Meet Gabriel
I’m Gabriel Sgroi and I am the Founder of Bookmarker. With our tool, you can efficiently manage, find, and collect links across different platforms, maintaining your internet activity accessible and organized from anywhere.
He accepted SaaSPirate request to an interview on SaaS industry and his role in Bookmarker company. We were privileged to have the chance to got the sort of in-depth discussion you will not find on the internet.
Without any further ado, let’s hear what he has to say!
Hi Gabriel, can you tell us about yourself and your professional background?
Hey, sure I live and work in Germany, I study business informatics in Stuttgart since, my specializations are database architecture, most projects I worked on in the past were individual business solutions like QM and logistic solutions or warehouse systems.
Tell us about Bookmarker and how it impacts your customers?
It improves the way of navigating in the internet, by collecting bookmarks in one place, give the user the freedom to be independent of a browser or system. It is easily possible to switch to another browser and platform and helps to spend less time by managing or searching for bookmarks, I think it gives our users a high benefit in daily live, I use it everyday and I can see most users are active users too. With Bookmarker, your entire personal Internet world is just a click away.
What advice would you provide to first-time SaaS Founders?
The best advice I can give is to work in a team, when you work in a team everything becomes more dynamic, you get different perspectives and you find solutions as a team. Thinking you can do it all alone is a bad decision, it just takes more time and you run the risk of getting lost in the details.
Your expertise primarily resides in database architecture. How does it help in your product development?
Database architecture is the foundation of any IT solution. Understanding the foundation of software gives you the ability to build strong systems that run fast and make them secure, it is also the part where everything comes together. It helps you to build more stable products, especially if you work with a lot of data.
Your X profile reads, Previously @Apple – Building shortkey.org. Can you tell us more about it?
I worked at Apple before my study time as an IT Specialist, it was one of my best experiences, the way Apple is structured and the interaction with the people changed my mindset a lot, it starts with the feedback philosophy, the way they communicate and the ability to never stop learning, all these attributes are now part of my daily life.
Shortkey is a small project I am working on in my spare time. The main idea was to generate results based on keywords that runs on its own natural language process, after a while get launched ChatGPT, it worked multiple times better then my model so I stopped working on it, I turned back into a simple web launcher that allow based on keywords to open pages or search in external pages by modifying the URL. I planned to integrate Google Gemini, which will be much more powerful and accessible to most users, but that is not in my focus at the moment.
Bookmarking software is a crowded landscape. What gap did you view in the marketplace that led you to found Bookmarker?
Many bookmark managers are overloaded with features like notes. All I was looking for was a simple bookmark manager that was minimalistic and offered the basic functions in a simple way.
The most advanced feature of Bookmarker is the ability to use it in all screen sizes, this is the missing bookmark manager that I missed on a mobile device without an app request. The feature I like the most is that you can start typing whoever you are and get the results, and you can launch the app instantly without searching all the subfolders.
And another important feature is the archive, it allows you to hide bookmarks that you do not need every day, but need them when you want to search for them, this allows you to always focus only on the links that are most important to you. Being focused is one of my personal attributes, I think it is for many other people too.
In your view, why do most SaaS startups fail?
I think anyone can build the worlds best bookmark manager or the best tagged site, you can offer the best price, the best service and the most advanced features. If you are not able to promote your SaaS, you will fail, in other words, you can have the most terrible product on the market, charge the highest price and the lowest performance, if you are able to promote your product, you run your SaaS.
Tell us about the podcasts you’d recommend or books you’ve been reading or any people you admire in the SaaS space?
I think Blue Ocean Strategy is a really good book that everyone should read before starting a startup, it shows many case studies of successful companies and makes you think in a different way.
My biggest inspiration is Steve Jobs, this is for me the most genius CEO, I think Jobs also has some bad sides, but the talk of Steve Jobs at Stanford University is brilliant.
My absolute favorite podcast is a German podcast “Kampf der Untenrehmen” it always compares two companies like Red Bull vs Monster or Starbucks vs Dunkin it gives some background stories it is extremely interesting to learn from other companies.
Any avoidable errors you’ve made as a SaaS Founder early on?
I think it is often a process of trial and error, of course there are a lot of mistakes that are made, but you can only grow by making the mistakes.
I think it is smarter to try to make mistakes as fast as possible than to try to make no mistakes.
Did you enjoy our interview? Anything else you would love to talk about via this interview?
YES I enjoy it a lot, it is interesting to rethink your own thoughts, I often read and listen to interviews, it is a fun way to be this time on the opposite side. A suggestion for someone who wants to be an entrepreneur: never try to offer a service that has no demand.
