New ways of working
Riccardo Suardi prefers simplicity. A grey hoodie over a white shirt; a fuzzy, monochrome backdrop during a Zoom call. For his app and business Nibol, just a single click is needed to reserve a desk in an office, a co-working area, or workspace in a café or a restaurant. Yet there’s an aspect of him that seems to veer from the simple path; it’s the long, zigzag road he travelled to grow Nibol.
Riccardo Suardi. All images provided by Nibol
by Matthew Burgos
When Riccardo was working as a freelance designer in England, he would fire up his laptop at local coffee shops, soaking in the scent of espresso and the low chatter around him to ignite his creativity. When he returned to Milan, his native city, he thought he could do the same. Instead, he encountered little enthusiasm from some café owners. “Maybe they don't want you to open your laptop and work there, or stay too long to read a book or work on your projects. But I wanted, needed even, different spaces to work in, and I couldn't seem to find a place here. That’s how it all started,” he tells ALHAUS.
At first, Riccardo would save welcoming café spots on Google Maps and share them with his friends who were also looking for comfortable spaces to linger in. When he noticed this could be a new way of working and studying, he began to explore its possibility. He left his freelance job and traded it for something better. In 2018 he conceived his start-up Nibol, a spin on 'nibble'. “I just wanted to create what I couldn’t find. It’s that simple,” he says. From that straightforward idea, Riccardo has turned Nibol into a rising star of the co-working industry.
But he got off to a shaky start. When he and his friends launched the Nibol app and website in the summer of 2018 for freelancers and students in Milan, they didn’t get the great reception they were hoping for. “We realised that people leave Milan for the summer, so there weren’t a lot of students and freelancers in the city,” says Riccardo. “Looking back, I remember reading articles and listening to podcast episodes about business on how timing is essential. We learned that the hard way.”
A month later, people returned to Milan, and Riccardo and his team re-promoted the app and website. He was right about the timing. Nibol created a buzz and achieved its first success, two factors that nudged the founder to make it official and register as a legal business. “It was just a personal product in 2018, so we weren’t earning anything,” says Riccardo. By 2019, Nibol was operating full-time, but Riccardo and his team wanted to understand what his target market needed. Through focus group interviews, they learned that people used Nibol because they felt comfortable enough to stay in the café or restaurant to work or study without the managers or staff eyeing them every minute. “From then, that’s what we’ve always tried to retain: to allow everyone to work or study in their chosen place or space without worrying whether or not they’ll be asked to leave,” he says.
Later on, their business plan was geared towards funding. Since they couldn’t ask the students or freelancers to pay for their reservations, they turned to the business owners for small fees since “we’re bringing customers to them,” as Riccardo puts it. But he knew this shouldn’t be a long-term plan, so he hired people to join the team and help brainstorm ways to improve Nibol. In January 2020, they opted for fundraising to expand their offering and let the business owners off the hook from paying fees. They raised around €150,000 to jumpstart their new business strategies. Then Covid happened.
“It was a real problem,” says Riccardo. “I’d already hired people then. Imagine leaving your previous job just to be told you’ll be furloughed from your new job, one you haven’t even started yet. By then, Nibol couldn’t work the way it was supposed to. Its essence is to move people out of their offices and homes and into a laidback, cosy space, but it just wasn’t possible with the national lockdowns. We were hoping everything would get better in the following months, but it didn’t. We needed to rethink our plans again, so we tried to find another target market and landed on companies.”
Riccardo toyed with the idea of hybrid working, “an Airbnb for work”. From this concept, he tapped businesses and asked them how they were going to handle the return of employees to their offices with the lockdowns and restrictions in place. Companies didn’t know yet, but Riccardo did. He stepped in, introduced Nibol as a solution to let employees work flexibly, and landed on a goldmine. His premise stays the same: employees can work in a café, restaurant, and—this time—also in office spaces and co-working areas on Nibol.
Companies ate up Riccardo’s solution. By the first week of October 2020, he secured his first company contract. The following week, he closed a two-year deal with another firm. The third week, he reflected on how Nibol had to stay in business for at least two years. “Before, we were operating from paycheck to paycheck,” says Riccardo. “With this venture, everything changed. In the first few months of 2021, we raised around half a million euros for the business, grew our team, and increased our revenues. At the moment, we have around 10,000 employees using Nibol for work. We’re further developing our app where employees can not only book their preferred workspace and meeting rooms, but also reserve parking space, invite external visitors, receive packages from the place they’re working in, and scan Green Passes [Covid certificates].”
Nibol has some upcoming features in store for employees, freelancers, and students that Riccardo and his team are exploring. They’re integrating the branches of the companies they work with, so if a certain business has a branch abroad, users can also use Nibol to book their space in that city. “It doesn't matter where you work because Nibol allows you to book anywhere,” he says. They’re also in the phase of a credit-based Nibol where companies give credits—“for instance, €100 per month”—that employees can use to access all the services Nibol offers. “In this way, companies don’t have to stress out about their spending due to leasing properties. They can just let their employees choose where they want to work while still being able to track their whereabouts and check-ins through the app.”
Riccardo knows hybrid working isn’t revolutionary, but he’s coming forward as a steward of reinventing how and why it works. “At the moment, our branding and marketing strategies are focused on companies, but it doesn’t mean we’ll completely disregard our freelancers and students. It’s just that we don’t have the unlimited capacity to target all of our users simultaneously. In the first six months of 2022, we’re reinventing Nibol by finding a way to be a standard of flexible, hybrid working.” As part of Nibol’s storytelling, it has refined its website by adding a blog page to help clients better understand who they are and how the app works. Nibol shies away from paid advertisement and drifts towards organic storytelling. “We’re telling our stories as they are. We’re making them simpler and more accessible, a reflection of who we are and our purpose.”
It’s puzzling at first to learn that Riccardo Suardi prefers simplicity over complexity when for every success story he shares, it’s anything but simple. “I remember creating a Skype account in high school and in the status, I wrote life is simple if you want it to be. I always love simplicity and consider it essential, but we have to realise plans don’t always go this way,” he says. “I realised that simplicity comes after complexity.” Behind the ease clients feel in reserving their space at a café, restaurant, shared office, or co-working area, there’s Nibol—a simple app devised for the future of work, that untangles the cobwebs of complexities.