Short version

My name is Francesco Di Lorenzo.

I am an Italian tech founder and software engineer, currently living in Lisbon. I love building products from the ground up and scaling them.

My most notable projects are Mailbrew (exited!) and Typefully.

Extended version

I am originally from Sicily, studied and worked in Milan for seven years, and now live in Lisbon.

I have a background in engineering and computer science and earned my Master of Science at Politecnico di Milano.

My first and only employment was as an iOS software engineer at Bending Spoons, where I was employee number 30. After nearly three years there, I decided to pursue my entrepreneurial ambitions full-time.

Entrepreneurship and experimenting with technology have been constants in my life, both while studying and while working a full-time job. This happened through side projects, podcasts, blogs, and socials (mostly Twitter). Sometimes, it feels like I was born and raised on the Internet!

My first project ever released to the world was a humble discount calculator called OnSale that got crazy popular via a free app of the day promotion and got 700k downloads in China, earning me $200 😂 Seems so little now, but it primed me on making money online.

My second project was an app called Libretto to track grades at Uni. It got to a few hundred users and probably earned ~€1.000 lifetime. It was more of a passion project. The best thing is that initially, it had this crazy-ass skeuomorphic icon (back when that was still in vogue!).

A pivotal moment was meeting Fabrizio on Twitter and then in real life. We built so many projects together and are still working in a team now 10+ years later.

Here is a snapshot of the projects I built with him:

Boxy. Mac web wrapper for the now-defunct Inbox by Gmail. Earned us the first tens of thousands of dollars online and was featured on The Verge and other major websites. It was a one-time-payment app of ~$4.99, so not very sustainable long term.

Boxy Suite was our attempt at making Boxy sustainable by expanding it to a suite of apps and building a subscription around it. At its peak, this had reached (if memory is not failing me) €6-7k MRR. We eventually sold the project to focus on bigger things.

Unreadit was a collection of semi-automated newsletters based on Reddit. Almost every day, Fabrizio and I would go in and manually curate these newsletters that were precompiled with the top posts from Reddit the night before. Quite a lot of work. It wasn't financially viable (only made a few thousand from it), but I learned a ton from it and planted the seed for Mailbrew.

Mailbrew is one of the most ambitious and fun projects I ever worked on! A personal content aggregation service that delivers you a digest email every morning with everything you need to care about. Some absolute legends like DHH, Chris Coyer, and Viticci used it at some point, and it really felt special working on it. At its peak, it reached $13k MRR. We sold it to Evan Williams because we thought Typefully could be a bigger opportunity.

Typefully is what we are currently working on and building a team around. It's our most ambitious project to date, building an AI-powered writing app for social media. It has over 200k registered users and is doing $1.5M ARR as of this writing. Building and leading the team of 8 people working on this is the most challenging and rewarding professional experience of my life.