![[Company Name]'s Founder Stories](/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Fonuder@-Partners-01a-150x150.png)
Founder@ Interview
Interview with Giuseppe Licari & Roberto Amerighi
“Find a strong partner to start your business, someone that you respect, trust and enjoy working with. That’s what will make the whole journey more fun and way easier, even during the hard times. .” – Giuseppe Licari & Roberto Amerighi
Today we feature Giuseppe Licari & Roberto Amerighi, the founder at GreenJinn. We hear their story in their own words, their successes, their challenges and their insights.
Let’s start by getting to know you. Can you please tell us a little bit about you and what you do?
We are Giuseppe and Roberto and we are the founders of GreenJinn app. We are self-professed foodies, and you may have guessed by our names… we are Italian.
We launched GreenJinn back in 2017 not knowing where this would take us and now we are a growing international team. GreenJinn is the free cashback app for brands that are good for you, your wallet and the planet. Our community of shoppers gets real cash on the brands they love from the supermarkets most convenient for them.
They can save up to £1,500 yearly cashback on healthy and sustainable products with offers tailored to them. We connect mindful and curious people with brave, innovative brands and help consumers Shop Smarter, Live Healthier.
For the brands we work with, we help solve the blind spot in their media with our new system: GreenJinn Treasure™: Tracking and measuring offline conversion from media. GJ Treasure™ allows brands to go beyond brand awareness of their ad spend and deliver tangible and measurable call-to-action to drive in-store activation and generate actionable insights with retargeting opportunities.
It is an easy way for consumers to get cashback on their groceries and for brands, we work with to track exactly how their campaign is performing. We know how important it is to understand a consumer journey and in an easy-to-measure way.
Currently, brands will use paid media to drive awareness and increase sales but have no insights or data on how that ad has affected in-store sales. The shoppers will receive coupons via a media source (Instagram ads, QR codes on billboards), they then buy that product full-price in-store or online, snap the receipt on the app and get the cashback. As easy as that. Shop. Snap. Save. The brands will be able to optimise their media, have access to live insights, be able to retarget and really track the performance of their media, in real-time and across retailers.
Outside of GreenJinn, we are definitely not shy of some karaoke. Giuseppe: I love watching F1, MotoGP and riding my motorbike exploring the British countryside and more! Also, riding my e-mtb at the park is a good outdoor activity, at least during the summer evenings! Rob: Getting to know new people from diverse backgrounds and contexts, experiencing local culture (and food of course!) in the UK and anywhere else we travel in the world.
A great introduction and start to this interview. Can you please tell us, how did you start, from what age, and what made you decide to change direction and start?
ADVERTISEMENT
We launched GreenJinn back in 2017 with the aim to connect mindful and curious people with brave brands.
We go way back and actually met at University, which is where our lightbulb moment happened. We (like a lot of people) were looking for an easy way to cut our grocery bills, without starving ourselves or having to buy junk food. So we wanted to start our own service to do just that… Hello GreenJinn!
We wanted to provide a space where people could discover new, healthy and quality brands, have personalised offers tailored to their needs, and be as quick and simple as possible.
After our degrees, we were working as consultants in Milan. The idea was still at the front of our minds so we kept working on it and decided to make the big move to quit our day jobs and become our own bosses initially moving to Berlin as a prototype basecamp.
We spent a few months in Berlin working on the prototype, studying on the market there, in the US and the UK.
We did everything we could to work on our idea…. sofa surfing, cheapest meals (not the healthiest…GreenJinn was yet to be launched!), saving where we could so we could dedicate everything to our little GreenJinn Genie idea.
We knew we were onto something but we were realistic. Our home country of Italy was not ready for a coupon app like this. We saw there was a steady growth in couponing in the UK, which was the centre of food innovation and sustainability in Europe, so we packed our bags, and headed there. What a shock to the system!
There’s no beating around the bush here, we needed money! Some of our friends from high school, uni, and work were our initial investors in the concept (cheers guys, couldn’t do it without you). But we needed just a little more.
We hopped on a flight, no idea what would come of it but headed to Silicon Valley. We knew there were tech experts there that we could get invaluable advice from and potential investors.
However, we didn’t know anyone.. We asked everyone we knew if they knew anyone in New York or Silicon Valley. We literally knocked on doors, waited around to just ‘bump into someone’… you know just like the movies, and would not take no for an answer.
One pitch actually happened on a sidewalk (or what we call pavement here in the UK), when someone was returning to the office from lunch.
We pitched the product to those who would listen and although we didn’t actually expect to get investors during that time, we managed to!
We completed a round of crowdfunding and found some great investors who believed in our product. We took on board invaluable feedback from those who listened to our pitches and about the market.
From there we moved from the prototype, defined the business plan, and improved our user experience.
We did it! We launched. We are the only cashback app on the market actively promoting healthy living and with personalised offers tailored to you.
We now have a full growing international team here to make our app even better.
Thank you for that insight. So can you tell us…What does your business do and where is your company based?
We’re the free cashback app for brands that are good for you, your wallet, and the planet.
