A Chat with Jonas, the Founder of The Grid

The idea behind The Grid was born out of something simple: frustration. Jonas, its founder, was tired of hunting for events inside WhatsApp group chats — scrolling back through noise, losing track, starting over. “It’s kind of disorienting, chaotic, and very impractical,” he recalls. So he built something better.

The team came together around skill, not just friendship. Luca handles all engineering, Marco runs marketing, and Jonas leads client communication and product direction. Working with friends, he quickly discovered, requires structure. “Because we are friends, we need to set positions so that everyone has specific responsibilities. If something screws up, we know exactly what went wrong — rather than arguing as a whole team.”

The hardest lesson wasn’t technical — it was human. Jonas had assumed that offering a genuinely better product would be enough to drive adoption. It wasn’t. Getting student associations to list their events on the platform proved far more difficult than anticipated. “You really need to persuade them, and it just takes so much energy.” The same friction applied to users: the network effect that makes discovery apps compelling only kicks in once you already have scale, and getting there demands relentless, energy-intensive marketing.

Their communication style reflects the same lesson: ruthless simplicity. Bold single words. White on black. No jargon. “You have these WhatsApp chats with long messages you need to scroll through — it’s a lot of sauce,” Jonas explains. “What if you just strip it all back?” The Grid recently hosted a community event with that same logic — build the community first, and the transition from member to user becomes a much shorter jump.

Legally, the team learned a painful lesson early. Three weeks before their official launch, a bot from a big multinational company scanned their App Store listing and effectively claimed their trademark. A rebrand, Jonas says, is eventually inevitable. It has not slowed them down. They are now building a ticketing system, approaching revenue for the first time, and thinking about how The Grid becomes part of a broader ecosystem rather than a standalone campus tool.

As for the future, Jonas holds multiple scenarios with equal honesty. The Grid might remain a Bocconi institution, passed on like an association. Or it might grow into something more. “Bocconi students are an extremely good clientele,” he says — not despite their age, but because of where they spend: on experiences, on nights out, on events. The only question left is whether the product can move fast enough to find out.

The interview

So first, how did you get the idea for the app?

The idea was born in March last year. Basically, it was just my irritation with the fact that to search for an event you’d have to go to a WhatsApp chat and scroll back. It’s kind of disorienting, chaotic, and very impractical.

So was it you that had the idea?

Yeah.

Since you guys are in a team, how did you select who to work with?

Maybe the only two rational choices were Luca and Marco, because they are the hard value providers to the team. Luca is our engineer and Marco is our marketing guy. We knew about them and chose them because of their skill. Other than that, we started with Giovanni and Machinga, who were just friends. We literally shared the idea over a video or something.

And how did your relationship evolve through the whole project?

It’s been kind of hard to separate work life from friendships. Sometimes they can coexist, but most of the time it’s difficult. For example, if someone doesn’t want to work, they might feel it’s easy to slack off because we’re friends. You really need to set clear boundaries.

And how is the dynamic? Does everybody’s role have the same importance?

Because we are friends, we need set positions so that everyone has specific responsibilities. Everyone cannot do everything. Each person has selected tasks to improve efficiency. This way, if something screws up, we know exactly what went wrong and can communicate it in an isolated manner, rather than arguing as a whole team. For example, if there is an error in the code, it is likely Luca’s fault; if there is a marketing error, it is Marco’s; and if there is an error in client communication, it is my fault. That division is very important.

What were some of the unexpected complications you hit while building the app? Things you maybe thought would be easy, but in reality were really hard?

I think I was just kind of naive. When you’re building a project like this, you have this thought that you’re doing it for the consumers and helping them. But that’s not really the truth. I thought getting associations to use the app as another form of promotion would be easy, but it was really hard. Nobody wants to use it until you serve it to them on a silver plate and make it as easy as possible. You really need to persuade them and explain it, and it takes so much energy. In retrospect, it’s kind of obvious, but it’s not something that’s obvious from the start.

Communication is obviously pretty important if you want people to download the app. How did you work through that as a team? Was it mainly through marketing, or were there other ways you tried to get users?

We cannot benefit from any network effect right now because we’re not that big. Realistically, every consumer we have right now, every user we have, comes from our external marketing, whether it is from social media or from on-campus events.

Recently, we also tried to create a community that would then be able to consume the product that we offer. It would be way easier for consumers to transition from just being in the community to using the product. Right now, students already have a way of discovering events, and everybody does the same thing. But when you offer something new, even if it is more beneficial for them, you really need to push it and change habits. The more people have it, the more people will have it eventually. This is the network effect. So yes, marketing mainly.

And how did you come up with your communication style?

This is what we started doing with Marco even early on, when Grid wasn’t even a thing and it was just a social media account. The Grid was originally just an Instagram account where we planned on doing weekly overviews. We wanted it to be as simple as possible. You have these WhatsApp chats and there are long messages you need to scroll through. It’s a lot of sauce, marketing sauce, marketing jargon. What if you just put single words in bold, white on black — very bold, very easy. I think that’s how all marketing should be, because otherwise it’s getting overcomplicated.

Did you take part in any Bocconi initiatives?

Yeah. We applied twice for B4i. We got rejected twice. Other than that, we have actually been in talks with the official CASA committee about making the Grid an official university pipeline for events, maybe as an addition to You@B. We have also collaborated with a lot of associations, whether it was helping us through contacts that we needed for events or future events.

