Two guys and a pizza app

WARNING: the following will make you hungry for pizza and reach for the app….

What do you get when you mix two guys and business post grad class? PizzApp

Born of the love of pizza and the want to have piping hot deliveries these two gents came up with a concept ready to rival any other food delivery app out there.

Having met at orientation at Wits Business School, Aiden Dinsdale and Richard Smith immediately recognised the drive in each other and spent their time during post grad plotting their big business idea.

Each of them always wanted to start a business, and developing a business based around an app was even more alluring.

“Apps are fantastic,” says Dinsdale. “They can provide something so personal on your phone and you have such intimate contact with them. If a business does get it right, it can provide a product or service more easily than anything else.”

Brainstorming efficiency in an app

   That’s where the obligation surfaced to provide an app that people really sought and that could possibly turn into a viable business. So they packed their bags and headed for the hills to brainstorm ideas around the business app they would potentially develop.

“We brainstormed countless business ideas before we both stumbled on one, took a step back and thought this could actually be something,” says Smith. “Providing efficiency in a market that desperately needed it.”

PizzApp was born in order to remove the unnecessary headaches from ordering online. From miscommunicating over the phone with your local pizza delivery people, getting confused about an address, misunderstandings about the order, the wrong topping on the wrong base. With PizzApp most of the human contact and therefore human error have been taken out of the equation. – the only logical way to do that is with an app.

“It wasn’t that we decided we want to do an app, then lets do pizza,” explains Dinsdale. “It was: let’s create a business model that is the most efficient and that supplies an industry that really needs it.”

“That’s when we stumbled upon the pizza industry,” adds Smith. “The app was natural progression.”

Systemize it

With their business- mindedness and management backgrounds, Smith and Dinsdale could plot their product from start to finish. They designed the systems so the developers could code the app but came up with the systems completely themselves.

“We knew what and how we wanted the app to work and needed the developers to provide it,” says Dinsdale.

“What you see on the app is just one section of our whole process,” says Smith. “We have a completely separate system for the chefs and the drivers.”

The chef portal, where the orders come through and are managed is a completely different system to the drivers’ system. The drivers’ system runs the orders going from the kitchen to the driver, then directing them to the delivery address and then notifying the customer when the driver is almost there.

The backend of PizzApp is a very powerful tool. It allows Smith and Dinsdale to see sales figures, targets, take stock and check when something is running low and needs to be ordered, creates promo codes, and even offers the option to start a new franchise.

“It’s literally as easy as dropping a pin on a location,” explains Dinsdale, “and it will enable ordering from a 4km radius. It will also schedule the kitchen that is nearest to the customer to the driver.”

“So we think we’ve reinvented the way people think about ordering and receiving pizza via the app,” Dinsdale continues. “But we’ve re-invented the pizza wheel once more to bring customers something that has never been done before – pizza cooked at their home.”

It’s an express pizza experience and won’t take longer than it normally would to get a pizza delivered. With a portable gas oven on the back of a delivery bike and some nifty cooking tricks up their sleeves, PizzApp will be able to make a pizza at your door.

“It tastes like a wood burning oven pizza,” says Smith. “You can’t taste the difference.”

The gas ovens hold the heat nicely and are very safe. The driver arrives at the customer’s with the bases that have already been prepared by the chefs, and while the oven is heating up the driver unfolds his work surface, dons his disposable gloves and adorns the bases with the desired toppings that had already been set aside in exact little portions. Three minutes later the pizzas are cooked and you’re served piping hot pizza at home.

“It gives the customer a level of involvement,” adds Smith.

“This is what happens when you put an engineer and a marketing graduate in a room for too long,” adds Dinsdale. “The sky is the limit.”

About Clare Matthes:

Clare’s father swears she was born waving spirit fingers and singing tah dah in an oh-so-dahling-showbiz-esque manner. Nicknamed “Schnauze” because of her smart mouth and quick whit, Clare