The infamous story of SottoCasa and how I became a better person thanks to EMDR

S02-E01 (8 January 2023)

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Ciao,

New year. New season of this sketchbook. Haven't you been waiting for this? 2021 and 2022 were two pivotal years for me, both professionally and personally. I learned a lot of new things and I bet you can't wait to read them 😊.

As for work:

• SottoCasa failed miserably;

• I sold my previous startup Instathings to an Italian energy saving company which, thanks to our platform, has developed a solution to manage the production and consumption of electricity in residential buildings. The new product is about to be tested in hundreds of new apartments in Italy;

• between June 2021 and October 2022 I was Chief Product Officer of Paginemediche, a small Italian company that works in the digital health space. In this period I created a stellar product management and growth team, redesigned the brand identity and redesigned the product from the ground up. I continue to collaborate with Paginemediche as strategic advisor;

• in the summer of 2022, I made an interesting experiment to create a mobile app dedicated to the therapy of irritable bowel syndrome through hypnosis;

• since November 2022, I have started collaborating with Translated, a leader in translation services with the goal of designing a continuous localization solution for enterprise clients.

From a personal point of view, I decided to work on myself with the help of a psychologist specialized in EMDR therapy, a technique that I found extraordinarily useful.

In this episode of my sketchbook I will start from where I left, telling you more about the infamous ending of SottoCasa and about the benefits of the EMDR therapy. In the next episodes of this second season, you will learn more about Paginemediche and how I become a digital health guru 😜.

The infamous story of Daje and SottoCasa

During the pandemic, I had the idea to create a proximity e-commerce where families could buy food products offered by neighborhood shops via an app. While we were all in lock down, I involved a group of students from my university course and funded the kick-off of a project called Daje (“let’s go” in roman slang): The story of Daje and how we invented proximity e-commerce.

The proximity e-commerce model hypothesized that it was possible to create a neighborhood micro-Amazon made of three components: 

• an app with which merchants could manage the catalog day by day, 

• an app for consumers who could do their weekly shopping, 

• a service of riders who picked up groceries from multiple stores and delivered them to customers' homes the day after the order was placed.

The model started working in the Monteverde neighborhood in Rome: within a few months Daje had won the hearts of a few hundred families who used the app every week to buy food paying extra for the service and delivery.

After a few months, the model was not yet economically viable, but the metrics were very promising. The team I formed was performing quite well so, after investing directly in the startup, I decided to bring on board two business angels. The money raised should have been more than enough to demonstrate the economic viability of the startup and estimate the capital needs to scale.

The most logical thing to do would have been to continue to insist in the same neighborhood to consolidate the experience and move from the MVP to a slightly more robust product capable of scaling to more neighborhoods. That was my initial idea. Unfortunately, due to the strong insistence of the two business angels, we prematurely decided to extend the service to other neighborhoods. The decision resulted in a substantial increase in the burn rate: in just a few months, energy was scattered across too many fronts, some neighborhoods didn't take off, and investors began an unfortunate process of blaming the team instead of sitting at the table as partners of the project. In a few weeks, the situation was completely compromised and, considering the unpredictable, aggressive and very unpleasant behavior of one of the angels, we decided to shut down everything.

I tried to transform the experience in a new startup (SottoCasa), but I was not able to raise a round. In that period, the wet dreams of the investors were all about the quick delivery and Gorillaz, a startup that raised a billion dollars in a few weeks and that - just after one year - was sold to the competitor Getir for a fraction of the original valuation (cfr. Reuters). Long story short, none of the investors I pitched considered our metrics enough to justify an investment in an alternative e-commerce model.

The business angels I had involved were not newbies: they had just sold their consultancy firm to a large international group for many millions. But, although they could be considered sophisticated investors, I only realized in retrospect that the expectations they had in relation to the invested capital weren't realistic.

Lessons learned the hard way:

• choose investors more carefully;

• ensure that expectations are aligned;

• focus, focus focus and ensure that all the available capital is invested efficiently only to achieve realistic and concrete objectives that allow for additional capital to be raised if necessary.

How I became a better person with EMDR

EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing and is “a form of psychotherapy developed by Francine Shapiro in the 1980s that was originally designed to alleviate the distress associated with traumatic memories such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In EMDR, the person being treated recalls distressing experiences whilst doing bilateral stimulation, such as side-to-side eye movement or physical stimulation, such as tapping either side of the body” (Wikipedia).

In a nutshell, you choose a problem to solve and retrace your life to find the episodes that generated the problem. We worked through my Imposter Syndrome and looked into various episodes from my childhood that contributed to my self-esteem undermining.

I recalled these episodes, relived the associated disturbing emotions and shared them with my therapist: anxiety, anger, sadness, helplessness.

As you relive the emotions, the therapist performs a stimulation, i.e. she rhythmically moves a hand in front of you. The fascinating thing is that this movement has the power to neutralize the disturbing emotions. After repeating this process several times, you are able to recall the traumatic events as simply facts from your past and you no longer feel anger, hatred or anxiety.

It's fascinating and almost feels like magic. Instead it is a therapy scientifically validated by many studies (cfr. Cleveland Clinic).

EMDR therapy has been a milestone in my life and I can't thank my therapist enough. After a year, I feel much more self-confident, I've lost almost 20 kilos of weight, improved my psychophysical state, and I've started going to the gym regularly.

Have you really read this far? Wow, I'm blown away. Even though I've just finished writing this episode of my sketchbook, I confess that I really want to tell you about a year of experience in Paginemediche.

Please, share this newsletter. Reply or comment if you have questions or comments: I would love do hear from you.

Nicola