From Third-Generation "Destined to Fail" to Building a Million-Euro Design Agency
Meet Giulio Michelon — founder of Belka!
Hey, it's Alex!
This week, I'm chatting with Giulio Michelon — founder of Belka, a bootstrapped Italian design agency that's grown to over €1 million in annual revenue. Giulio comes from a family of entrepreneurs but deliberately chose to start fresh rather than inherit the family mattress business, driven by the belief the "third generation destroys."
From selling photocopied newspapers in elementary school to landing clients through a casual Facebook message about train app design, Giulio's journey is refreshingly authentic and practical. He opens up about everything from his early pricing struggles to implementing EOS at a 13-person company, and why he puts "sorry mom but I will never finish this" on his LinkedIn education section.
Key insights from our conversation:
How a two-hour weekend project redesigning Italy's train app generated €1.5 million in revenue
Why values-based hiring beats skills-based hiring every time
The counterintuitive power of admitting your weaknesses publicly
If you've ever wondered what it takes to build a profitable agency while staying authentically yourself, this one's for you.
Dive in below!
Belka Quick Stats:
🤝 Business Model: Design & Development Agency (Digital Interfaces)
💰 Annual Revenue: ~€1M+ (2024)
📊 Profit Margin: ~20% (after founder salaries)
👥 Team Size: 13 people
⏳ Time In Business: 10 years
💸 Funding: Bootstrapped, always profitable
📍 Location: Northeast Italy
🎯 Target Market: Italian B2B SaaS companies needing interface help
Growing up entrepreneurial but choosing a different path...
I was born and raised in a family of entrepreneurs…
I'm from this northeastern part of Italy where basically everybody's dad has a company – it's almost meme worthy. My granddad started a mattress company which is not related to what I do today, but I always saw my dad and my family working in this mom and pop business where they were making mattresses.
Two things I was sure about: I didn't care about mattresses and I really liked video games.
So there was this kind of conflict between video games and "you should help with mattresses." I was like no, there is Metal Gear Solid. This is serious stuff. laughs
Fast forward, I'm going to college…
I picked computer science instead of economics and ended up meeting this professor who at some point said, "Look, I have contacts with Silicon Valley, so whoever wants to chat about that, you just have to ask."
Out of 160 people, I was the only one asking apparently.
Three weeks later I was living in Sunnyvale and interning for a startup in Silicon Valley…
The Silicon Valley awakening...
The idea that people have of Italy – you think fashion, you think dolce vita, you think traditional environment, right? And food. Very good food.
I was completely stunned by Silicon Valley — I had read about it, but it’s one thing to read about it and another seeing the Google campus is as big as your hometown.
I participated in Startup School Y Combinator event…
I met Paul Graham…
I met one of Facebook's co-founders out of luck.
When I came back home, I could see how big the tech industry was, and that this stuff is happening and it's bigger than we expected back home.
Another thing that didn't make me go through with the family business is that I am third generation… I always heard the saying, “first generation builds, second generation expands, third generation destroys.”
So I thought, why bother? This is not going to end well. laughs
I need to restart the cycle.
So I said, "Fuck that. I'm starting from scratch."
I made myself the first generation.
Landing those first clients and finding recurring revenue...
I think the first job was some kind of software tool to evaluate geological risks.
I absolutely have no idea how much we charged for that – maybe €2,000, maybe even less. It took some weeks of work and it was a contact that came from my now co-founder Luca.
What I remember is that we put a lot of effort and care on the interface. It was very pretty and very usable with sliders and other things that weren’t trivial to do back in the day.
But the first REALLY big client that was out of our family network and lasted some years was Carlo Gavazzi Automation.
All agencies have two kinds of customers – the first are projects where you do one or two projects then it’s over. Then there's what we personally called ‘the gorilla client’ that averages between 30 and 40% of the company’s overall revenues.
Carlo Gavazzi was our gorilla…
We worked with them for two or three years, maybe four and averaged like €100k-150k per year.
Once we had that little bit of recurring revenue, everything became easier.
Authenticity as a business strategy...
My university degree on LinkedIn says "sorry mom but I will never finish this."
I made note of that because it’s obvious so many people are trying to be super polished and perfect online, but it comes across so inauthentic.
And it started because my mom really asked "Why are you not finishing your degree?"
Not finishing school is not as tragic as it might be in North America because we don't pay crazy tuition fees, but still she was worried. At the beginning I was actually very scared about that, but after a while I was like, "Mom, I'm hiring people with degrees, so you can hire that expertise when you need it."
But regarding authenticity, I think it's actually very counterintuitive, but I think it's a sign of strength.
Those truths are things that haunted me in the past. I felt insecure about that. One time, my own university asked me to come to orientation day as a special guest, and I was like, "Guys, are you serious about this? I never even finished."
