Interview with Giancarlo Erra, the CEO of Tweetify It [2023]

I’m Giancarlo Erra, and I have 20 years of experience as a creative entrepreneur, professional touring musician and software engineer. I’m involved in several projects and companies, but sometimes I need to put my hands in the nitty gritty, in particular when I have a problem and no one still thinks about a solution to it (or if there’s, then I think it’s not good enough). That’s why Tweetify.It was born.

As a non-native English speaker, making good short posts out of long content takes time and effort. I wanted a solution to make it so in a way that kept the original tone of the message, customisable every time, and very easy and intuitive to use (unlike many websites nowadays).

There are many aspects to that. AI is a big part, and that’s been through many iterations before arriving at its current form, and it’s a project that keeps improving all the time. Creating short posts from very long content keeping the context, topics and tones, can be challenging.

The other part is the scraping because AIs need to read the full website text. You need to extract it correctly and format it. 

Another big part where a lot of attention went was the customisation options; I wanted to give way to keep and choose the character of the post or modify it as needed.

Tweetify It was made to turn long-form content into short social posts, but there are no specific fields where it is more or less appropriate. It’s based on an LLM (Large Languade Model), so it can deal with pretty much every topic. As long as the original text or URL talks about something, Tweetify It can make a short, engaging and personaled post out of it!

Along with Tweetify It, I run other projects, and I’m aware I’m in a lucky position to do what I like most of the time when working, so my balance is quite positive. 

It’s inevitable that if you want to be an entrepreneur, or even more serial entrepreneur, it means your commitment to what you’re doing is total. You can do it only if you are ready to do that and it’s what you like. 

Many think it’s about getting rich or making money, but nothing is far from reality, particularly for startups.

When dealing with a new startup and project, the one thing you miss is time. And the one thing that social media needs is a lot of time! The main problem with social media for me is that social media needs constant attention, so I need to decide where to distribute my time.

Market competition it’s something you have to fight against all the time, and usually, one of the best tactics is to find your niche and push with it. That’s precisely what Tweetify It does. The good thing about AI is that prompt engineering is very creative and challenging to replicate, and the system around it even more.

Passion for what you do is essential for yourself and anyone working with you. There are many plates to keep spinning, stress, tight deadlines and growing lists of things to do, all while trying to keep pushing to get new users on the platform and support existing users. So a positive attitude and passion for what you do are essential.

The suggestions are the same for any entrepreneur: being ready for hard work without much money. It’s not for the money. It’s for the passion that you do what you do.

Also, the other common suggestion is to be sure your product is a solution to a real problem. And then be ready to do everything for a long time: from the creation to the marketing, from the support to marketing.

It’s the hardest work but most rewarding if you’re ready.

I’m already waiting for the investment to be ready for the next step: making Tweetify It a total social management platform using AI. At the same time, more immediately, I’m working to make API access for the service to be integrated into other platforms and then to release a browser extension version and a mobile app version (two of the most common requests).

In five years, I want to see Tweetify It being the most used solution for posting personalized short and effective posts starting from any form of long-form content.

But the users will indicate the best way forward and maybe even find ways and features I didn’t think about!