The Zing-Zing saga (episode 1): the accidental start up…

Joshua is the founder and manager of the Zing Zing Chinese takeaway restaurant which has two outlets in London. A self-taught entrepreneur with a curious mind, he brilliantly oversees all of Zing Zing’s communication on the social networks, and has managed to build up a community of fans and loyal customers.

Having made it to the restaurant world quite by accident (or maybe its was his calling?), we wanted to let Joshua tell us his story via a series of short episodes, from his beginnings as an arts student through to his present-day status as a restaurant entrepreneur and manager.

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My first thoughts about starting a business were completely accidental.

It was the end of a drunken night at university and we were desperate for a terrible, cheap pizza. Unfortunately we only had three paper menus and all three of these restaurants were closed. Despite a long and frustrating search both online and offline, we were out of luck. We went to bed hungry (and still quite drunk).  This wasn’t before we had asked ourselves several times, why wasn’t there a website that listed the details and menus of all the local takeaways?? Our idea was borne out of frustration, hunger and alcohol.

This was back in 2007. We were two university students studying English literature who didn’t have a clue how to start a business, not much money to our name and no idea how to build a website.

The first task was to decide on a name and brand. From the name we wanted something simple and fun that hinted upon what we did. We settled on ‘eatstudent.com‘, despite its slight reference to cannabalism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

We also decided that all our copy would be humorous, with lots of racy jokes to catch the attention of our audience. We also decided that our colour would be ‘green’ because most other food companies used red and we wanted to be different.

The next task was to talk to the takeaways themselves to see if there was any interest. Despite being kicked out of the first few places we tried, we soon found that not only was there a lot of interest, but these takeaways were hugely competitive towards one another and had a budget to target students. We soon realised that we could sell slots on. The website for very decent amounts of money – between £700 and £1000 each. Not bad money for a couple of students! After two weeks we had signed up 10 restaurants and actually needed to build a website.

By selling to the restaurants first, it really helped us from a cash flow perspective – the business was able to fund itself. We approached a good friend who was slightly more technical minded than us (although still no web developer) and offered him £100 to build the website for us. He learnt some basic code and managed to get it finished within two weeks. It looked terrible. It looked like two students had paid another student £100 to build it. But on the positive side, it was very easy to use. No frills, just a very user friendly, simple interface that allowed people to find the takeaway menu of their choice in two clicks.

We had the website, we had the takeaways, now we had to tell people about it. We got a few hundred humorous flyers printed and started handing them out around the campus.

We also set up a stall on campus and gave out free pizza. That got people talking.

Finally quite a few of our friends had started signing up to this brand new and exciting website called ‘Facebook’. At this time people wanted to join as many Facebook groups as possible, so we set up an Eatstudent group that got close to 1000 people joining within a few weeks. Word of mouth started to spread across the university campus, quickly, and we soon had a few thousand regular users. Eatstudent.com was up and running.