WeStudents was my first company. It was born at the desks of Liceo Altiero Spinelli in Turin, from the idea of three students (myself, Giorgio Morelli and Matteo De Lucia) who wanted to fix a problem they lived every day: Italian schools were still fragmented across paper, disconnected electronic registers and chaotic WhatsApp groups. We wanted one place, built for students.
What is WeStudents
WeStudents is a free app for Italian high-school students: a smart diary, a classroom social network and a school noticeboard all at once. Launched on October 25, 2018, it brought together three things that used to live in separate places - the homework agenda, the grade tracker and peer communication - into a single experience designed for people who actually go to school every day.
The app is organized around three core sections that mirror how students actually live their day:
- Il tuo banco ("Your desk") - homework and test calendar with automatic peer sharing among classmates, and grade tracking with charts and averages.
- Community - a board for events, assemblies, conferences, parties and student-led initiatives, also managed by school representatives.
- Polls - official school votes and anonymous "WeAsk" polls to give every student a voice.
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The Challenge
In 2018 the Italian school landscape was rich in digital tools but poor in user experience. Electronic registers were built for teachers and administration, not for students. WhatsApp was used as a substitute to share homework and class material, but without structure. Communication between class representatives and the rest of the school still went through paper notices or email circulars no one read.
The real challenge wasn't technical. It was convincing hundreds of thousands of teenagers, used to Instagram and TikTok, to install a school app and use it every day. Doing that required a product that didn't feel imposed from above: it had to be beautiful, fast, viral, and solve a real problem from the very first minute of use.
Key Features
- Synchronized smart diary - Homework and tests automatically shared across all classmates, so no one has to write the same thing a hundred times.
- Grade tracking - Manual grade entry with progress charts, per-subject averages and overall GPA.
- School noticeboard - Events, announcements and extracurricular opportunities posted by representatives and student associations.
- Polls and WeAsk - A fast voting tool for schools and freeform anonymous polls.
- Class and school identity - Every user is linked to their class and institute, creating a vertical (per-school) social graph instead of a horizontal (friends) one.
- No intrusive ads - Student experience comes before the business model.
My Role
At WeStudents I was co-founder and head of engineering. At 18, after dropping out of school and turning down a job offer at Google, I devoted myself full-time to building the product. My work spanned four main areas.
Architecture and app development
I designed and built the first version of the app - mobile front-end, backend, cloud infrastructure - with a team that started as just me and a few others. The goal was to handle a sudden download spike without breaking, keep costs near zero in the early months, and iterate quickly on features based on user feedback.
Leading the engineering team
As we grew we went from 3 to 11+ people: university students aged 19–22 from economics, computer science, data science, engineering and design backgrounds. I owned code reviews, defined technical standards, and shaped the product roadmap together with CEO Giorgio Morelli.
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Launch and viral growth
The October 25, 2018 launch generated over 10,000 downloads in the first 12 hours, 15,000 in the first 24, and pushed us to the top of the Italian App Store. All of that with zero marketing spend - the app spread purely through word-of-mouth among students on Instagram and class WhatsApp groups. I worked with the team to handle the load spike, optimize signup and turn that wave of curious users into recurring ones.
Product evolution
In the following years WeStudents grew past 500,000 users, expanded across every Italian region and became - as we'd stated from the start - the reference platform for the Italian student world. I contributed to defining a business model based on non-invasive advertising and partnerships with companies in the education space.
Results and Impact
Launch success
The launch was one of the fastest ever for an Italian education app:
- #1 in the Education category on Google Play Italy
- #8 in the Education category on the App Store Italy
- #88 and #111 globally in trending apps on Google Play and App Store
- 140,000 social impressions in a single day
- 11,000 Facebook followers in the first month
Nearly 500,000 students reached
Over the years, WeStudents has helped nearly half a million Italian students live school in a simpler, more organized and more connected way. It has redefined how high-schoolers share homework, grades and initiatives - without depending on chaotic WhatsApp groups or school registers that weren't built for them.
A new generation of founders
WeStudents is also the story of a team of twenty-somethings who turned a problem they lived first-hand into a real company - based in Turin, structured as an Italian SRL, generating its own revenue and powered by an active community. For many of us it was a first entrepreneurial experience, and for me personally it was the training ground that led me to later found Devv and to sell Wezard.
Press coverage
The project was covered by Il Sole 24 Ore, StartupItalia, University2Business and many other outlets as a textbook example of an Italian student-founded startup that grew without external investors in its early months.
Conclusion
WeStudents is concrete proof that the best products are born from living the problem, not from reading a market study about it. It was my first major project, my alternative university, and the proof that - in Italy too - an idea started by three high-schoolers can reach half a million users when executed with precision.
The lessons I took from it - viral distribution, listening to users, building young engineering teams, handling traffic spikes - became the toolkit I now bring to companies and entrepreneurs as a fractional CTO and advisor.
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