Piqniq is a fun new app allowing people to create food sharing groups at their workplaces enabling them to delight colleagues with good and honest food. The Hungarian team has launched a Beta version in November and is now targeting early adaptors before scaling globally.
Piqniq was born from the desire to give access to good and honest food in every moment of people’s life. The app is creating a bridge between those willing to eat homemade food and those who love cooking by enabling them to create groups at their workplace. Piqniq is defining itself as a startup aiming to democratizing the food business. The closest idea to Piqniq might be the Restaurant Day when anyone can set up a restaurant, café or a bar for a day at their home, office or on a street corner. So finally why not to enable Restaurant Day every day through the Piqniq platform?
1. Why do you think that this is the right moment for Piqniq to take off?
From Piqniq’s perspective there are three factors coming together very nicely, making us quite optimistic about our timing. First of all, trust in food has dropped radically over the last five to ten years. So access to good and honest food from transparent sources is something people are looking for globally. Secondly, fast internet coupled with more than a billion smart phones in people’s pockets has really pushed things forward in terms of opportunities for peer-to-peer collaboration. We clearly benefit from this trend. And as the third component, cost of financial transactions are dropping radically. Exciting startups like Dwolla are working on making it close to zero. This trend makes it easy to provide immediate online payment solutions and go beyond the basic feature of reserving food online.
The timing has also a personal perspective for the founders. For Misi, building Piqniq is an opportunity to work in a supporting role, having previously working on his own ideas. He feels he is now a part of a well-functioning team. For Janos previously working as an employee of large corporations, it was time to take some risks as an entrepreneur instead, working together with a strong team on building a global community around Piqniq. After years of solving problems for big corporations Tamas wanted to solve something that is important to him and has an impact on the everyday lives of others. For Aliz, Piqniq is an exciting challenge.
2. What difficulties are you having in addressing the global market as Hungarians?
There are two ways to approach this question. Making a long list of advantages and disadvantages and analyzing in what extent we have difficulties because of the fact that we come from Central Europe. Or we can just focus on the possibilities. We have chosen the second option. The world has shrunk, trends and needs are universal and we live in a global village. If you really want to achieve your goals in 2014, you can do it by working hard enough and with a lot of passion. And eventually it will not matter where you are, geographically speaking. By the way, the Hungarian market is a pretty good place to use it as a tester community and start growing from these experiences. We are convinced that if the community sees our passion, the message will go through and we will reach the target audience no matter where they are.
3. You speak very proudly of your team and you seem to be completing each other very well. What advice can you share about building the right team?
It took us a lot of time and patience to build our team. We could have made easy and fast decisions on hiring people in order to move forward quicker, but that would have compromised our values and culture. It took us a lot of effort to learn how to be honest and transparent in all situations even if it goes together with bringing up conflicts between each other. Sometimes it can get painful to talk openly about feelings and needs but going through that pain is definitely worth it. A lot of organizations do not have this sensitivity and think about these efforts as it was a waste of time. It is not. It is actually the rock solid foundation to build on. At least that has been our experience.
4. In your opinion, what is the secret sauce of building an active community?
Piqniq is still in a very early stage so we can only talk about our vision related to the question of communities. However we truly believe that users have to be treated as our partners. Empowering the community, spending as much time as possible on understanding their problems, needs and motivation can bring us to get to know them better than they know themselves. This involves a lot of meetings and interviews with all potential user groups. Honest and clear communication, transparency are key elements for us and we focus on giving and creating value for them.
We also have the objective to collaborate with communities like OuiShare or other platforms working on promoting good and honest food like Eat With and Restaurant Day.
5. It’s 2015, and Piqniq has achieved…
Having already contributed a lot to democratizing the food industry. By 2015, we imagine ourselves as a globally recognized and loved brand, being used in offices, workplaces and other communities worldwide by millions of people on a daily basis.
