This is one of the cooler college startups that I’ve heard of recently. Anthony Zhang started EnvoyNow, a food delivery service, as a freshman at USC. Zhang identified the problem on his campus of students not being able to get food delivered to them on certain parts of campus, as only students and faculty were allowed to be there. Zhang, being the young entrepreneur he is, started delivering the food himself. It originally started with students texting Zhang their order, Venmo (a money transfer service) him the money, and then he would deliver the food to their exact location on campus. At first, he was making up to $50 a night.
Later, he and his friends launched a full-fledged web site and hired several other college students (‘envoys”) that delivered food. EnvoyNow charged a flat $2.99 delivery fee, along with a 20-25% cut of the total food order. Shockingly, in its first semester as a legit business, it made $22k. In 2015, it later expanded to the University of Wisconsin and Indiana University.
Today, Zhang sold the company to JoyRun (in 2017) for an undisclosed amount. On to another business venture!
Source: http://fortune.com/2017/03/30/anthony-zhang-envoynow/
I love how this business started from Zhang delivering food on his own! It is extremely impressive that he took initiative like this. He wasn’t afraid to put himself out there and was extremely successful as a result.
This is a really innovative idea. I can’t believe the business made $22,000 in its first semester of operation. Is JoyRun a food delivery service?
I love this business idea. It’s a good way to make money, but it’s also a good way for college students to get food from places other than the dining hall. If our college had this, I would definitely pay for a service like this.
This sounds a lot like a problem that we looked to answer in the first weeks of this course. It is interesting to see that this young guy continued with this past just the primary start up. I think that is a definite problem for college students, especially on larger campuses like USC, PSU, ect.. Where they would have to go 20 minutes just for food. Very cool, and exciting to see it actually happen on a few campuses.
I think its great that he started small. I think its really easy to wait to start until you have several people working for you or a big investor. Start working now so that if and when those things come, you are ready and have experienced part of the market.
Making $22,000 in a single semester is amazing, I would drop out of college at this moment if I had a business like that. It is cool how Zhang morphed his business from being a one man show into having payed employees and using a website. This is something I would love to have at my college, and hope that I can start a business like this one day.