An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Failure can be your greatest teacher. Don’t be afraid of it, you are not going to die. I had many “failures” in my life but every single one of them taught me an important lesson.
As a part of our series called “Making Something From Nothing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Umberto Mezzadra.
Umberto Mezzadra is the Founder of PlayPauseBe, a deck of cards that help Yogis become more independent, focused and aware in their Yoga practice. Multifaceted professional, he helped many companies bring new ideas to the market while exponentially growing their business online. His strong analytical approach combines behavioral science and visual communication.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?
I grew up in Pavia, a small city in northern Italy. My father was a brilliant geophysicist working in the oil industry. His biggest passion was art so I grew up surrounded by it. Books, exhibitions, artworks, by the time I was 3, I was already able to recognize a number of artists. As I grew up I struggled to find my purpose, pulled by the creative and analytical sides I inherited from my father and conditioned by the “fixed workplace” of Italian culture. I ended up studying Business and working in quantitative marketing for companies like FedEx & Mars.
In 2012 I made the life changing decision to refuse a well-paid management position in the corporate world; I resigned and moved to Rome to found a Startup with a guy I met at a Startup Weekend Milan the year before. We got funding, some traction and an acquisition proposal but we ended up failing.
After the startup failure, I started collecting a number of experiences in very different fields. I became a ski instructor, traveled the world as a photographer (a passion I had since the age of 7) and became a very successful consultant to startups and brands on how to profitably grow their business online, particularly through advertising. A field where I felt I was able to combine both the analytical and creative parts of myself. These 7 years completely changed me, and for the better.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. — Steve Jobs.
This has been so true for me. For 30 years I have been doing so many completely different things, apparently disconnected from one another. Now that the “dots” are finally starting to connect I am able to see how even small things or what I thought to be failures, helped me to achieve my goals.
Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?
That’s a difficult question to answer. I read a lot and I can think of many books having had a significant impact. I am going to choose Narziß und Goldmund — Herman Hesse. When I was 14 it made me reflect on the importance of both rationality and instinct and the search for our truth. And in recent years Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson which made me look at my business (and myself as an entrepreneur) with different eyes. Also Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman which I believe is a must to read for everyone doing business.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. There is no shortage of good ideas out there. Many people have good ideas all the time. But people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. Can you share a few ideas from your experience about how to overcome this challenge?
First of all: be prepared for the fact that obstacles and difficulties are going to be there from the beginning and you cannot avoid them. It’s all part of the process.
It is super important not to get discouraged and lose traction. When something challenging happens I always stop for a moment and think “ what am I learning here? “ Is there a positive upside I am not seeing right now? ”.
Often when people think of a new idea, they dismiss it saying someone else must have thought of it before. How would you recommend that someone go about researching whether or not their idea has already been created?
The fact that something exists is a positive indicator that there is room in that market. Someone has already validated the general idea and there is a demand, which is a good thing. What comes next is finding a way to craft something better or different than what is already there. Analyze the market, get a clear vision and make it happen. The idea is 10–20% of the equation, the rest is execution.
If you realize that your idea is going to open a new market space and create new demand, then focus on validating it first. There are many great ideas for which the market might not be ready or responsive. The sooner you know it, the better.
Lastly, never be afraid of sharing your ideas, the perceived risk of being “copied” or having an idea “stolen” is just not real. Competition will eventually come but as a result of your success.
For the benefit of our readers, can you outline the steps one has to go through, from when they think of the idea, until it finally lands in a customer’s hands? In particular, we’d love to hear about how to file a patent, how to source a good manufacturer, and how to find a retailer to distribute it.
- Define your target customers and understand how your product will benefit them.
- Clearly define all the characteristics of your product in order to make it fulfill its promise
- Once you have a map of all the features of your product, start working on them one by one. Don’t try to do everything yourself, get help and eventually build a team.
- Once you have a prototype (but sometimes just a render will do the work) build a good landing page, some ads and get a feel of how the market responds. If you are creative you can land the first customers at this point.
