A restaurant in pocket

Saeed Lotfi, Amin Azhdarkosh and Masoud Zareii are the founders of a website which sells restaurants foods online. They start their business with only 3 million Tomans.

After a while, they could become successful and develop ZoodFood site which is the first online food order.

Difficult but promising start

Lotfi said that at first they register the company and launched the site. Then they contact restaurants.

They had to persuade both customers and restaurant to trust them and work with them. They began with small restaurants in Tehran.

Most famous restaurants which trusted their site at that moment were JoojeDaagh and Perperook.

• Why internet and why food?

Most important motivation of this team was that they were interested in internet and knew that someday people would use online stores instead of going out and buying foods.

With this service, user can sit in his/her house, search the food he/she likes and order it. Then the food would be delivered so soon.

No cash is needed. But due to the problems in city maps, they had delivery issues. On the other hand, delivery cost is not fixed in Iran. These kinds of obscurities are dangerous for online businesses.

Be cautious

Lotfi says: “people think that by starting an online business with little capital, one can become a millionaire in a short time.

But that’s not true. In Iran less than 5% of purchases are done online.” He says: “everybody who has an idea wants to implement a startup but it requires crossing many stages.

Today competition is much tight and founders should have enough knowledge about online businesses. If you have an idea, you should think about all the possible aspects.”

Positive view of investors to online services

Saeed Lotfi talks about investing on online businesses and says: “today investors have more positive view towards online bussineses.

Building investor’s trust is very important because investment plays an important role in an online business. Maybe you would think that you can start such a business with 10, 20 or even 30 million Tomans.

But the cost is much more than that. When a business is online, its services should be updated, more people should become members and more staff should be employed.”

We have a positive outlook

What is the rate of ZoodFood? Saaed Lotfi doesn’t give a clear answer. He says there is no specific reference for rating a site.

Assets like brand value, logo, sales, customers, profit and etc. determine its value. People don’t trust online businesses yet.

There is also no advertisement for such online businesses. For example government can introduce one approved internet site each week so that people get familiar with online purchase. Altogether, Lotfi thinks the future of his business is promising.

But he believes if organizations and agencies support this kind of business more, they would progress too soon. For example instead of 5% online purchase share in Iran market, this would be 50%.

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