Kit#2 Federico Andrioli

First name: Federico
Last name: Andrioli
Country: Italy
Occupation: Digital marketer, developer, teacher and entrepreneur

Where to find Federico online:

Federico, what do you do?

I’m a developer turned digital marketer and sometimes I also teach (got the teaching genes from my parents). I’m Jesper‘s business partner and RocketKit co-founder.

What is your background?

Since I was a kid I’ve always had a huge passion for everything computer related. I taught myself how to develop websites around 1996, ages ago, after falling in love with the internet thanks to a friend who showed me how a 33.6 kbit/s modem worked.

In 2006 I co-founded my own web design studio and, after 6 years of learning how to be an entrepreneur (often by failing a lot), I felt ready for a new chapter. So in 2012 I left that company eager to explore the newborn italian startup ecosystem.

Having met a brilliant software engineer, Tobia, I joined him in trying to turn his app idea, WeOrder, into a real startup business. In 2015 WeOrder got funded by two danish entrepreneurs so Tobia and I moved to Denmark where I got to meet some very smart folks. Jesper was one of them.

In 2016 WeOrder got eventually acquired by a Norwegian company and we all moved on to other challenges. I came back to Italy but Jesper and I kept working together over Slack on several MVPs until RocketKit was born :)

Your favorite tools to help you with your work?

It’s the first browser tab that I open in the morning. It’s my go to place to create (together with Google Docs), store and manage all my documents. It’s reliable and great when I’m on the go. The best cloud alternative to a computer with an office suite installed.

I use the Slack desktop app on a daily basis to manage all the work with my clients. It’s probably the best solution to coordinate remote teams. I particularly love its super fast search engine and the ability to create a direct web link to each post, very handy when you want to share a specific post outside the app.

Well, there’s not that much to say, I couldn’t really function without Google Calendar reminding me of appointments, meetings, birthdays and deadlines. I use it to sync all my calendars between my desktop and mobile devices.

Freedom is probably one of the most effective productivity enhancement tools I use. When I want to get in the zone for a few hours I start a session and whenever I try to check one of my social accounts (or a website in my “distracting list”), I see a nice white butterfly over a green background instead. After a while you just stop caring about all those distracting tabs. It really keeps you in the zone!

There are so many interesting web technologies these days, but I’m a WordPress developer at heart. I use it for my clients and all my MVPs. RocketKit is also built on WordPress :)

My favorite hosting provider so far. Great customer support and great caching stack to make my WordPress websites run smooth and fast.

Gmail is my main email hub. I configured all my email addresses as different indentities on Gmail so I can organize and keep track of all the messages I get from one single main address.

Awesome activity tracker. It makes me aware of how I’m spending my time during the day, since I mostly work from home and I often risk to watch way too many youtube videos!

My VPN of choice when I’m travelling and I have to connect to public wifi hotspots. OVPN app is one of the easiest to configure and once connected is surprisingly fast.

It might seem strange but I consider Spotify one of my favorite work tools together with Freedom. I cannot really focus if I’m not listening to my music!

Your favorite tools on a personal level?

It’s the only app I use to stay in touch with friends and family.

I use Brave on my iPhone, instead of Safari or Chrome, because it’s very fast and it natively filters out most ads from all the websites you visit.

Probably the best cross platform (and open source) video player. I love it especially because it plays every possible video/audio format, so I don’t really have to care about downloading the right codec or using a different app.

I started posting on Instagram a few years ago as an exercise for creativity and to be able to pay more attention to my surroundings. Lately I’m not very active since I’m focusing on RocketKit and other projects, but I still like to follow a few cool artists and photographers.

I’ve never been very active on Twitter, but I recently started using it regularly because of it’s big crypto community. I scroll my feed on a daily basis trying to collects useful crypto insights between an endless stream of “to the moon!” tweets.

Your absolute favorite tool in one sentence?

So simple but so effective, a must have if you want to focus and stay in the zone.