Raising funding for your startup in the United States is incredibly difficult, but raising funding for your startup in just about anywhere else in the world is even harder. However, one startup founder has managed to raise significant funding outside of the U.S. - in Italy, to be exact.
This founder’s name is Damiano Ramazzotti, and his company, WeTipp, has raised around $600,000 since launching in 2014.
While WeTipp’s unique service, an engagement platform that helps communities map and leverage the passions and skills of their members as well as automate their administration, is certainly deserving of that kind of success, let’s not forget about the man behind WeTipp’s success, Damiano, whose impressive experience and expertise enabled him to launch such a promising company in a region not necessarily known for tech innovation.
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Prior to founding WeTipp, Damiano worked internationally as a trainer and facilitator in the nonprofit sector, and managed international youth projects on active participation and intercultural dialogue. Previous roles include Co-creator & Project manager of Makerland, Head of Community and COO at Talent Garden, and Co-founder and president of Binario Uno NGO.
Clearly, this is someone who understands both the importance of communal connections and technological innovation.
Refusing to rest on his previous career achievements, Damiano set out to start his own company, and subsequently joined the Rome Founder Institute. It was there that he conceived of WeTipp, which has made it its mission to help organizations better understand who their members are, leverage their true skills, and match their activities to their true passions - all with their unique online membership management platform.
Countless community-based organizations face the constant struggle of keeping their members involved in their activities and finding attendees for their events. From nonprofit to alumni organizations, coworking spaces to public institutions, attracting and keeping target audiences engaged is paramount for these groups to survive.
Drawing from Damiano’s particular global experience, WeTipp accomplishes its goal of supporting organizations to engage their members in three different ways: by helping groups map the passions and skills of their members, making it easier to identify trends and available resources; by allowing them to share events and messages by interest, only reaching people who are potentially interested and avoiding the typical spam of social media groups, forums, or newsletters; and by suggesting activities to create and the people to do them with, drastically reducing the hassle of creating an event.
One of the biggest target audiences of WeTipp that would benefit the most from their platform is the nonprofit sector, with a base of more than 140 million volunteers around the world. However, there are plenty of other types of companies that could use WeTipp; among their clients are the European Commission who, uses us to connect and empower the students and stakeholders in the Erasmus+ programme, and Talent Garden, Europe's leading coworking space network, who uses WeTipp to connect members professionally and save 80% on administration and invoicing.
However much success that WeTipp has experienced, Damiano still acknowledges that the Founder Institute’s tough but effective, structured approach was essential in helping to crystalize the idea during its formative stages:
It was gruelling but awesome. At the beginning our class had 21 Founders, and at the end only 10 survived. It helped us identify a business model which would be coherent with user’s needs, and provided us with Mentors on every possible aspect of building a startup.
While Damiano’s experience in the Founder Institute was difficult, it was nonetheless beneficial, as they have received some major press over the past couple of years, and in 2017 Damiano and WeTipp joined the 21st Batch of 500 Startups, one of the world’s most prestigious venture capital firms and accelerators.
