Eventvm was born in 2020, just before Covid, during our last year of high school. It started from a simple frustration we all knew too well: the classic sentence “there’s nothing to do”. We didn’t believe it was true. Things were happening, they were just hard to find.
So we launched an Instagram page where we collected and shared all the events happening in a city. From there, the idea evolved into an app: a single place where anyone could discover any kind of event: aperitivi, culture, music, sports, art, festivals.
The app allowed organizers to upload events and sell tickets, while we manually added everything that wasn’t being published, one event at a time. Our goal was simple: make the app feel alive, full, and useful from day one.
In 2022, we officially incorporated the company, secured our first investor, and opened a small office. At the same time, the community kept growing.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-zt0GtfdCc
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Our social communication worked a lot. We collaborated with events and festivals all over Italy, and in 2023 the app expanded to Turin, Milan, Genoa, and Rome. To scale faster, we evolved from a simple event aggregation platform into an AI-powered system, scraping events from major platforms like TicketOne, Eventbrite, and Dice. In just one month, the app was filled with events across the entire country.
During the summer of 2023, other two investors joined the project, investing a total of €240k. The team grew, the numbers grew, and so did the ambition. We reached 80k users, 90k social followers, collaborated with major Italian brands, and generated millions of views through our content.
But the business model didn’t work.
Being active only in Italy wasn’t enough to sustain the project at that scale. In summer 2024, driven by user behavior and market feedback, we decided to pivot.
First, we shifted toward creating experiences for university students inside companies, collaborating with brands such as Stellantis, Golden Goose, Alessandro Marchetti, and CERN in Geneva. We also explored partnerships with companies like Satispay, Qonto, and Kappa.
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→ The First Pivot
We redefined Eventvm’s storytelling by connecting childhood dreams with present-day experiences. The narrative invited users to reconnect with who they wanted to become and how experiences shape identity.
This emotional repositioning strengthened brand identity, increased audience engagement, and differentiated Eventvm in a crowded event-tech market.
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After 4–5 events, it became clear that this model was still too fragile.
So we pivoted again. This time into educational trips for students, connecting what they studied with the places where that industry actually lives. For example, fashion students in Canada traveling to Milan Fashion Week. This version worked.
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→ The Second Pivot
Every evolution of Eventvm was tested and validated in extremely short timeframes: during the second pivot, while I was in Canada, we launched and validated the new model with paying users in just 7 days, proving real demand before scaling.
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But it was also moving too far away from the original vision. At that point, the team made the hardest decision: to stop.
We tried everything. We failed, pivoted, rebuilt, and tried again. Eventvm was the most intense and meaningful experience of our lives. We gave everything we had, because we genuinely loved what we were building.
And that, more than any number, is the real story.
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The team was incredible, we arrived to do more than we have ever thought. I am so proud of every single people who joined our adventure.
And I can say: we became the most important events community in Italy.
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Imagine being a 21 years old guy with your app in the top 50 App Store right above the main competitor.
Actually, crazy.
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I was the creative and crazy one, Stefano was the real practical and focus one. I was leading community creation, growth, and marketing strategy, he was trying to tnerci a galla e gestire le finanze, rapporti con collaboratori ecc.
We scaled the platform to over 70k users and 90k social followers. Through continuous experimentation, ideas and wrong moves. But this is it and non woudn’t do a best choice in our 20s.
I was the creative and unconventional one, while Stefano was the more practical and focused. I led community creation, growth, and marketing strategy, while he kept the company afloat by managing finances, operations, and relationships with collaborators.
We were a perfect match.
Together, we scaled the platform to over 70k users, 90k social followers, over 15 collaborators and tons of events through constant experimentation: trying ideas, making mistakes, and learning fast.
Looking back, there’s nothing we would have done a best choice in our twenties.
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