Hybrida, Gabriele Franco’s Growth Agency for Marketing Solutions

Interview with Gabriele Franco, head of Growth & Founder by Hybrida, an innovative marketing solutions agency which consists of a team of young and promising professionals.

Today we have the pleasure of welcoming Gabriele Franco – head of Growth & Founder by Hybrida – in our virtual lounge. Hybrida is a growth agency based in Rome that specializes in the promotion of e-commerce selling potential, thus creating the “growth agency” trademark.

Hybrida started just 4 years ago, and it already gave its support to lots of globally known brands, apart from managing growth plans at an institutional level in Italy. Hybrida’s course of action can be summarized in two main hemispheres: the Growth and Growth Hacking Program, and the Hybrida PMF Program. The first aspect consists in Hybrida helping businesses and start-up companies by increasing the number of sales and leads, increasing average cart value, reducing advertising costs and improve marginality. The second big sector is involved with activities aimed at helping people develop their ideas. In fact, thanks to Hybrida’s PMF Program you’ll have the chance of gathering a Development Team around you that will offer in-depth explanations about how to make an idea successful, how it can impact the market and how to create a product that people genuinely need.

Let’s hear more about it from Gabriele himself 🙂

Hi Gabriele, first of all, thank you for your time. Our first question has become a staple of these interviews: we always ask our guests to simply inform us about their projects. So, if you had to explain to our readers what Hybrida is, you’d say that…?

“I’d say that Hybrida is a company that offers growth departments to eCommerce and Saas businesses to increase their number of customers, their revenue or their number of leads. That would be the short answer, but, actually, we’re also busy building a scientific growth laboratory. We think that, thanks to our experiences, growth can be mapped and systematically achieved by using Galileo’s scientific method.

In short, we: observe a phenomenon, using data evidence to locate the problem, make hypothesis about what causes the problem, experiment in order to validate or not our hypothesis. 

We didn’t invent anything, we only applied a 500 years old methodology to our 20 years old digital company”.

And now, three questions at once! Who’s Gabriele? What does Hybrida occupy itself with? How did Hybrida come to mind?

“Gabriele was a young man who started working by selling trumpet mouthpieces on eBay. After thousands of product and sale experiments, he achieved some results, laid down the procedures necessary to get there, and he then sold his skills to someone else. Now, he’s created a full-blown company, where he has to manage a team of Marketer Scientists and Devs comprised of 9 people, who work every day to improve our customers’ key metrics”. 

We had the pleasure of noticing that Hybrida’s team has a young population ready to take on the world. What are your goals for the future? Do you have any expectations?

“Our job is pretty peculiar. Over the last 2 years, there has been an explosion of marketers in Italy, and this happened because there are no actual entry barriers. Truth is, our job is very hard, since we can’t control the results, but only some variables. I’ll explain this further. Construction workers can control the results of their work when they place one brick after another. Developers can control the results by writing the code themselves in its entirety. Marketers cannot control people’s behavior when purchasing products, so, marketers don’t directly impact the results. Their job will consist in: understanding people’s behavior, guiding people’s behavior to make them act just like marketers want them to.

This game involves an infinite amount of variables. And even though it might look extremely difficult at the start, after a while, if you managed to make the growth process systematic, this will become the greatest profitable business. All of this brings us back to our goal: we at Hybrida want to create Italy’s best performing Marketing and Growth team. Our progress is measured on the basis of our clients’ increased revenue thanks to our help. Once we’ll get the highest growth rates for our customers, compared to any other company in Italy, we’ll be able to say that we set our vision’s first true milestone”.

Can you help us understand better what “creating a product that people genuinely need” means for you?

“In many cases, people think that marketing is some sort of manipulation tactic, but, actually, what happens is basically coming up with a solution to a problem shared by many people. If we think of it like this, the act of marketing and the product (the solution to the problem) become one and the same. Therefore, our experimental method won’t be solely applied to communication channels, but also to the products we’re selling. By doing so, we’ll satisfy the users’ needs when we reach out to them, and we’ll improve our economic performance”.

You worked with very interesting international brands: is there a project in particular that you especially enjoyed?

“At the moment, we’re working alongside some well-known brands, such as Bialetti Perù, Flowe, Spedire.com, Glimmed and others I cannot mention here, and we’re selling products all around the world. We found out that what works best is not working with whoever has the greatest product, but working with other companies that, just like us, are ready to get their hands dirty by experimenting in every facet of their business to discover the best formula over time”.

Here’s a “chit-chat” style question: according to you, how is Italian marketing doing today?

“I think that the Italian marketing landscape is way too bound to tools, rather than methodology. There’s an overwhelming number of Facebook Ads or Google Ads experts, and this can lead to problematic situations: when you specialize in using a certain tool, you’ll try to solve every single funnel-related problem by using that same tool you’ve always known. I feel like two years from now the Italian landscape will change radically: the focus placed on Facebook Ads will be on analysis frameworks, the Facebook Advertiser will evolve into the current Social Media Manager, given the super low entry barrier.

Of course, companies won’t evaluate partners and consultants based on the activities where they’re needed, but based on the history of achieved results”.

As for the last question, let’s have fun with some trivia: why the name “Hybrida”?

“The name “Hybrida” was born during a pizza-based dinner at the office. We had to decide from lots of names written on sticky notes we put on the wall. None of those names appealed to us. Suddenly, on the TV, a commercial about a scientist making an experiment came up. That’s when the idea hit me: “If what we’re doing here every day is considered marketing and product ‘experiments’, hybrids are the result of such experiments”. On that basis, we chose our name, but also because our team itself, comprised of Full Stack Marketers and Developers, is a hybrid”.