They were like, "Yeah, but we like what you're doing, so just come."
After a while, I started thinking: first, nobody really cares. I'm not a surgeon, so this is not the field where you need that. And I'm not operating as a developer as well – that's not my skill.
I actually think that making peace with the imperfection in the past and talking about that is a great sign of strength. I prefer to convey the story in the way I felt about it and not try to cover it up or sugar coat it, because I feel that comes across as very obvious as a sign of insecurity.
During my twenties I was trying to prove myself right, and if I couldn't live up to expectations that someone else set for me, I wasn't valuable – which is bullshit.
Recognizing the parts of my past that used to make me feel insecure and making peace with them is just the way to go.
And also I like to make jokes. So I felt that was a great punchline. laughs
Content as the ultimate client magnet...
Our biggest customer after Carlo Gavazzi Automation was this startup called Fatture in Cloud, which is literally "invoices in the cloud." They have half a million customers – they're like a €40 million operation.
I met Daniele, the founder, through an article that I wrote about how I would redesign the national train app. I sent it to him on Facebook to ask for feedback like, "What do you think about that?" Six months later, he was like, "Look, we're redesigning our app. We're not as bad as the National Train Station, but we might need help."
I'm sure I sent this article to a lot of different people, but I had faith in my good luck and skill that the right person would resonate with this kind of content, and I ended up hitting the right person.
That article – I think it's now worth €1.5 million in revenue, so I think it's the most valuable two hours of my life, money-wise. It was just a couple hours on a Sunday, me redesigning an app with wireframes, very high level, and putting it on the internet.
Later, we had more strategic success with design systems.
Luca noticed that design system work was going very well in the market. We ended up investing time and energy in building a report about how all the companies in Italy were implementing these systems – what were the good, the bad, and the ugly.
This was probably our best marketing effort since the train article.
We asked ourselves: how do we position ourselves as a leader in a niche, which is design systems for Italian companies?
The niche is small enough to beat every other existing competition.
We needed to produce content, and to produce content we needed to have insights.
So this was a quarter-long initiative…
We interviewed all these people, produced six or seven different articles, webinars, interviews to other companies, and this paid off.
Those are the projects where we have the highest gross margin – I think probably 50% more than just generic digital product implementation. We won business against the big dogs like Accenture, and not because we competed against them in an RFP.
The clients just asked us, "Look, we want to work with you directly."
So now we are a 13-person operation working with national banks.
Building systems without drowning in bureaucracy...
We use this framework called EOS – Entrepreneurial Operating System. We've been implementing that for a couple of years. At the beginning I had the same sensations like, "This is too much work. We're going to drown in bureaucracy."
But the most interesting part is not in adding bureaucracy but in what I ended up removing. The good thing about EOS is that it forces the owner to make firm decisions. You can't try to follow 10 different things at a time, so it forced me to decide, and it's very repetitive in making decisions and making clarity.
The other thing that unlocked my brain: vision, 10-year plans, three-year plans always looked dumb to me.
Like why can't you just adapt through the way?
I was talking with Peldi, the founder of Balsamiq, and he told me something very simple: “You write the vision to give a direction but you can still change it every year. So it's like writing on ice.”
That clicked something in my head because I was like, "Why should I write a vision if I know that it won't be true?" And he was like, "Just to share your thinking so people can see what you're thinking, and then you change your thinking with new information that you gathered through the next quarter or year."
I was like, "Oh, so the issue was that you can't understand what I'm thinking. That's very embarrassing. Let's write that down."
We have quarterly meetings, weekly appointments called L10s with scorecards and issue resolving, and weekly town halls where we review the goals of the year.
It's more work than it looks, but it's necessary work.
The partnership evolution and knowing your zone of genius...
Luca, my business partner, at some point before EOS and building some of our systems was like, "I don't want to do this anymore. I am very tired. I don't like this."
So he started implementing EOS. That’s ultimately how we came to the decision.
Honestly, we aren't always the best at communicating between the two of us – it's really hard having a partner in life and in business.
Sometimes I just listen to Luca and surrender, like, "You look so convinced that I'm not going to battle through this." Operations – Luca is very deep in vision and knows how the company works better than me.
We are hiring a general manager, so I can concentrate on meeting people, gathering insights, understanding what is going on in companies and teaching the story.
We both tried the role and Luca really didn't like it – he was like, "I hate that managing is my sole job. I like building stuff."
To me it was like, "I hate that managing people is my sole job. I like telling stories and listening to stories."
We ended up being very tired – both of us.
Accepting that I'm very good at things at my own company hasn't been easy to be honest. I felt a little bit uneasy at the beginning talking about these things with Luca, especially as the founder of the company.
