In May 2018 I joined GoDaddy to lead the entry of the company into the Italian market. GoDaddy is the perfect ally for anyone who has a business project, wants to make it real and make it grow by exploiting all the potential of the Internet. There are many services available for small businesses and they can help entrepreneurs find their point of carried out on the web.
After an initial approach to the market in 2019 with a smart investment aimed at testing the response of potential customers to our proposition, in January 2020 we launched an integrated and full funnel marketing campaign named “.makeyourpoint” and backed by a strong investment. You can find more details about the campaign in this official GoDaddy blog post (in Italian).
Read the interview with Gianluca Stamerra, Marketing Director at GoDaddy Italy
Below you can find the translation of an interview I did on the occasion of the launch of Makeyourpoint and where I described what were the main turning points in my life. Here you find the original interview is in Italian.
1 – Hi Gianluca, how did your passion for doing business and for start-ups come about?
The question catapulted me back to the days of my university studies in Psychology where one of the first debates faced was Innatism versus Empiricism, that is: do we learn through experience or are we born with genetically “pre-installed” skills?. This is to say that since I was a child I have always had a sort of entrepreneurial restlessness that led me to constantly try to do business.
I remember that at the age of 6/7 I used my pocket money to buy toys, I played with them for a week maximum, then I took them to school to show them and I resold them to my classmates at a higher price than what I had paid for them. The business didn’t last long because the parents of the other children wondered why their children were asking them for money and alerted the teachers who in turn called my parents. Shortly after, therefore, I decided to look at a new customer target with a classic comics and used items standof my house. I sold them in the public gardens and when I ran out of used items I bought things at the housewares shop next to the gardens. I was about 8 years old. Then my first well-paid jobs as a PR and event planner when I was 16.
Finally, another occasion in which I showed my entrepreneurial vein is when I opened my Telemedicine Startup in 2014 (closed after just over two years).
In short, as I said, I’ve always had a certain desire for entrepreneurship and I often wonder if it’s not a sort of primordial instinct .
In the book The start-up of you, Reid Hoffman quotes a sentence by Muhammad Yunus that somehow supports my feeling, namely “All human beings are entrepreneurs. When we lived in the caves, we were all freelancers… we foraged for food to feed ourselves. Human history began this way. With the advent of civilization, we have suppressed this aspect. We have become “workers” because they have instilled in our minds “you are labour”. We have forgotten that we are entrepreneurs”.
2 – What was a turning point in your career?
First turning point
In the spring of 2007 I participated in a Heineken Italia Viral Marketing project in collaboration with Libero.it in which, to promote the change of location of the Heineken Jammin Festival from Imola to Venice, we had invented the story of a boy who had lost a bet with friends on the location and as a result had to run the difference between the two cities with a backpack, zero budget and documenting everything on a Libero blog. I was that guy, Giastar, and obviously the public didn’t know it was a marketing project. It went swimmingly, more than 60,000 users followed my blog daily and after a few days TV, Radio and Magazines discovered this youthful madness. Interviews on MTV TRL, Radio 105, Mentions on Open Studio, etc. Gioia magazine called me “The Forrest Gump of the digital age”.
The turning point? Arrived in Venice after 20 days on the road, on the second day of Festival di Quattro, there was a whirlwind in San Giuliano Park that destroyed the stage and injured several people. The Festival and the project were suspended. With them also all the scheduled interviews. Giastar’s development plans with Heineken cancelled. Giastar went back to being Gianluca Stamerra, front-end programmer and freelance web marketing expert. A year later I sent my CV to Libero.it and they hired me at Wind, but this is another story I’ll tell you shortly.
Second turning point
I have a degree in Cognitive Psychology from the Sapienza University of Rome and in 2008 I had applied for a PhD in Behavioral Psychology in Malaga, Spain. I had obtained the scholarship, but for the assignment I needed the homologation of the title in Spain. I was supposed to sign for the assignment in September 2008, but the approval wouldn’t arrive until December.
The turning point? From Malaga they told me to postpone the start of the PhD for a year and meanwhile regularize the title in Spain. My usual restlessness prevented me from staying still for a year and therefore I decided to send my CV to Libero.it with whom I had worked in 2007.
As an Internet and technology enthusiast, the idea of working for a large Web portal thrilled me and compensated for the disappointment of the PhD. At that time Libero.it was owned by Wind which, having received my CV, decided to hire me as Product Marketing Manager in the Mobile Internet department.
When I tell this story I always think of the film Sliding Doors with Gwyneth Paltrow where, following a sort of magical encounter with a little girl on the subway, the protagonist lives two very different lives in parallel. Here, my turning point, my Sliding Doors, was colliding with the administrative time required for the approval of a title. Who knows if in that September 2008, in addition to starting my experience in Telecommunications, in a parallel dimension I didn’t also start my career as Professor of Psychology in Malaga.
Third turning point
A third turning point was when at the end of 2012 I decided to quit Vodafone in Milan to do an MBA at the IE Business School in Madrid . I left the security of a good job in a large company and with a strong brand to move to a country that was in its peak unemployment and moreover with a heavy debt to pay the Master’s.
I remember that in the days of the decision I had a conversation with a former Wind colleague who said to me:
Let me see if I understand correctly, you leave your country, your friends, a stable salary and a career path, to move abroad unemployed and with a mortgage behind you? Well, you have my full admiration. Yesterday I heard this phrase in the Coach course I’m doing and I want to dedicate it to you:
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to our courage.” .- Anaïs Nin.
I’m sure your life will expand exponentially.
Well the decision to move to Madrid was a real turning point! Since then there has been an MBA, a start up, an international career managing various brands and markets as well as a wedding and a cat!
3 – Why should small Italian businesses and businesses focus more on the web to find their turning point?
Digital transformation is a key element for the survival of companies regardless of their size. Technological evolution has never been so rapid and it constantly defines new and higher quality standards which inevitably raise the level of user and customer requirements. The competition between companies is therefore becoming more and more ferocious and in order to survive these must refine the entire “Value Chain” . This means not only enhancing and amplifying marketing activities, but also optimizing internal production processes. All this would not be possible without the help of new technologies and the Internet.
Having a showcase on the Internet and giving it visibility through various digital tools such as Social Media, SEO and SEA is now crucial . Similarly, using the internet to optimize your processes is one of the key elements for success. Let’s think, for example, of a restaurant. There are thousands of them in every city and the competition can get fierce. Having a website with an online booking system is now a prerequisiteboth for the user, who can book at any time without calling, and for the restaurateur who can manage the occupation of his tables, the purchase of food items and the allocation of staff in advance. Obviously not counting the impact on visibility on various channels such as Social Media, Google Maps, review and booking systems, etc.
4 – How can GoDaddy help them achieve their goals?
GoDaddy provides entrepreneurs and small to midsize businesses with the tools they need to have an online presence and make it visible . Therefore, on the one hand, it provides a wide range of products to create showcase websites, blogs, e-commerce platforms and applications, and on the other, marketing software that allows you to amplify the reachability of these sites.
We have thought of intuitive and easy-to-use solutions, for all needs and for any level of technical expertise. From website builders that do not require any technical skills, such as our “Websites + Marketing” or our “WordPress Hosting”, up to advanced solutions such as Shared Hosting and VPS; for the more experienced and for more complex projects. In short, a wide range of solutions that start from giving a name to an idea with a Web Domain , up to seeing it succeed on the Net with our Marketing tools.
Don’t miss my interview on La Repubblica.
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