Providing a solution for online content creators - Joseph Petty (Znaplink)

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.

Joseph: Znaplink is a community building tool for content creators and online 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.

What are the best and worst 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.

What has been the biggest 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