunozzi, Paolo Picazio, Andrea February, Giuliano Iacobelli, Eugenio Cassiano, Filippo Catalano, Antonella Fanuzzi). “We put a proof of concept online during the lockdown – says Biondi – As soon as friends saw it, they asked us to invest”.
With AdEspresso, the two raised $ 3.2 million in total. Of course they had less experience, even if they were not of the very first hair (Biondi had already made Pick1 together with Paolo Privitera, then sold, and Chieruzzi a small network of blogs, also sold), but the situation was different. “We were linked to Facebook and had to run, so we never got too structured and gave up on the sales team – says Biondi – Today we have no ties and we want to build something much bigger. We have learned that expressing ambitions is crucial for the growth of the project, and in this case the sales department has a cost and an important role ”. AdEspresso started a partnership with Hootsuite to take advantage of the sales department. The sale was instead decided when the founders realized that Facebook was copying the functions offered by third parties faster and faster and AdEspresso alone could not have gone at the same speed. Chieruzzi adds: “Startups die of technology only in the first year. After the product becomes less important. Whoever wins does so with the go to market strategy ”. That is, the ability to penetrate a market using internal and external resources to convince potential customers of their uniqueness, thus gaining a competitive advantage. “Generally the ideal customer of a startup are the founders – explains Chieruzzi – but there is a phase in which this is no longer true. With AdEspresso we have learned that when you start serving a large audience you have to start conducting research and analysis on current and potential customers ”.
With this in mind, Breadcrumbs was born with a manifesto on revenue acceleration that identifies the customer (companies with great potential growing at a slow speed), the company vision (helping SMEs to respond to signals sent by customers in real time and effortlessly), and defines the brand. The company’s website is built around dominant yellow and original illustrations. Biondi explains: “With AdEspresso we understood that working on your own brand identity right away is crucial to having that recognition that adds a lot of value to the company in the long term. And this also helps in team building “.
Breadcrumbs is split between San Francisco and Milan, “to take the best of Silicon Valley and Italy”. A winning formula with AdEspresso, but with a trick. Biondi explains: “Having a team of people with the same culture or who speak the same language allows you to go much faster”. Thus business, marketing and sales are located in California, while design, product and technology in Italy. “The Italian developers have nothing to envy to the American ones – adds Chieruzzi – and in fact we pay them the same way. Here there are many guys who want to deal with international projects, and since there is less competition it is easier to keep them in the company. A certain type of experience is lacking, but in 95% of cases it is not necessary ”.
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