- Be clear on how you are going to make money long term. This is often more important than the product itself.
You can have the best product in the world but if you are not able to sell it, you are going to be in a bad position. I saw too many founders focusing only on getting funded by investors instead of building a sustainable “selling machine” for their products.
I believe the best long term solution is to create a direct relationship with your customers instead of just looking for retailers or selling on marketplaces like Amazon. Yes, it is more complex but it can be a very strong asset if you do it well. - Manufacturing is super important, you need to be on top of every single detail and double check everything. You have a big responsibility on what your manufacturer delivers.
- If your resources are limited, I believe that IP protection should be a concern only after your product starts selling. There are lawyers specialized in these kinds of matters, it is pretty straightforward.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started Leading My Company” and why?
1. Pay attention to who you involve in your project. Friendship and business are 2 completely separate things, don’t mix them. I had a very bad personal experience. I involved friends with the goal of helping them change their life for the better but I ended up being extremely disappointed. I now learned that I need competent people, not friends to build a profitable business. After that experience I started looking at my businesses as a team instead of a family. A great football team strives to get the best players, when someone is not performing, they get a new one.
2. Failure can be your greatest teacher. Don’t be afraid of it, you are not going to die. I had many “failures” in my life but every single one of them taught me an important lesson.
3. When things are going well don’t relax, that is the time to build even more momentum. As humans we tend to relax once things start working well. I have seen successful businesses stop striving to get better once their revenue reached a certain amount and once things started changing they were not able to face the crisis ahead.
4. You are going to get compound interest on all your efforts. Persist.
“Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it; he who doesn’t, pays it” — Albert Einstein Often we are not able to see what our present effort will translate in 5–10 years from now. We have the feeling that even though we are working hard nothing is happening. Until at some point everything starts to fall into place because every single action mattered and helped you reach that final goal. Once I realized this I became much more resilient and able to face big challenges.
5. It is not going to be easy. Prepare to face crises and challenges.
When you think about an idea and you try to visualize the steps to get to where you want to go with it, everything seems easy. 10 years ago everything looked easy. I have now learned that things don’t work out the way you planned them and challenges are going to be there all the time.
Let’s imagine that a reader reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to invent. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?
Make a deep market research. Define what your product is going to help your customer do/achieve. Run some numbers to see how you can make your idea profitable. Study, do not take anything for granted.
There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?
Never worked with one of them but I am sure it can be helpful in some cases. What I think is super important is to get a strong marketing strategist and someone experienced in advertising. I personally worked with companies struggling to stay in business but with the right marketing strategy were able to grow their profits 10–15X in less than 6 months.
What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?
I have been in the startup world for quite some time and think that often venture capital is overrated or at least seen the wrong way.
A lot of young entrepreneurs literally spend their time just looking for venture capital, when they instead could (and should) come up with solutions to create revenue from the very early stages of their entrepreneurial adventure. Which then can lead to getting much better funding later on, accelerating towards a bigger goal. Then, of course there are projects that absolutely need venture capital from an early stage, but often this is not the case.
In our case for example I know that one of the projects we are working on, at some point, will very likely require additional funding to be able to scale. But right now, since we are able to generate revenue in other ways, I am focusing on making it profitable and have a very clear idea of what we need to make it ready to scale.
Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
The ultimate goal of what we are doing with PlayPauseBe is making people feel better through Yoga and Mindfulness. If we succeed (we just got started!) we are confident we’ll be able to contribute to making the world a better place. Personally I like to help people in need and support causes I believe in.
You are an inspiration to a great many people. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
Nowadays people live with a high level of unnecessary stress. If we all had the knowledge to better understand and take care of ourselves we would see a much better world.
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.
Elon Musk. I am fascinated by how he was able to handle two very difficult ventures at the same time (SpaceX and Tesla). I have a few questions ready for him 🙂
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
Thank you for the opportunity you gave me! It was a pleasure!
Making Something From Nothing: Umberto Mezzadra Of PlayPauseBe On How To Go From Idea To Launch was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
