Economics student Joseph Petty is the founder of start-up business Znaplink which helps content creators build and promote their online brands.
Znaplink was recently awarded funding from the university to help grow the business and so we caught up with Joseph to find out more.
brands. It allows users to build ‘mini websites’, collect email addresses,
send newsletters and sell digital products. We have gained over 50,000
users and over 200 monthly paying customers. We aim to continue to add
tools for creators and become the market leader in the creator economy.
After growing an Instagram
account to 160k followers, myself and my co-founder experienced the struggles
that content creators face when trying to create a website, set-up email
marketing, sell products and more. We decided that there should be one tool
that can do all of this and it should be easy to use. That way content creators
can spend their time doing what the do best: create content.
I got some help with the university and attended a four week start-up programme and took advice from the start-up advisors there.
aspects of running your own business?
Deciding what to prioritise
your time on and having the freedom to do this is one of the best. The worst… I would say the time spent working on your idea. There is always a million things to do but only a finite amount of
time and energy.
Name one thing you wish you
knew before you started your business
How much I don’t know. At
every stage of growing a business road blocks are inevitable and things will go
wrong. Expecting this and knowing that there is a lot to learn helps to get
through.
takeaway from your experience
Everything feels daunting
and overwhelming at first. In reality, it’s more possible than you think. I
remember right at the beginning knowing that for the product to get built we’d
need a software developer.
I had absolutely no idea where to begin. What
criteria, where to find such a person, how much we should expect to pay and so
on. It can be so easy to get stuck up on all of these questions that you don’t
do anything. I found that just taking baby steps in the right direction would get
the ball rolling and before I knew it we had the entire platform built with
thousands of users.
You can get help, advice and even funding for your own idea.
Visit UoB B-Enterprising to find out more.
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With thanks to Joseph Petty
Introduced by Bob Lee