startupi

You know how things work in Brazil, in business, on the Internet, in interior parts of the nation, and in the minds of kids, right? You know where innovation comes from and how it follows and precedes changes in habits?

I don’t, thanks very much! I look at the big picture, sure, but I also try to keep an eye out for the overlooked things, something that might scale into a game changer.

Check out this kid who is just entering high school, who has studied programming since he was 10 years old, created products since he was 12, has real partners and has helped one of the most talked about crowdsourcing collectives in the country. He idolizes Steve Jobs (as do most geeks!), he admires Jonny Ken and Kaue Linden, he dreams of blogging for a big portal and he loves and recommends even his competitors’  services!

You’ve heard of NovosFollowers? It’s one of those scripts (which this teenager wrote) used to artificially grow your Twitter following (as opposed to growing it through more organic or “real” or “honest” engagement). The fact is, for example, a Brazilian was the first to offer a Twitter solution based on demand, before Twitter had even opened its API. (That was Dan Salles of Twitter Central, a different set of functionalities and a different innovative developer; he also did the first Brazilian Census via Twitter).

The innovation with NovosFollowers, which launched in November and relaunched with new features in January are: 1) it doesn’t require a Twitter login, but uses oAuth; and 2) it doesn’t merely follow the followers of other users who are in your list of followers, nor does it follow-back people who follow you (which makes you a big follower as well as a big followee).

I spoke to our 15 year old entrepreneur, João Pedro C. Motta at the home office of Zuugy Networks, located in Governador Valadares, Minas Gerais. He is the ex-owner of several Orkut communities for hackers (some with more than 1000 users) which he sold for anywhere from BR$100-1000; he is also blogger and administrator at WebDicas. We spoke via VOIP, and although I can’t say I completely understand how all this works, it involves databases, geolocation, and tracking user IPs (without storing them, though, to maintain privacy).

Not that the technical details matter so much for this post. I do not intend here to recommend this service, nor to investigate the nature of the forces and effects it has, much less review the business plan (which shows a certain savvy, as he charges more for commercial clients).

What I find most interesting is the history of all of this - something totally out of left field, in a nation with 200 million inhabitants. It’s a brainstorm that came to fruition. João (Official João, as he is known) has built on his experience building tools for Orkut, building a large base of users, readers and a captive audience.

“Lots of money is following you.”

The latest plaything João has built is also a money machine. It has 100,000 users, nearly all in Brazil (some 500 in Portugal and 3000 in the US). These users pay BR$100 (businesses pay thousands) for profile mining and in order to prevent spammy automatic messages like this one.

João wouldn’t confirm what he’s making but he’s doing well (doing some other sites and projects too) and he has two partners with money. They seem to be somewhere between FFF (”Friends, Family & Fools”) and angel investors (see this post and this one for more about investing strategies). There are fixed costs including dedicated servers and IPs and variable costs involving the development of a new project (which he told me about but asked me not to publish) plus there’s money and fuss amongst the competition in two sectors!

Details: at school and among his friends, few really know what João does. His family knows, but his parents only use email and Orkut, and his family are not involved in what he learns and does - with the exception of a cousin from Espirito Santo, 25 years old - who works in IT and “helps out, especially with Java.” Some parents would consider him a slacker, always sitting at the computer: “they thought I was playing games, and didn’t believe I could be a professional.” But he has not been influenced by games; nor much by the web, even, to the point of having done the design for NovosFollowers by himself.

“I saw people talking about Delphi, PHP, so I went to Google and downloaded scripts and manuals and taught myself,” says João Pedro. The first script he wrote was a Delphi script that searched data from Mega Sena; the second was a Delphi browser based on IE; the third was a web radio administrator he wrote in PHP. “Today if I need a WordPress plugin I just write it myself; if I need a server proxy, I write it.”

“My dream is one day to have a real name and respect on the web, to show everyone that independent of age you can really make something good,” he shared. “I think the role of youth in this new era of IT is really important, because youth are such a font of incessant creativity, they have such a guaranteed place in this sector. For me, the future is in the hands of the youth and they can make their name in business,” he continued.

Oh, and João also wants to be a journalist. He’ll be netter than I at explaining technical details, with a great deal more quantitative knowledge than the typical one in mass media. Same on the web - people deal with technology, digital media, entrepreneurship through the power of hype, excitement, fashion…sometimes without focusing on the fact that it’s entrepreneurship which is the most important theme.

I know our João is creative, innovative and a real entrepreneur. I want to see what he becomes when he grows up (without implying any lack of admiration for what he has already done). I want to see if there are more like him out there (if you know of someone, send me a tip at diego at startupi dot com dot br).

João took the liberty of testing NovosFollowers on Startupi. In 15 minutes we went from 2918 followers to 3523. 18 hours later some 200 (probably of this new 500) had stopped following.