If you’re constantly missing your morning caffeine fix so you can make it to work on time, don’t worry – now there’s an app for that.
A new start-up has created Zamon, an app that lets consumers order coffee and food from connected cafés on the move and pick it up ready to go, with a location tracker telling the café their expected time of arrival.
“The idea came to me because I was sick of skipping breakfast. I would get the coffee, but skip the meal, and eventually ended up asking the café owner if I could text him to prepare a breakfast roll when I was 10 minutes away,” says Roshan Mahanama, creator of Zamon.
Zamon is Mahanama’s second start-up, and he’s determined to take it easier and enjoy the ride this time around, now that he knows what he’s doing.
Mahanama left a corporate career to launch his own business after growing tired of corporate culture.
“I’m terribly impatient, I hate people who say no, and I hate procrastination, and those are the three things that make up the corporate life. So my personality was a polar opposite to that,” he says.
Mahanama created Live Connected, an online mobile store, three years ago, and watched it grow from a business operating out of his home study into a company turning over $6 million a year.
After coming up with the idea for Zamon, he set to work creating the app in a few months.
Though it’s currently being trialled in cafés around Surry Hills, Mahanama says it wasn’t easy getting people on board, with many owners declining to take part because they didn’t have time to learn and incorporate a new system.
“I think some café owners were also hesitant about it because there’s the perception that the customer is going to pre-order and never turn up, which we can overcome. Then there’s the perception that the customer is going to pre-order and turn up late and their coffee’s going to go cold, which we can also overcome,” he says.
Despite the fact that it’s still in a trial stage, Mahanama is already thinking of Zamon being used around the world.
“We decided to build it from the get go so someone in a different part of the world could use the software.”
Mahanama’s tips for start-ups:
- Be careful who you get your advice from.
- Write down your romantic, idealised vision of what it is that you’re trying to do because you will forget.
- Have that person in your life that you can lean on because you going to go through this rollercoaster. Some days will be a great news event and some days will be a lousy news event.
- Don’t get fixated on your plan. I wasted a lot of time initially because I came from corporate life trying to get my business plan right and working with a bunch of people to build a business model so that we can predict what the revenues were going to look like. It was a complete and utter waste of time, because the only metric you really need is how much money do you have that you can afford to lose, and how much are you losing per month which can tell you how long you can survive.
