How a 57-year-old pizza maker who believed in hashtags reached 1M followers in 24 months.
What a neighborhood restaurant teaches AI founders about distribution: put the founder on camera, build formats, shoot in volume, let the data decide.
The starting point
Spaccanapoli is a 25-seat pizzeria in France run by Giovanni, a 57-year-old owner with a strong personality and a business that lived on word of mouth. The goal was explicit from day one: build enough attention to open a food franchise within two years.
The formats
We put the founder at the center. Humor, reactions, recipe tests, and the daily life of a small neighborhood pizzeria. Each format was a die: a fixed structure with a few faces, rolled again and again.
When a trend appeared, we answered the comments instead of copying other accounts. When a tasting video took off, we sorted hundreds of comments into three recurring questions and answered each with a new video.
The numbers
- 400+ videos edited between January 2024 and April 2026, up to 38 in a single month
- 50M views in the first 12 months, 50M+ views a month today
- +20k followers a month on average
- From 2k to 1M followers in 24 months, 1.6M today
- 100k to 200k views per video on average, most viewed video at 5.3M
- One franchise request a week, from France, Morocco, Algeria, Switzerland and Belgium
Watch the videos
The most viewed video, 5.3M views →
The full account on TikTok →
What it means for a SaaS or AI founder
A founder with a point of view, formats built around the way he talks, enough volume and a data loop that keeps the winners get distributed in any category, pizza or AI. You are building AI, in a market where everyone wants to understand what is changing. Your ideas have a bigger audience waiting than his did.