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Francesco Goes to San Francisco to Attend the Startup School

, by Laura Fumagalli
Many Bocconi former students are in the team of Spotlime, the app for last minute events awarded with the IT Cup. The app allows users to broaden their choice of things to do, and buy tickets directly from their mobile devices

Every time they came to Milan they were wondering what to organize for the evening. Surely Milan offers a lot of opportunities for having fun and new venues are sprouting like mushrooms in each district. The problem is that most of the times it's difficult to know what's going on and often word of mouth is the only way to be informed. Francesco Rieppi and Francesco De Liva have often wished to spend their evenings differently. and they found the solution. They created Spotlime, an app that suggests to people who live in Milan the ten most interesting last minute events, with the possibility to book or directly buy the tickets.

The two friends, who were classmates back in school times in Udine and then came together to Milan to attend university – Rieppi at Bocconi and De Liva at Politecnico – have gathered a team of former Bocconi students and launched their startup last December. The other members of the team, in fact, are Fabrizio Dell'Acqua, chief marketing officer, Luigi Selva Verzica, legal consultant, Luca Bordogna, sales manager and Annalisa Amadio, digital. Giulio Ferro is in charge of the server.

In its first two month of existence, Spotlime 2,500 Facebook fans. A semifinalist at TechCrunch Italy, before the launch the app won the IT Cup, a business competition promoted by Registro.it, obtaining as a reward the participation to Mind the Bridge's Startup School in San Francisco, where Francesco Rieppi is now as Spotlime's Ceo.

"Ticketing is one of our long-term objectives", explains Marina Marchetti, Spotlime's promotion manager, a former Bocconi student too. "For now", she continues, "we try to investigate our users' interests in order to be able to offer them the closest selection of events to their tastes". Once they sharpen their offer, the startup will earn from commissions on tickets sold through the app. Soon they will launch a new release of the app with additional functions, and the team is already planning to replicate the service in the other main Italian cities.

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