Two strangers and an IT bootcamp : The Italian Indie Hacker Story You Need to Hear
Sometimes the best friendships spark from sharing the same desk at school. For Emanuele Di Pietro and Francesco Mistero, that classroom happened to be Frederico II University of Computer Science in Naples, and what started as two strangers learning to code turned into one of the most genuine indie hacker friendships you'll find.
It All starts from frustration
Emanuele is fed up with university. Many founders before him are dropouts, why not him ? He didn't yet give up on his studies but he wanted to at least get into the meat of development right away which he did by registering in the Apple Academy in Naples. Francesco is younger and but he also wants to attend the Apple Academy during university to get a feel of what IT is about and maybe find his passion in mobile development.
A seed of a friendship made possible by X
Emanuele is already a little celebrity of his own on X ! He has a few thousand followers and he already posted his fair share of banger tweets which Francesco already noticed ! As any casual X user Francesco at first didn't pay much attention to it but the face of Emanuele was already familiar to him and they already had the chance to meetup at university but nothing concrete sparked out of this meetup yet.
The decisive meetup
When Francesco joined the bootcamp he immediately noticed the author of those banger tweets ! Being the extraverted energy ball he is, he couldn't help but greet Emanuele and talk about mobile development at the academy in which it turned out that Francesco was actually the very first beta tester of Emanuele's app !
The final meetup which sealed the deal
Later on they again bumped into each other this time at an event about development in which Francesco explained to Emanuele that he got so inspired by his journey that he decided to do the same and it had changed his career path for good ! While the conference happened to be a bummer it was still a success because from that last meetup both developed a sincere appreciation for each other and started a long lasting friendship !
What happened next ?
Afterwards Emanuele went on to develop is most famous app follow snapshot which made him a few hundred bucks, which for someone who picked up web development less than a year ago is an impressive feat ! But the most impressive achievement goes to Francesco ! On his very first app EVER, he made a sale !
Can you imagine building an hello world project and striking gold right away ? This is quite the accomplishment !
And even if that product didn't generate a lot of money yet it still generated some which is something most founders struggle with for months even years !
While this happened to be a meetup that took place during a nearby event this could have never happened have they not participated to that same event ! Luckily there is a feature for the people who don't travel and want to meet other builders : in your settings you can set your default location which will be taken into account by the algorithm to offer you meetup possibilities 🇮🇹🚀