
It’s a known fact that seed capital is very scarce in Italy. Entrepreneurs, which by definition are stubborn entities are therefore finding creative and cheap ways to bootstrap their startups.
Tipsandtrip was born from an idea of social media consultant Juliette Bellavita and Blogo.it CEO Marco Magnocavallo. They had the goal of launching a web app and an iphone app in 6 months with less than $10k.
How did they do it? With some great project management and a few crowdsourcing platforms. Let’s break down their costs:
- Logo design: a simple contest on 99designs with a $300 prize. 114 submissions and a professional logo in less than a week.
- Development: using DjangoPeople and Elance a very international team was born. Developers are in Argentina, Ukraine and Russia. Total cost: $5000.
- Iphone development: an italian freelance developer found on the web. Two months of work and $2500.
- Iphone icon: a dutch designer made a professional icon for $350
- Internationalization: translations in german, french and spanish. MyGengo.com and Tolingo.de. 24h turnaround and a great service. Total cost: $100.
- Hosting: pay-as-you-go cloud servers, mostly free in the beginning.
- Debug/usability: UserTesting and $100.
- Sweat Equity: Juliette and Marco put in a bit of work during weekends as project managers, designers, developers, sysadmins, etc.

Total: $8,350.
They say they’re gonna use the remaining $1,650 to fix the numerous bugs that usually come out after the launch.
We still haven’t drilled down into the app. The founders were tired of having to remember all the precious tips their friend were giving them regarding restaurants, B&Bs, shops, etc. in foreign countries prior to their trips. After looking for an online tool to annotate all this information and having found nothing really useful they decided to build it themselves.
Tipsandtrip is your portable notebook where you can write your vacation related notes and find the best tips your friends and other users make public. The app will be a crowdsourced list of the best restaurants, shops, parks, beaches, B&Bs and city spots for tourists. The app obviously geolocalizes every info and integrates with Facebook and other social networks.
They are competing in a very crowded and fragmented market but I’d say that for $10k, they’re off to a good start.
It’s a free app and you can download it here.


Online social travel guide website
One of the most important features I spotted is the offline mode. Tripwolf lets you choose what you would like to download and save you from those huge roaming costs. Users have the choice of downloading either text only or the whole package that includes pictures. You will then be able to synchronize everything back at the hotel.



