Casey Sullivan Bookafy Founder’s Favorite Book:Love Is the Killer App: How to Win Business and Influence Friends by Tim Sanders
"Nice, smart people succeed."
― Tim Sanders, Love Is the Killer App: How to Win Business and Influence Friends
Giancarlo Giansante, a 40-year old, is a communication graduate and Executive MBA at IE with 20 years of experience in marketing, sales, communication, and the digital environment. He is also a teacher and speaker at Instituto de Empresa, The Valley, and other schools in Madrid, Spain.
He has focused on bringing transparency and value to the ad tech and data environment. He believes in the necessity of common language across digital marketing. He bridges the language gap, facilitating clear, transparent communication across digital marketing actors.
FAVORITE BOOK
When Giancarlo was building his company, his favorite book was “The Art of the Start 2.0” The Art of the Start 2.0 (2015) is the revised version of 2004 The Art of Start written by Guy Kawasaki. A guide for creating a company, updated to consider the progressed start-up world. The author, Guy Kawasaki, is a well-known marketing expert in the start-up world.
The book covers everything you need to know about starting a business from scratch to creating a great product. It is more than just a book about starting a company and teaches you how to be a start-up founder. After every chapter, there is a quoted solid business advice from Guy Kawasaki that is undoubtedly worth remembering on your business journey. It is a great way to learn about the skill set you need and give you a piece of in-depth knowledge to become a company founder quickly.
ABOUT ADJINN
When Giancarlo left Nielsen Holdings, a global marketing research firm, he launched his own company, Adjinn, back in 2016. Adjinn is a publisher intelligence model for different kinds of ads. They provide data from a competitive perspective that allows brands and publishers to become updated about their competitors’ ad marketing. Adjinn’s technology is base on data gathering methods from websites supporting digital advertising. With the use of search engine spiders, they can navigate marketing advertisements from brands and publishers.
FROM BOOK TO BUSINESS
After leaving Nielsen, he began to establish his own company, and The Art of the Start was his right hand; it was like his own business coach. The book taught him to create a business from scratch, from idea to launching. He learned the tips and tricks of conversing with potential investors, hiring staff, and figuring out how to endorse his project. It also provides how-to start even without an external investment such as bootstrapping. No wonder Adjinn skyrocketed because of new technologies that made it easier start-up without an investment. Fun fact, Giancarlo’s favorite online tool was Breeze, a management monitoring tool used in their core operations. He said that it was easy to use, well-designed, and minimalist.
In the last chapter of the book, Guy Kawasaki explained that we should aim at being a mensch; who helps others without expecting anything in return.
We can see that Giansante has applied this in his business ways. During an interview with Nathan Latka, he said that he did not focus on growth from the money point of view. His goal was to be sustainable and sell their services to his clients. It was a special thing for Giancarlo to do meaningful work. He thought of his mission to be quite odd because he isn’t any other businessman that focuses on growing profit. He cares about his clients more than his company’s potential growth. As a result, Adjinn is profitable, with 50 customers paying $3,000 monthly, about $190,000 per month in revenue.
A team of 16 people operates in Madrid, Italy, and Portugal with two business models. They have a 5% revenue churn per year as of 2019. They look to scale for the next year, and he values himself at about $20 million. We can say that Giancarlo Giansante became a man of success.
