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Today we publish a very special interview. It is a conversation with João Pedro Cortinhas , one of the founders of SWONKIE , a differentiated Portuguese platform with unique characteristics, which competes with canada email list major social media management services around the world from its headquarters in Vila Nova de Famalicão .
In 2016, João Pedro Cortinhas and Daniel Fernandes went to the television program “Shark Tank” in Portugal with a simple prototype of a product they believed in.
The product was designed for content creators to help them create better content. After the TV show, brands, agencies and media outlets reached out to the team to learn more about the service and whether it could also function as a social media management platform.
These questions were the turning point for the product because the team realized there was still a gap in the market with existing social media management platforms and SWONKIE could fill it.
In 2017, they launched the SWONKIE platform as it is known today, which has since become one of the best social media management platforms .
This is a success story, as SWONKIE 's impressive figures attest : there are more than 4,000 customers using this service, including more than 25,000 Social Media Managers, who together have set up more than 150,000 Social Media Profiles on the platform, which has been used to send more than 10 million social media posts.
This is also a story of entrepreneurship, inspiration, work and a lot of commitment in a project that was born alone and stemmed from a personal need, as you can read in the following lines. If you still don't know what SWONKIE is , then take this opportunity to get to know a platform that deserves the attention of all digital marketing professionals .
Before moving on, I would like to emphasize that João Pedro Cortinhas ' friendliness, availability and dedication were essential for this interview to be carried out, which greatly honors our Digital Strategy Blog .
SWONKIE INTERVIEW – JOAO PEDRO CORTINHAS
Gonçalo Sousa (GS): How and when was SWONKIE born?
João Pedro Cortinhas (JPC): It was never part of my plans. I never thought about having my own business. I never thought about being an entrepreneur. My plans were to work for a big company for the rest of my life, and I was fine with that. I gave my all, I worked hard and maybe that's why I acquired the skills of an entrepreneur. I took on the projects as my own and managed them as if they were my own.
I didn't become an entrepreneur of my own free will, it wasn't a deliberate decision. When in 2014 I decided to leave the company where I imagined myself spending the rest of my life, as a personal decision – I was going to get married and move to England with my wife who was already working there – the plan was to go to England and get a job in a company and start my career again for someone else. That was the plan.
What changed? I was 28 years old and I felt like I was at my peak working capacity. I had learned a lot – on my last day of work I left the office at 4:45 in the morning because I wanted to leave everything in order, and I even went back to the company for a week for free to accompany the person who was going to replace me – and that made me feel good. On my honeymoon I took a book to read on the plane during the long flights we had ahead of us. A book would fit nicely in my suitcase, and the only book I had was a book given to me by the CEO of the company I had left after an internal ideas program I had participated in about the history of Facebook.
It was a game changer because it started to awaken in me the best and worst question you can have in your professional life. The question is: What if? What if I do it? What if it goes wrong? What if it goes right? This is where the turning point begins, this is where your plans go down the drain, this is where the magic starts to happen, whatever it may be. When you make the decision to get involved, things start to happen.
I knew I wanted to do something, but I didn't know what, so I decided to take a gap year to try different things. My first idea was to go to Google and search for how to make money from home.
