Simone Scanu is an Italian developer and founder of the Formula Live Pulse application, which contains all the information of main interest to F1 fans. Here is the conversation we had with him.
FP: "Hi Simone, thanks for being here with us. Tell us a bit about your story and how we got to where we are today, to the point of creating the application itself, Formula Live Pulse".
SS: "Hello and thank you. So, my background: as a school I did accountancy, but I have always had a passion for technology, ever since I was a child. In my spare time, between the jobs I had when I was still living in Sardinia (now living in Berlin, ed), I studied independently. I first became a freelancer, I also wrote technology articles in my spare time, then I became both an editor and a developer. Later, as a web developer I started to study a bit more software engineering, again on my own. From there, I started working with different clients, and then the idea of the app was born, which came out of my passion for Formula 1: with my father we wouldn't miss a race. I still have memories of my father waking me up at dawn to watch the races in Australia or Suzuka. Being born in 1989, I didn't live through the Senna era, but I fully lived through the Schumacher era, I was a huge fan of his. The idea for the app also came from my girlfriend, who got very close to F1 thanks to me. She started asking me a lot of questions, some very simple, some very complicated, so it was sometimes difficult to answer without any data in hand. Seeing this possibility, I basically created my own dashboard, which we could use together, and then I thought that something like that could help a lot of other people like me, like her. From there, I slowly started to develop the app, its concept. In a couple of months, between one thing and another, I completed the first version. The community is responding well, we clearly also have the help of some collaborators, who are helping us to make the app known. The response has been very positive and we are now where we are, at a stage where we are developing a lot of additional functionality that, with all due respect, the Formula 1 app doesn't have".
FP: "We can say that most business, commercial ideas anyway, you know, come from solving a problem for people: you look for a slice of the audience, you think about what could improve the experience of this audience in general and you find the solution. Can you explain all the features packed into your app that improve the experience for fans?"
SS: "Yes, doing an investigation before developing the app, we realised that there are so many motorsport related apps: one just for news, one just for live timing, one for this and that. So I basically took a bit of everything and created an aggregator, plus of course there are also features that I'm not sure you can find in other apps, like telemetry and official FIA documents. I think Formula Live Pulse is the first one that provides this kind of data, this kind of information, and we don't want to stop there, because we already have ideas that we are testing anyway".
FP: "I want to ask you how you came up with the idea of the name Formula Live Pulse, which is a name that struck me right from the start".
SS: "Quite honestly, it came out of a mix of suggestions that came up thanks to GPT. I couldn't use the name Formula 1, as it is trademarked; so I put Formula, which is a generic word. Live Pulse because we give everything live, most of the data we give is live, so that's the concept".
FP: "Personally, I really like the concept of the Pulse, because it's really the pulse, right? So it's also kind of like having the formula in the blood, I interpreted it that way as well. How's the expansion going from an international point of view".
SS: "Yes, exactly. I honestly didn't expect such a positive response from the community, at least not in the short term. There has already been a big help from pages that have a lot of followers, as I told you. For now the biggest audience is in Italy, but the goal is to move, to be able to access markets where Formula 1 has been present for many years, or those where it is expanding today. We are talking about Europe, so the United Kingdom, Spain, France and Germany mainly, and then we aim to go overseas, like in Latin America, in Brazil, which clearly has a great history in motorsport, but also other Latin American countries, like Argentina - with many fans because of Colapinto - Mexico. Then clearly we have the United States, which thanks to Netflix is the biggest market now".
FP: "If you had to sum up in one 'catchphrase', why someone should download the app, what would you tell them?"
SS: "That's a good question. Why download the app? Because our goal is to give everyone all the information about Formula 1 and make it accessible to everyone, both people who are just getting into the sport and people who are also super passionate about it, in short, big Formula 1 fans. So the idea of the app is precisely this aggregator that is useful for both categories".
FP: "Basically, at whatever point in your experience with Formula 1 you are, Formula Live Pulse can help you understand it better, that's the concept".
SS: "Definitely yes. For example, we have the AI (Artificial Intelligence, ed) assistant, which you can ask anything about Formula 1, and it explains it to you. If you tell it to explain it to you as if you were a 5-year-old child, it explains it to you as if you were a 5-year-old child".