Values-first hiring in a small but growing team...
We go through a very diligent four-step interview where the first steps focus on values and the final steps focus on skills. Our values are very clear to the team. We keep insisting on them, showing examples of when the values are applied and when they're not.
I think that the real deal breakers are values.
I couldn't imagine myself telling this 10 years ago.
I was like, "Yeah, this mumbo jumbo guru stuff, values and hippies and whatever. We need to do business." But now I just discovered that good employees share probably like 99% values and then you need the skills to actually do the work.
You can teach skills but you can’t easily teach someone to bring that sense of magic to their work. Magic is my favorite value because it's something unique each person brings to the team – it's like your zone of genius. You can use that to make things incredible because that's your unique skill.
We ask questions to test how they behaved in the past, because past behavior is reliable data while everything else is just speculation.
For example, "What is an opinion you changed?" – those are classic HR questions.
The worst answer I can get is "I never change an opinion." I'm like, "Good luck with that."b
The future vision: from execution to insights...
There are a couple of things that I don't want to be true in the future.
The first thing is to be in the domestic market.
We've worked with some companies outside of Italy, but we’re not an international company.
This makes us very fragile – we are heavily linked to the domestic economy.
The other thing I don't want is to be linked to execution as much as we are today. We started as an agency that helped you design and develop interfaces. We were very strong in execution, very early on a lot of technologies – React Native, Figma. We are teaching Figma to other companies migrating to new technologies.
I think this part won't be what will help us going forward, both because there are technology constraints that will make it not very interesting – namely the AI changes that are going to happen. That will make the execution of projects less valuable, unless you're working on highly technical stuff.
Web development has been in the market for a while.
I don't think there's a lot of stuff that's really hard to execute.
If you have to build a new Figma, that may be more complex, but if you need to do the next ‘invoices in the cloud’ software, I think you probably can have AI code in two to three years.
Where I want to go is deeper on research, insights, and being an information business basically. Having a depth of understanding in the field of digital products that is deeper than everyone else – that's where I want to invest.
One thing we notice is that when companies can't communicate through their product interface, ironically the issues are in the communication of the company itself. The issue most of the time is that internal communication is as messy as external communication. The accountability chart is messy, the rituals to keep everyone aligned are missing.
When we interviewed 30 tech companies in Italy, we learned that the issues were not skill-based. The big elephant in the room was "I give my design to the developers and they don't understand shit." Spoiler: you're not including your developers in the design process, and that's why they are confused and pushing back.
You can't communicate to your customers, you can't communicate to yourself – it must feel very painful.
These are the next 10 years of Belka.
Some things are already happening – one is the podcast I'm running. I interviewed Andrew Wilkinson as the first one out of Italy.
The plan is building content and building insight into the real issues of digital products and specifically interfaces.
Becoming the ‘CEO morning routine meme’fix ...
Three or four years ago I was going through a very bad breakup – the worst breakup of my life. I ended up crying for a couple of weeks on the floor, and this is not a metaphor…
It's not hyperbole.
This is what happened.
Luca was calling me like, "Where the f* are you? What is going on?"
I was like, "I'm so sad. I just can't work. I'm sorry."
I was angry because I hadn't seen it coming. I just crumbled.
I ended up telling myself: I need to understand how to first not make this happen again, and how to be happy again because I was probably depressed. I started tracking everything about my health. I discovered I wasn’t very good at understanding my own body – my head is very disconnected from my body.
Ironic given the fact that my family was producing mattresses, but I've been having trouble with my sleep. I've been sleeping five, six hours after a life of eight hours of sleep. I downloaded this app called Rise to help figure out how I should sleep.
So heart rate variability, resting heart rate, how much I sleep, my diet, understanding my body composition – all these things to understand how to feel good. I ended up living like an athlete monk – I stopped drinking alcohol, I stopped drinking caffeine, I'm currently waking up at 5:30 because birds are singing.
I ended up doing the same things that CEO motivational stories on YouTube suggest, but out of empirical tests. Like the caffeine – I stopped taking that two or three weeks ago. I really like coffee, but my resting heart rate wouldn't go down. I was drinking one coffee per day and I was like, "I need to cut that."
I'm becoming one of those CEO morning routine guys, just trying to be happy.
Maybe YouTube gurus figured something out that I was just skeptical about. laughs
That’s it for this issue!
Please feel free to subscribe, or reply directly to share your feedback on what you’d like to hear more about for future issues!
If you, or someone you know would like to be featured, or just want to connect, feel free to message me on LinkedIn, or, if you’re building a business of your own and need some support, we should chat!
There's something about entrepreneurship, and wanting to build your own thing, that just can't be shaken out of you.