Get real cash on the brands you love from the supermarkets most convenient for you.
Save up to £1,500 yearly cashback on your everyday shop when shopping both online and in-store.
Healthy and sustainable products with offers tailored to you. (Fun Fact: the Green in GreenJinn is for sustainability!)
We provide up to 100% cashback on everyday products.
With GreenJinn, you can SHOP, SNAP, SAVE, just like that. Magic.
Just browse and add the coupons you like. Shop in-store or online at all major retailers and buy the products as you would normally do.
Take a photo of your receipt and submit it for confirmation. Once the receipt has been checked you can claim your cashback. The money is sent straight to you!.
Too good to be true? Why not try it for yourself!
We are a B2C and B2B business. We work with our consumers on getting the best offers and products available to them. With our brands we are giving them a platform to trial their products on our highly engaged users, gather feedback from them, and gain insights into shopping patterns. We are always working on bringing new and exciting brands to our app that fit our values and own criteria. Brands need to either fit some if not all of our criteria which are: Sustainable, Healthy, Innovative, Fun, Tasty.
We stick to this to make sure we know we are doing the right thing for us, our community, and for the planet.
We are based in London (near Vauxhall) however we have team members all over the world. With the current climate we are all currently working mostly from home but managing some in person meetings. We have a few of our team based across Europe so we are an international company with many different cultures but come together as one team.
What’s the story behind your success? What led to your aha moment? how did you get to where you are now?
We were travelling to the US to meet investors and were living on a budget. In order to save money and still have substantial meals, we were eating our favourite $2.15 meal at 7/11 everyday (hot dog + soda + fruit salad)…and after a few days we thought “this can’t possibly be our life!” We started to experiment with all possible ways to save money and buy products from supermarkets but most methods available were still providing mostly junk products! By then we were working on GreenJinn’s first prototype and we realised that we were into something big!!
Right now it is our team. We are very much in startup mode and do everything in-house and we work together as one team. We are scrappy and we like it. Each team helps each other which has been invaluable. If we’ve had an overwhelming number of queries and activities from our community, then all teams drop what they are doing and help out.
Thank you for sharing that. What’s been your life’s biggest lesson so far?
Our biggest challenge was the chicken and egg problem whilst building a marketplace. We were dependent on brands partnering with us as well as users downloading and joining the app.
To overcome this we started by proposing a free service to brands that were launching their products in the supermarkets for the first time so there was a good range of offers available to our users from the very beginning. This also allowed us to get more insights on what people loved and approach new brands to partner with based on that. The app started taking off and got unexpectedly viral, the brands were loving the platform even if it was still small…at some point, we realised that we didn’t have to struggle anymore to add new exciting brands!
Other than that Covid was coming and how long it would take (wouldn’t we all!)
How the first international launch works, how much planning, testing and taking every single detail into consideration helps make it a success. Once you nail the first one, scaling up internationally gets way easier!
How important it is to have a complete skill set in the team as early as possible. It is true that in a startup everyone does or can do everything but starting to specialise people as much as possible early on in the journey will help you scale your business faster and make it a success
If you were to go back in time, what piece of advice would you give to your younger self?
At the beginning it’s important to stay very focused and do a few extra miles when it comes to time and efforts that you dedicate to your new business. To our younger selves, we’d suggest spending at least some time and mental resources nurturing our own hobbies and passions rather than neglecting them. Building a great brand and long-lasting sustainable business is a marathon, you can run a few sprints but need to carefully balance your energies over time
We weren’t really encouraged to be entrepreneurs. In our own country, Italy, there is a religion behind being employed with an “indeterminate contract”. Doing things in a different way, our own way, was a great driver when we started our journey.
To the doubters (or to ourselves sometimes): When we want something and we know it is right for us we typically go for it!
There have been a few times when we have questioned being entrepreneurs. It happened a couple of times at the peak of the most adverse situations, the only sure thing is that a second after we look at each other we think about what we are achieving with our team and community and tell each other “no way we would not do this all over again!”
We’re nearly halfway through our interview so it’s a great time to ask how does your business run. What three tools make your business run better?
One tool that has been invaluable to us is Slack. We are quite a remote team (both because we are in multiple countries and because of Covid) so we can’t just reach over our desks for a chat. Having slack has meant we can have constant communication, which for a start-up when things can change really quickly is crucial.
It has also meant we have kept our team culture alive as an easy way for members to share what is getting up to, celebrate the big and small moments, and feel much more connected.
For our sales team, it would definitely be Hub Spot which they use for all external communications. Through Hubspot, we can reach new brand opportunities on a larger scale. We can schedule meetings and emails and see insights for our email performance.
We can trigger different accounts with different communications depending on what they have already seen.
We have built our own dashboard (we have a great development team who build and manage our app and can build anything!) This holds all of our app data, where we put all of our offer campaigns live and any interactions with our users and the app are held. Basically, it does everything! Everyone in the business uses it in one way or another so this is vital to our business. Luckily we have our dedicated development team who built this and are constantly working on making it more efficient and adding new features for us to use. Without this, in place, we would completely rely on our dev team on everything which would slow all processes.
