Tractionboard.co is an Amsterdam-based startup that recently announced that it has closed a major pre-seed funding round and has been selected by the international accelerator program Techstars.

We interviewed his Growth Marketing Manager Andrea, one of our Alumni.

H-FARM College “catapulted” me towards a very innovative and international way of thinking and how things are done. The ecosystem created within and around the university gave me the opportunity to develop, in addition to my academic skills, also professional skills and soft skills that proved to be incredibly useful in the following years. I remember the emotions I felt when I walked between the greenhouse and the classrooms and how nice it was to be in a place free of distractions and so close to nature…In H-FARM, as student, but also as a man looking for his own life path, I had the opportunity to be constantly supported by the people of this ecosystem, by their reflections, professional ideas and experiences. I remember in particular a lunch with Professor Maurizio Massaro during which, together with one of my classmates, we talked about an idea we were developing and it was an incredible, compelling conversation with a flow of ideas and reflections on every aspect of the business. 

As Growth Marketing Manager I take care of all the aspects relating to growth, the acquisition and relationship of our customers. Tractionboard.co aims to help and support early stage founders in raising investments. Our priorities are our founders, we know firsthand the difficulties in finding and approaching investors and for this reason we have created a platform that will give the founders the opportunity to find the investors best suited to their needs, quickly and easily. The founders will have a list of investors based on their needs such as internships, geography of investors, ticket size and other filters that will help them navigate the complexity of fundraising. In this last month our subscribers have grown by 46% and we are about to launch our new free and accessible platform that already matters now a list of more than 33k VC investors and Angel Investors from all over the world.

The main soft skills I learned and mastered at H-FARM College are teamwork, critical thinking and time-management: they helped me a lot in navigating the world of work. Looking instead at hard skills, certainly the basics of business management, marketing and more innovative skills such as disruptive technologies and agile models.

Proactivity and speed of execution: these are the two variables that I would recommend to anyone who wants to work in a competitive field such as startups. Proactivity has the aim of never making you stand still and pushes you to research and understand your own market and customer needs. Speed ​​of execution is necessary in an area like this dynamic like that of startups, there is no time to do things calmly. Execution and speeds beat any well-developed plan.