On The Volunia Launch

Is it even possible that Volunia is so crappy? I mean, it takes effort to build something that no one on our beloved planet thinks is nice. We must be missing something, right?

If you’ve never heard about it, Volunia is supposed to be some kind of mix between a search engine and a social network. Honestly, I have no idea what that means. It’s still in closed beta so I’ll wait for other pioneers to explore it. You know, hic sunt dracones and all that.

The most interesting thing about Volunia is that its supposedly worldwide launch event was barely a press conference. In Italian. The projector didn’t even work. The presenter started talking about chickens (no kidding). Poor live demo. You get the point.

I haven’t watched the launch live, but from what I’ve read it will probably be remembered as the worst launch event of 2012.

If you search Twitter, #volunia has managed to become a trending topic. The problem is that it’s just lukewarm to downright negative commentary. They even got a not-too-negative post on Gigaom, but other than that, probably due to the lame launch event, the project only got national news coverage so far.

People are complaining that Volunia is a failure. No. They are complaining that it’s a Typical Italian Failure. Probably they’re even right. The cause of the yet-to-be-verified failure, however, is never considered. The project leader (and launch event presenter), Massimo Marchiori, is an engineer. That, and an ugly website, is all it needs to screw a product launch. The guy is an engineer, even a good one it seems, and is temporarily acting as a entrepreneur, marketer, salesman and presenter all at once. That doesn’t work, and trust me when I say that. I know what I’m talking about.

They got €2M and 2 years. They have no excuses for failing to hire a designer and a marketing guy. They’d have cost only pocket money compared to all the rest. Even so, I hope Volunia will succeed. I really do. Because we need success stories, not laughable attempts at building the next Google, and failing miserably. That said, kudos to Marchiore and his team, as they deserve at least some appreciation for trying to build something new. Most of the critics don’t even know what it’s like to run a startup, so they’d better shut up and wait to see what happens next.