For our product team, Jira has been great. Everyone in the team can see what project other team members are working on, see what stage they are at as well as bring other members of the team to that project when needed. It means tasks are divided amongst the team so not one person is overwhelmed and we can keep a status on all projects that are going on (there’s a lot!).
What do you know now that you wished you had known before?
Other than that Covid was coming and how long it would take (wouldn’t we all!)
How the first international launch works, and how much does planning, testing, and taking every single detail into consideration help make it a success. Once you nail the first one, scaling up internationally gets way easier!
How important it is to have a complete skill set in the team as early as possible. It is true that in a startup everyone does or can do everything but starting to specialise people as much as possible early on in the journey will help you scale your business faster and make it a success
What has been your greatest or proudest achievement or moment?
Definitely getting our Treasure system working and seeing it in action!
We had our first OOH campaign with Drink BABE (AB InBev) this year while the country was in full lockdown. We worked with BABE on their campaign including billboards that were situated outside Sainsburys stores all around London.
The challenge was to drive new users into stores to increase the trial of their new launch. We needed to drive heightened engagement and incentivise product trial through the call to action of a free sample of BABE wine at Sainsbury’s in London.
Using our Treasure system we placed QR codes directly on the billboards which directed people to a bespoke BABE landing page and offer to increase brand and product awareness and an easy consumer journey.
Over the two weeks, we saw 14.4 million impressions and reached over 530K people. (This was also in the midst of one of our lockdowns!). We had a result of 11% conversion rate from QR scan to instore purchase.
We are continuing to put sustainability first and we are proud of the recent stand we took against Black Friday weekend. A weekend that does a lot of damage to the planet, we wanted to encourage people to shop more mindfully. We wanted to help offset some of the damage of Black Friday weekend and invest in carbon reduction projects. Sustainability is very important to us, it is in our name (green) as well as one of our key values. We know it is no longer a nice to do, it’s a need to do. For every receipt that was submitted on Black Friday or Cyber Monday we took into account all carbon emissions involved (including actual receipts) and have now invested in an additional 74 tonnes of Carbon offset by investing in Carbon reduction projects around the world.
What future life goals do you want to achieve and why?
We have lots of plans!!
Without giving away all our ideas, we are working on making our user experience even better and easier to use. We are pushing further into the world of AI, going above and beyond to let our users access our offers through TV or activated in-store. Although the UK is our main focus for now we will be launching into new countries soon!
We are continuing to build our Treasure™ system, becoming a data specialised business by helping more brands optimise their media, gain valuable consumer insights and retarget and really track the performance of their media.
Sustainability is an area that is very important to us. That’s why we have Green in our name. It’s one of our key values and something we live and breathe at GreenJinn. We have done a lot this year from becoming a climate-positive workforce, launching our Go Green with GreenJinn initiatives which further educates our team and our users, and holding webinars challenging our brands to partner with The Felix Project to help reduce food waste.
We want to continue to learn and share this with our users. We want to improve and hit our targets within our four sustainability pillars: Product, Partnerships, People and Planet. The main one being, that we are working towards becoming a B Corp business.
Together with our community, we want to shape the supermarkets of the future, making sure that what we consume on a daily basis is as healthy and sustainable as possible!
To finish our inspire questions…”We believe that sharing inspiring words can inspire others.” If there was one positive thing you would say to someone to inspire and empower them what would it be and why?
Find a strong partner to start your business, someone that you respect, trust and enjoy working with. That’s what will make the whole journey more fun and way easier, even during the hard times.
“Thank you it has been great learning more about your founder story and GreenJinn”
To learn more about GreenJinn Visit https://www.greenjinn.com/
Inspired by this story? Please share this story and other founder stories.
For more inspiring founders stories check out Founder Stories.
Have an inspiring founder story?
Every entrepreneur’s journey is unique and powerful.
Your story of perseverance and success could be the spark that ignites the next generation of world-changing ideas. By sharing your experiences, you’re not just telling a story – you’re lighting a path for others to follow, dream, and achieve.
Disclaimer:
The views, thoughts, information, and opinions expressed in the text, videos, images belong solely to those of the individuals involved, and do not necessarily represent those of Founderat.com and its corporate owners, employees, organization, committee, or other group or individuals.
More from Founder Stories
” Be very careful with advice—most of it will steer you toward conventional thinking. Build your ability to reason from first principles, embrace resilience, and focus on creating long-term value.“ – Nick Root
"Be very careful with advice—most of it will steer you toward conventional thinking. Build your ability to reason from first …
“I’ll share two bits of advice that have been instrumental to me, both coming from different places but equally impactful…” – Liam Sanders
Founder@ Interview With Liam Sanders "I'll share two bits of advice that have been instrumental to me, both coming from different places …
“Start with empathy.” Whether you’re building a product, leading a team, or pitching to investors, the core of your business should be understanding people’s needs…” – Rainier Mallol
Founder@ Interview With Rainier Mallol "The one piece of advice I would give is: "Start with empathy." Whether you're building a product, …
