Before Napps there was Mr Guider: an augmented-reality tourism app that would plan your trip and let you point your phone at the Colosseum to see it two thousand years ago. It was a genuinely beautiful idea, which is Pedro's polite way of saying it cost €120,000 to build and had the market timing of launching a tourism startup directly into a global pandemic. Mr Guider did not survive COVID. The habit of chasing an idea until it either works or dies clearly did.
The origin story he's most proud of is a hiring one. Told by a professor that one student was reliable and the other, Nuno, was "unpredictable" and "rebellious," Pedro did the only logical thing and called the unpredictable one first. Where the professor saw a problem, Pedro saw a co-founder, which tells you roughly everything about how he makes decisions.
On the blog, Pedro writes about the parts of building Napps that don't fit on a pitch deck: getting the market wrong for two years, the real numbers behind retention and LTV that only showed up once customers did, and why a native app stopped being a €120,000 luxury. He has recently discovered that people actually want to hear this story, and he intends to make that everyone's problem. He still runs on post-its.