Did Bocconi propose anything that really helped during the setting up of this app?

No, not really.

How do you balance the product, studying here, and going out?

I’m a really inefficient person with my time schedule for the reason that I cannot do multiple things at once. If I’m studying, I need to study for a week just to study. I cannot do anything else because it’s boring and I need to rewire my brain. And if I’m doing the Grid, I need to do the Grid for a week because it’s more exciting and I need to rewire my brain for that too. Mixing those things together means nothing gets done.

When we developed the product, it was mostly interplay between us and Luca, because we were basically designing the app and feeding Luca the features, trying to figure out app designs that would optimize engagement with users. Where do you place the buttons? What colors do they have? What pages do you use? What content do you feed them? This type of stuff.

Did he handwrite all the code?

Yes. Now I’ve been lucky enough to contribute to the code as well, but Luca wrote 99.9999999% of that. With no AI. Luca is a genius. He’s our strongest asset.

And legally, did you have any issues?

Yeah, and we needed to deal with it and we didn’t. In the end, it’s not as bad as we thought it would be, but it’s kind of a funny story. We launched the app formally on the 26th of October for the public, but the app was actually on the App Store for three weeks before that. The reason was that we wanted to have everything in compliance with the App Store policies, so we knew that the app could be downloaded and that we could set up the app page and everything.

But this resulted in the fact that our app got scanned by one of the bots from the legal team of Live Nation, a 36 billion dollar company that focuses on the event environment. Our trademark basically got stolen, so we don’t have the trademark technically. Eventually we’re going to need a rebrand.

So you’re going to change the name?

Yeah, eventually. Not in the near future here on campus, but near future in absolute terms. We were thinking in half a year, depending on how things evolve. Maybe also merge with someone else, because I feel like the way for expansion of this product is to really become part of an ecosystem. And I think here at Bocconi we have quite a lot of opportunities to get in touch with that ecosystem.

How do you see the future of the product, especially considering you’re graduating in a year?

We are still quite unsure about that, but we are preparing for multiple options. One of them is that the Grid is never going to be a proper company and it’s going to stay here in Milan or Bocconi and serve as a service for students. We would basically make it an association and pass it on. Of course, in that case, there is no economic prospect to this.

What we’re trying to do right now is to formalize our ability to gain revenue. That’s what we’re working on now. In the future, we want to have a ticketing system. That’s currently what we are working on, and there are many legal and other compliance issues that come with it. So we would need to limit it to Milan or Bocconi. But still, considering the costs that we have, which are really low, I think we would be able to sustain it even in such a small environment.

I was wondering about the costs. Don’t you have to pay for servers or data services?

Yeah, we have to pay for support services. As part of the app, we use countless APIs and a lot of other software services that we need to run the app, such as database features and hosting features.

And how do you divide that?

Right now we divide it equally among the involved people. But so far, we have such a low cost that it is almost negligible. We have super cheap stored data. Up to 10,000 users, we’re basically paying 3 euros per month for the database. Then we’re paying some fee annually for the App Store hosting, which is quite high, but if you distribute it across the months, it’s not that big. I think that store is around 120 per year.

Then there are the APIs that we use. We’re using Bocconi ChatGPT, so that’s free. There is some very low limit, but we have something. We also use a scraper running Milan-wide every day, combine those events, evaluate them with ChatGPT and Claude, format them, and automatically upload them to the Grid. And all of this, I am paying five euros a month for. We did a lot of work writing the code in a way that optimizes for tokens and clumps together the requests.

What assumptions did you have regarding the Grid that you had to completely change while doing it?

One of the assumptions is definitely that value alone, maybe in the form that we’re trying to provide it, is not enough to generate demand among users. That’s what I said before.

Another assumption we had at the beginning — and one reason why we wanted to make it a whole ticketing app and everything — was that students alone are not a good clientele. I changed my mind on that. Students are actually a very good clientele, especially in the event environment where we operate. Of course, everybody says they have lower budgets, and yes, there are some things that they pay less for, but I would say that events are exactly the sector where they have a larger willingness to pay than many other groups.

So you need to shift the business model in a way that takes advantage of this willingness to pay in students and provide value at the same time. In that case, I think it’s a very good business model.

However, I think there is actually a stigma, and we’ve verified that with multiple VCs, that we are kind of uninvestable because if you tell any VC that your target base is students, they’re going to send you to hell. Which is what happened.

Did you go after some VCs?

Yeah, we were talking with some. We had like three calls going on, very early. We also had some mentors. I talked to a guy from the industry in Prague, and everyone said the same thing.

Maybe there is something that we’re critically missing, but so far, with the research that we did and from how we see that Eventbrite is doing in different sectors, how Dice is doing in different sectors, and how Luma — which is a new, very similar company in America right now — is doing, it’s obvious that this group of people, students, are very good for this industry.

So are you going to try to fight that assumption that students are not good clientele, or just accept it?

I wouldn’t say necessarily fight it. I would say adapt to it. With a typical broad ticketing app, if you focus only on students, there will be a problem because you won’t be able to capture the rest of the market. But if you reform the app or platform and focus on students, and maybe provide some extra services that students typically require, I think this is a very good business model. So not necessarily fight that assumption, but adapt to it.