Map2App – An Italian Startup

For the past decade, the San Francisco Bay Area has become known for its user friendly startup environment.  Such was the case for Map2App, founded in April of 2012 and based in San Francisco, with operations in Italy.

What is Map2App? It is impressive technology that provides a way to create mobile travel guides quickly and easily for IPhone, Android and HTML5 enabled devices. No coding experience is required and you can build professional travel apps that look great in few hours.

The Map2App team is made up of enthusiastic people with a passion for travel and technology, and includes Chairman, Richard Belluzzo, CEO, Pietro Ferraris, COO, Simone Biagiotti, and CTO, Michele Orsi. L’Italo-Americano’s conversation was with Pietro Ferraris and begins in San Francisco.

The first time I visited San Francisco was in 2008.  I came just for a few weeks because my previous company, called Econoetica, won a business plan competition held by MindTheBridge, a San Francisco based organization that aims at connecting Italian startups with Silicon Valley. The prize was a one week “road tour” with potential investors and business angels. It was a crazy week of meetings, learning and discovering the Valley. We did not raise money that time but I fell in love with the city and its amazing atmosphere and spirit.

I went back to Italy but I promised myself that the next company I started – if there would have been a next one – I would have founded it in San Francisco. So I did. At the end of 2011, I resigned from my position as CEO in Econoetica, and, together with co-founders, Simone and Michele, I decided to create our company, Map2App, Inc. in San Francisco.

The idea of Map2App came to us because of our passion for traveling and discovering new places, mixed with our background in mobile technology. We realized that when we travel, much of the information provided locally is still on paper, thus being not very appealing, limited, and not easy to distribute. I kept on collecting local maps, brochures, travel guides… a lot of weight and in most of the cases not very useful information and with a tremendous impact on the environment.  So we wondered, “Why these destination promotion companies don’t put all of this local information into an app, with everything geo-located, bookable and – when possible – interactive?”  And the answer was easy, “Because making an app is much harder and expensive than making a website or a brochure.”

And then the real idea came, the idea of building a travel guide for mobile platforms easy and fun so that anyone who wants to share information about any destination can do so.  Our main targets were small destinations willing to promote themselves in a modern and convenient way.  Today Map2App is a web portal that allows anyone to build beautiful mobile travel guides and distribute them on iTunes and on Google Play.

I moved to San Francisco in March 2012 and we incorporated our company the next month. We created an online tool (freely available at www.map2app.com) and we started to work with travel bloggers who wanted to give their audience an app to discover the wonderful places they visited, with hotels who wanted to offer a modern concierge service, with city administrations who wanted to have a mobile presence, with tour operators who wanted both to give info and sell services through an app to their customers, with event organizers, media agencies, etc.  In two years we published more than 500 travel guides about amazing destinations that have been downloaded by more than a 1,000,000 people globally. Our mission is to contribute to the democratization of sharing local knowledge and travel information.

I spent 18 months in San Francisco with my wife and eventually returned to Italy. Today I run Map2App mainly from Italy and come to San Francisco from time to time. My wife still works remotely with a company based in Berkeley.

The reason why I came at first was mainly because I wanted to spend some time in a highly competitive environment for startups in order to test, validate and improve our idea, then there was my love for the city itself and finally I thought that given the difficult economic situation in Italy at the time (but even today), finding investors in San Francisco would have been easier.

In the first 18 months of our company, I did a lot of different things in San Francisco, from building up an advisory board to pitching Map2App to investors and meeting a lot of different people at tech events.

I found an extremely welcoming Italian community, above all around MindTheBridge and BAIA (Business Association Italy America), and they helped us a lot, introducing me to people and pointing us in the right direction when needed.

The reasons why my wife and I decided to go back to Italy were both personal and job related:

Map2app was growing nicely but we were making a big effort to increase sales in the American market, sales in Europe were going much better. Also, the cost of living in San Francisco, and in the Valley in general, is much higher than in Italy.  We needed a cheaper home town, closer to where Map2App was really growing.

At the end of 2013, we packed everything up, we left our house in Bernal Heights and we moved back to Italy.  I have returned to San Francisco a few times since we moved and often think to move back.  To begin with, my wife will spend next October in town, working closer with her colleagues. Our love story with San Francisco is not over yet.