FP: "All this has clearly been possible thanks to the progress of technology in general, so I'm asking you: did you expect, when you started out as a programmer, that technology would develop so much, even so quickly, that it would lead you to do what you've done today?"
SS: "Honestly, no. So, when ChatGPT came in 2022, I was amazed. It arrived in November 2022, if I'm not mistaken, and I locked myself in my house: I spent Christmas and New Year locked in my house, because I was really fascinated by it. I embraced it immediately, because I think that when there is a paradigm shift, like there is now, the thing you can do is just embrace the new. I am the first to say that and I say that to a lot of people, otherwise you are out of the market, there is absolutely nothing you can do. There is little to criticise about artificial intelligence. I understand the many who say it is causing so many jobs to be lost, but how many are it creating? I'm always there: double standards, double measures, I'm never on the negative side. And then again, it's a technology that you want or you don't want, it's there, it's available to everyone, if you don't use it and if you don't embrace it you're out. Because businesses want it, companies want it: everybody wants a piece of it, so you have to put yourself out there".
FP: "Is there a message that you want to send to someone who maybe is more or less in your situation, an enthusiast who wants to embark on a path similar to yours, but is perhaps frightened, I imagine you too must have had doubts before creating this application: how do you overcome that phase of fear, of uncertainty, of taking the risk?"
SS: "My initial fear, I'll tell you very frankly, was that something like that already existed and I knew nothing about it. But that fear then went away, because I started to do a lot of research. My girlfriend helps me a lot with the whole bureaucratic management part, but I'm really focused on programming, I snub other things very easily. I think my idea came about simply because I wanted to follow two very very big passions that I have had since I was a child, namely technology and Formula 1. I got my first computer when I was six years old, and I used to watch races from a very young age, so to combine my passions was the best idea I have ever created. I have made things in the past though, but I never made them for me, for myself, I made them for clients: this I think is my first real project completely independently. My two passions are practically pushing me to do it and for now I can't complain at all".
FP: "Can we say that the strength of the passion, the drive of the passion and the desire to pass it on to so many people can compensate for the hard work behind it?"
SS: "Absolutely. Look, I don't hide it, I'm a very work-focused person, I work a lot. When I worked as an employee I always worked overtime, not because they asked me to, but precisely because I liked what I did. Now even more so, definitely. If I didn't sleep before, I sleep even less now, because clearly when something is yours, you feel it much more. Now, for example, there are ideas or things to solve, a certain problem within the app. There are things that maybe come to your mind at two in the morning when you're about to go to sleep. Then I have to get up and I have to go and write them down, write them down, because otherwise you fall asleep and forget everything. So that's my situation at the moment, but again, I'm super happy because it's going really well".
FP: "Speaking of sleep, out of curiosity, I'm curious to ask you how you spent a typical day of yours in the most agitated phases of creation, which I imagine are the ones that took the most time, the most effort".
SS: "So, little sleep, I must say. I slept very little, I think it was around four hours a night. There was a moment when I was racing against time, because when you want to publish an app, clearly you have to take into account the response from both Apple and Google. So the app has to be approved, and on Google's side there wasn't so much blocking, but on Apple's side there was quite a block at the beginning to even publish the first version of the app. Then the problem with Apple is that the engineers don't tell you exactly what the specific problem is, they just give you a copy and paste of their documentation. It also depends on the reviewer, but basically there's a rule, and if you interpret the rule one way, or rather, if the reviewer interprets it that way and it's bad for you, you're screwed: there's nothing you can do. If Apple says no, it's no. So there I was racing against time, and there I slept very little, because I was trying to make small changes, I was sending them back for review, then you have to wait for a reviewer to review the app and then he says yes or no. For every change, I was practically waiting almost a month for the answer. I was racing against time, because I wanted the app published by the end of January at the latest, ready for the tests in Bahrain. Tests that were then crucial, because it was the first time the app was receiving data. Of course I knew how they were transmitted, but I had that doubt ‘what if they changed something?’ For example, next year, with the new regulations, we don't know how the data will arrive, between active aerodynamics and so on. I won't hide from you that the goal, maybe one of the biggest goals we have, is to talk to Formula 1 and tell them ‘we have something great to offer’. Who knows in what future that will happen, but for now it's going really well as it is".
FP: "I'd say it's going well, Simone. Thank you for your time and good luck for the future".
SS: "Thank you, it's been a pleasure".
Main cover photo www.linkedin.com
