The entrepreneur journey

Do you really have the time to read all the newspapers every day? Ten years ago, Beniamino Pagliaro, founder of Good Morning Italia, was working as a journalist in a leading Italian news agency and pondered: if even journalists have a hard time reading the newspapers, why wouldn’t regular readers?

When Beniamino first had the idea of sending readers daily news briefings, he pitched it to his employers at a news agency in Italy. However, they weren’t receptive to his proposed solution. Undeterred, he contacted ten journalists from different news outlets, some of whom he’d only know from Twitter. He told them about his idea and asked if they were interested in joining him to explore this space and the opportunities it could present. The response? All of them said yes. For Beniamino, this was his first business validation.

“Thanks to the Internet, I had this idea, sent the email and months later we were live. We had a very simple Wordpress site and we started to test the market to see how it would go”, tells Beniamino.

Some of the journalists Beniamino reached out ended up being part of the core team. They helped produce and send out early morning newsletters with curated news to help readers keep up to date with the most important stories from around the world. The team’s background and experience were fundamental to turn the initial idea into a business.

“The first briefing was sent on January 2013 and from that day on we didn't miss a single day. The daily briefing was sent out on Christmas and Easter included. So you need to have a team”. Today, there are around 20 journalists working on the editorial side on a daily basis.

When Good Morning Italia started working with Activate, the startup was at a more developed stage than the usual undertaking. “In a way, I feel the whole team built a programme for us”, said Beniamino. The strategy was to take a step back and, through sessions with Activate team, work to find the real market opportunities and redefine the goals.

“A programme like this will make you work on many things directly. So if you want to build a company, this is the right process. It will help grow your company and your ability on how to work”, he concluded.

Good Morning Italia still has subscribers who signed up on day one and the readership estimate is twenty thousand people including corporate customers. Watch this space!