GoodBarber celebrates its 10th anniversary!

The odyssey that led to GoodBarber starts in 2001 with the launch of WebzineMaker by Sebastien Simoni and his three associates at the time, Jérôme Pietri (the current COO), Philippe Chiappe, and Federi Bernardini, with the aim of making the creation and publication of blogs easier. This first step already highlights a desire to make the web more accessible and more fun in an innovative logic of personalization. Webzine will notably host the magazine Marianne between 2005 and 2010, which will count more than 6 million visitors per month.

The silhouette of GoodBarber begins to take shape little by little: if WebzineMaker already has the vocation to make the publication on the web open to all, without requiring training in programming, in a growing digital era; it is the democratization of smartphones with the appearance of the iPhone in 2007 that makes this problem evolve further. It is then the emergence of a new opportunity, of a second step, that of allowing users to publish apps directly on smartphones without going through a coding phase. Dominique Siacci, the current CTO of GoodBarber, seized this opportunity and launched DuoApps in 2009.  

The idea is there, the team and the premises too; in 2011 DuoApps and WebzineMaker join forces and officially launch GoodBarber, creator of mobile applications, in order to meet a growing demand and facilitate the use of new technologies to non-specialists. 

If  WebzineMaker and DuoApps only merge into a single entity under the name of GoodBarber in December 2018, GoodBarber has evolved during these years. Released in French and English in the early days, our interface will developed to include Italian, Spanish, German, Portuguese and Turkish between 2013 and 2015.

We celebrated our first million downloads in 2013, as well as our first participation in the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The concept is on the move, the users are on board, so GoodBarber opens to the international scene with the inauguration of offices in New York and Lisbon in 2016, synonymous with a certain success that will be confirmed in the years to come. Indeed, 30,000 mobile apps were published in the App Store and Google Play in 2017. The same year, GoodBarber established its international presence when the United States became its first market in terms of revenue, proving that insularity is not necessarily a barrier to development. The millions of downloads in 2018 affirm its journey, effectively crowned by the final merger of WebzineMaker and DuoApps. 

Until 2019, the GoodBarber tool was focused on publishing content applications, allowing the publication of articles, videos, photos, sounds in the format of a blog, with the addition of features such as chat to give the opportunity to create an active and engaged community. However, GoodBarber did not stop there, and unveiled that same year its new Shopping apps, in order to meet the needs of a society that is increasingly digitalizing the sales and trade sectors. 

In addition to GoodBarber, other projects were born during these 10 years, especially for the youth. In a logic of transmission of a passion for programming to the youngest generations, Roboticamp is launched. During these few years, nearly 500 young Corsican children from Ajaccio to Bastia, passing through Ghisonaccia, have been able to attend robotics and coding classes on Lego Mindstorms Ev3 robots. These robots and intuitive interfaces have made it possible to seduce a new generation, in the hope of further developing the island's technological sector. 

In addition to the youth, GoodBarber is actively involved in the development of the Corsican entrepreneurial ecosystem. At the end of 2015, Sébastien Simoni accepted the presidency of Femu Qui, the investment fund for Corsican companies since 1992. His goal is to foster the emergence in ten years of a resilient ecosystem with about twenty companies of a size comparable to GoodBarber, which work on export while being located in Corsica. Alzà, the brand new seed fund launched in 2021, is the perfect example of this desire to reach a critical mass of startups. In the same logic of creating an ecosystem, the CampusPlex, one of the first co-working spaces in France, was created in 2009. This space will host WebzineMaker, DuoApps (and other startups of the time), leading to a close collaboration between the two companies even before GoodBarber. Today, the CampusPlex houses mostly GoodBarber and a few digital companies, but there is a demand for more players to be grouped together in the same location. Thus, the construction of a new workspace, called CampusPlex 2.0 is underway. It was launched in the form of a call for projects aimed at young Corsican architects. The idea, true to GoodBarber's DNA, is to offer young architects an opportunity to express their talent on a large-scale project. CampusPlex 2.0, which is scheduled for delivery in 2023, will bring together a critical mass of actors involved in the development of the digital sector in Corsica on nearly 2,000m2 in the heart of Ajaccio.