“No, I can't! I am not ready!” This would have been my answer if two years ago somebody had asked me if I were ready to become a father.

“Of course! Where do I need to sign to start?” And this would have been what I had said if I were asked whether I wanted to found and jam my startup. 

Today, two years later, I am not sure about what happened to me. Did I launch my startup or am I become a father?

Since I started this adventure with my two co-founders, Pietro e Andrea, I am kind of sure that the answer is that we jammed a startup.

Well, then, why am I so confused? I’ll try to explain. 

You win a startup competition not actually knowing what is going on. You are thrilled and everybody is happy for you. Anyway, when you start working hard on it, you become aware about how difficult it is to make your fantasies of new born startupper real.

Like when you become a father, you feel happy, incredulous and pleased by the greetings that affectionate people show you. All this is soon wiped out by a new born baby that, despite the loving gaze, invades your life crying at night-time for feeding and being reassured.

You go on working on it. You make (many) mistakes, but you always learn something. People sharing with this adventure help you not to give up. They don’t leave you alone even in the hardest time. You only dream of seeing the first registered user or the first booked experience on your platform.

It is like having a large number of grannies helping you to grow up your baby, who starts walking, talking, and smiling.

Here it comes the first day of school. We are finally online! You can see how users interact with the platform. You can work in order to find new users for your community. Since it is a marketplace, you firstly get concentrated on the offer, which is the many passionate locals thrilled to share their knowledge with tourists. Then, little by little, you start seeking for demand, that are travellers looking for a different trip experience, made of human contacts in order to really get in touch with the visited place.

It is like that baby, who grows, becomes a child, makes friends and, suddenly, gets a crush on somebody...

Then here it comes the first transaction. A real pleasure. A feeling that you can’t control. It is an unjustified exaggerated exalting feeling, which gives a boost to you.

It reminds me the first kiss of that boy… as a father you are curious, happy and proud. However, you know that there is still so much to discover.

Suddenly you understand that you succeed to actively captivate more than 700 Italians. Thanks to them, through your platform, everybody can book an authentic experience choosing among more than 1700 proposals in 500 locations in Italy!

That child has become a young man, he finished high school and he is ready to leave for studying abroad. He gets many friends, he discovers many things, but he still doesn’t know what to do when he grows up.

All of a sudden, it is May 2016. Finally you are collecting resources to really promote all the experiences proposed on Guide Me Right. You can’t wait. You waited so long to make people who doesn’t know about these authentic proposals aware of them. You want this people to join together allowing Local Friends who committed to the project to share their world. You know that, when it happens, everybody win: Local Friends, Guests and, above all, the territory!

In few words, your family and you did a great job on that (quite) independent young man. In these years, you grew up as well. You lived both beautiful and hard moments, which you go over thanks to your family and to that young man who gave you so many satisfactions, mostly unconsciously.  

Now it’s time to start a new phase. That boy is now a man and he has an active role in our family. You always feel an enormous sense of responsibility and you always want to give him more. However, you already know that you only can help and support him.

This is how we, my family and I, Guide Me Right team, feel now looking at our baby, the Community of Guide Me Right.

In the next 12 months we will finally be able to invest into marketing in order to make people know about this community and its proposals all around Italy.

We know that we can’t do it on our own. We need all passionate locals that committed to the project sharing their experiences www.guidemeright.com. We need you all, members of the community, to feel active party. Help us to make this project and its identifying experiences known!