Raised €20K. Acquired 10K users in 6 months
Context
Pig Company was my first startup. I co-founded it in Bolzano, Italy in 2009, building an online dating platform from scratch. I was 22, had no startup experience, and no playbook. We raised €20K in seed funding and set out to compete in a market dominated by Meetic and Match, companies spending tens of millions on marketing.
Challenge
Dating platforms are network-effect businesses. They only work if enough people are already using them. We had to solve the cold-start problem in a geographically constrained market against incumbents with virtually unlimited acquisition budgets. Every user we won had to come from being smarter, not from outspending.
Approach
Product
I defined the product from the ground up: how the platform would work, the user experience, the matching logic. I acted as product manager and technical lead, making infrastructure and hosting decisions to keep costs within our seed budget, then hired and managed a developer to build it.
Growth
Acquisition ran on three channels: SEO to capture local dating intent, PR that landed us coverage in regional newspapers, and paid ads where we could stretch the budget. The PR coverage was the biggest unlock. Newspaper articles drove signup spikes that SEO alone could not have produced at that stage.
Operations
Beyond product and marketing, I handled the operational side: incorporating the company, managing the fundraise, and running the finances. At a two-person startup with €20K, every function is your function.
Result
We reached 10,000 users in six months. But the unit economics never worked. A local dating platform could not generate enough revenue per user to sustain the cost of development and infrastructure, let alone compete with incumbents on acquisition. I shut it down.
What I took from it
This was the project that taught me to look at the business model before looking at the growth curve. Traction without economics is a trap. It also gave me a hands-on education in product thinking, SEO, PR, and hiring, all of which became the foundation for everything that followed.