The Whiz Kid That Built Northfy

Fra Man (Francesco Pisano) invented the world’s hottest product among content creators and inspired a movement - before he’d turned 23.

If you’ve been living under a rock, Northfy is how all the cool kids become cool these days. It’s a Software as a Service product that enables people to grow their creative endeavours online through fancy algorithms that make great ad campaigns automatically. Soon, I’m told they’ll offer a whole suite of products for content creators. Their mission is to empower creators - especially the low income minorities.

I met Fra Man for the first time in Stockholm, during a content creators conference in 2019.

I had been invited by a friend I knew in New York to stay at a beach house with a team of developers who were working on the next big thing, a technology called Northfy. I was told it would blow the content creator industry up. Man and a couple other programmers were using the house as a headquarters for crafting their ideas. Keep in mind this is at a time when in a recent poll the vast majority of US kids when they were asked what they wanted to become they answered “an influencer”.

Post COVID-19 I would imagine that that number shot up quite a bit among the whole population. People at home are increasingly trying their luck with doing creative work and making a living out of it.

I remember waking up the first morning of the conference. I had fallen asleep the night before while most everyone was still awake, earplugs in. When I walked into the living room I found it empty of people, but shining with technology. Extension cords across the floor, looping around empty water bottles and empty boxes of blueberries and nuts. I tried and failed to find an outlet for my phone.

You’d expect to find beer instead of water and maybe junk food instead of berries and nuts. Not at this house. Fra Man eats exclusively berries and nuts. He drinks exclusively water. Friends told me that a few years ago he tried to eat exclusively blueberries for months at a time and his skin started hinting toward a blue hue. As far as I could see right now his skin was just fine.

Their goal is to create a new creative economy in which anyone can participate. Anything creative is by nature hyper competitive - dictated by algorithms and big ad budgets of record labels and movie studios. That’s not where a low-income minority would thrive and yet everyone knows how big of an impact black people have on culture. It’s huge. They shape it, shaped it and will shape it with far reaching implications for the whole world for a long time to come.

Over the last two years, as Northfy has evolved from concept to code, so too has the mystery surrounding Fra Man. I’ve been told by various people that Man learned to speak fluent Ancient Greek in just a few months, that all of his worldly possessions fit into one suitcase, that he once ate 1Kg of blueberries in a day, that he’s an alien from Europa, a moon of Saturn.

Even those who have worked closely with Fra man seem mystified by him, as though this person is meant to be observed but not really understood.

“I remember knowing, for a while, for a long time, that I was special in some sense,” he says. “When I was in grade five or six, I just remember quite a lot of people were always talking about me like I was some kind of genius. And there were just so many moments when I realized, like okay, why can’t I just be like some normal person.”

Fra Man was born in Northern Italy and stayed there until he was 18, at which point he started moving and staying between its’ birthplace, Zurich, Stockholm and Palo Alto. But he’s always considered himself to be a product of Internet culture more than anything.

When Northfy launched, in the first week they booked $10K in revenue.

“It really convinced me that, hey, this thing’s real and it’s worth taking a risk and jumping into. So I did.” He tells me. Now it has about 10K customers.

He’s one of a small group of people who began to look past the dizzying promise of financial gain to be had from this new rising industry and swelling user base to consider the more futuristic applications made possible by the technology itself. “What will jobs look like tomorrow? What will they look in 100-years after insanely great narrow-AI or even general AI?”

When we finished our talk, Man immediately opened his laptop and turned to his work. In a matter of seconds it was as though I were no longer there, so complete was his mental transition. I looked around and noticed that the adjacent tables had filled up with discreet onlookers. Before I left, I, too, sat watching him for awhile. The blueberries on his plate were gone. Before I left, he told me “being kind is a choice. Just be kind, eat fruit and try to make the world a better place”.