About Paolo
I'm Paolo. I've been the technical authority on other people's platforms and the founder of my own product, and the second one taught me more about the first than I expected. I work from Amsterdam.
The story I keep telling, in full
When Flushiest launched I genuinely believed the hard part was over. I'd built it, it worked, and people needed it — that felt like the whole job. It was maybe half.
The flyers are the part I tell on myself. I had a print run made, on the assumption that handing them out on a street in Amsterdam was simply a thing one does. It isn't — there are real constraints on how and where you can distribute physical marketing material, they vary by municipality, and I learned that after the box was already in my hallway. It cost money I didn't have to spare and, worse, it cost weeks of momentum at exactly the moment momentum mattered.
Flushiest did fine in the end. Four news outlets and radio picked it up on a marketing budget of effectively nothing. But that worked in spite of my preparation, not because of it, and I don't think I'd have learned anything if it hadn't nearly not worked first.
Why that turned into advisory work
Building has become dramatically easier and nothing downstream of it has. AI tooling means a competent person can put a real product into the world in a weekend, and increasingly people do — and then hit exactly the wall I hit, with no warning that it was there.
So that's the work: launch strategy, AI-use guidelines, and technical architecture advisory for teams who've already got something real and need someone who can move at their speed. Not a build service — Bona Agency is where things get built. This is judgment, on tap, for as long as you need it.
How I got here technically
Twice I've come in as CTO — at Vision ESG and at Rising Collective — and both times the job was to design a system from scratch and then own the calls nobody else wanted to own. What to cut from version one. Whether to build it or buy it. Whether to hand the implementation off or hold the code myself.
I still write the code. Not out of sentimentality — an architect who never touches the build stops finding out which of their decisions were wrong, and I'd rather keep finding out.
How I work
Directly, and fast. No six-week onboarding, no proposal deck, no packages to choose from. A first conversation is a conversation: you tell me what's going on and I tell you honestly whether I'm the right person for it. Sometimes the honest answer is no, and saying so early is most of the value.