In this episode, recorded live at our Growth Sessions event in Bologna, we talk to Andrea Giannangelo, founder of iubenda, and Davide Campagna, founder of Cotto al Dente — two founders who took very different paths to get where they are today.
Andrea co-founded iubenda at 21 with €69,000 and a PDF, at a time when no one in tech wanted to hear about compliance. Davide went from dentist to food blogger to founder of a fitness app, monetizing a community of hundreds of thousands of people one subscription at a time.
Together, they talk about the signals you need to spot before everyone else, why building an audience beats chasing investors, and how to manage explosive growth without losing focus.
We’re bringing you the conversation between Andrea and Davide from the Growth Session Bologna, organized by iubenda. To listen to the full episode:
The market is always right
There’s a question that comes up a lot when people talk about startups: how do you know if your idea is actually any good? Andrea, co-founder of iubenda, has a simple answer: look at who’s paying you. Not the people who say “great idea,” not advisors, not investors. Customers.
“The market’s opinion is worth 99. The advisor’s opinion is worth 1.”
It’s a lesson Andrea learned the hard way. When he founded iubenda fifteen years ago, almost no one believed compliance could be a market. Investors turned him down. But he kept going, because he saw something others didn’t yet: an obligation everyone had to deal with, and that no one had standardized. “Everyone had to do it, I’d standardize it, and something would come of that.”
Davide’s story started very differently. Trained as a dentist, he started a food blog in 2014 almost out of boredom, and it took him years to realize it could become an actual job.
The turning point came when a company offered him a contract: €800 a month for three recipes. “I thought: finally, I can cover my expenses.” From there came a fitness app, millions of followers, personalized training plans. But the point he stresses most is this: turning your passion into a job is a stroke of luck, not a guarantee.
The asset no one can copy
On one thing, they both agree: your audience is the most defensible asset you can have. Before the product, before the business model, you need to build a group of people who follow you because you give them something of value. Davide adds that turning followers into paying customers is the real test, and there’s no formula for it.
The same goes for funding. iubenda has raised a total of €69,000 in fifteen years — not out of principle, but because the market kept responding, and that response was its best leverage.
Andrea doesn’t sugarcoat it: venture capital is a tool, not a goal, and it comes with trade-offs people often underestimate. “You’re selling on a promise. You might have done a great job and still fallen short of that expectation.” His advice to anyone starting from zero is to build validation before chasing capital.
“Nothing raises capital like having the market respond to you.”
The danger of peak moments
Then there’s the question of peak moments. For iubenda, these were often tied to regulatory deadlines: dates when thousands of people would suddenly go looking for a solution. Andrea describes those moments as intense, almost like a sprint. “You’re there, you know you’ve hit the peak, and you know it’s downhill from here.”
The same logic applies to AI. There’s a risk here too: adding instead of removing.
Andrea doesn’t mince words, and for him it’s mainly about removing friction: “The question you should be asking is: how do I automate my process? Not: how do I add a chatbot?”
For Davide, it’s the same idea applied to his own field: using AI to improve what already works, like creating more precise, more personalized plans, without replacing the human relationship that remains his real differentiator: “There’s more and more of a push to bring in new things, like a virtual trainer or nutritionist. But honestly, I think AI should be used a lot more to simplify people’s lives and maybe make the product we’re already offering even better.”
Uncomfortable lessons
Then there’s a harder lesson, one Davide shares candidly: picking the wrong partners is probably the first real risk in any venture. He knows because it’s happened to him twice. “Choose the right people to start with.”
In the end, the question that closes the conversation is the most revealing one: if you had to start from scratch, what would you do? Andrea and Davide answer almost in unison: build an audience.
“If you have the audience, everything else follows.”
Don’t rush to monetize, don’t chase funding, don’t wait for the perfect product. Find the right people, create something they actually need, and build everything else from there.
Handing over the keys to the company you built
Another conversation with Andrea (founder of iubenda) — this time joined by iubenda’s CEO. They talk about what comes next: how to build a company that works even without you.
