What inspired you to start the business?<\/b><\/p>\n
I thought about starting Piq almost two years ago now, and it just came from my own personal frustration with coffee and caffeine. I was drinking a lot of coffee as a law student and I had a job at the time. Working, doing my law degree, having a social life and being a uni student, I just didn\u2019t have enough energy. <\/p>\n
I was lying in bed at 2am thinking, why can\u2019t I sleep? I did a Google search to find what stops the negative side effects of caffeine and it said drink water and exercise, which wasn\u2019t going to work at 2am. I dove deeper into that rabbit hole of looking at what could help me and I came across L-theanine, which is a natural extract from green tea. <\/p>\n
It helps to reduce the negative side effects of caffeine like jitters, anxiety and crashes. It\u2019s got a lot of research behind it from neurologists and neuroscientists saying how wonderful the relationship is between caffeine and L-theanine. So I thought I\u2019d make it for myself.<\/p>\n
Amber Scott, founder of Piq, won the Enterprise Challenge run by Entre (University of Canterbury’s entrepreneurship club).<\/p>\n
You won the University of Canterbury Enterprise Challenge, what was that experience like?<\/b><\/p>\n
I entered the summer start-up programme at the end of last year, which is part of the University of Canterbury Centre for Entrepreneurship. I worked on that for 10 weeks of summer last year, and that was really awesome. <\/p>\n
I\u2019ve had some friends go through it and they loved it. It\u2019s different having people around you that are trying to build something and are super driven. I entered that and thought it would be a great experience to meet a lot of people, get connections to people in the industry, and I never thought that I would win it, but here we are.<\/p>\n
What will the prize go towards?<\/b><\/p>\n
It was a $32,000 prize, which I was very shocked to win. I was just so grateful and in disbelief. It\u2019s broken up into services and cash, so the services will go towards these designated areas like accounting, lawyers and marketing, which is incredible. That\u2019s what I would have spent it on anyway.<\/p>\n
The other cash amount will go towards launching, marketing and getting the educational marketing really strong and getting Piq\u2019s name out there. Most people have the problem we\u2019re trying to solve, but they don\u2019t realise there is a solution.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d also like to do a clinical study on the relationship between Piq and coffee instead of just L-theanine and coffee, if possible.<\/p>\n
Piq’s key ingredient is L-theanine, a natural extract from green tea that helps reduce the negative side effects of caffeine.<\/p>\n
How do you build the business from here?<\/b><\/p>\n
Our pre-orders have been slowly trickling in, despite not having done a lot of marketing campaigns yet. In terms of manufacturing, we\u2019re really proud to be manufacturing in New Zealand. It was really important to me that we did.<\/p>\n
Once we\u2019ve launched and our sales are opened up properly by the end of November, we really want to work on getting it into the hands of consumers and seeing how they react to the product. They\u2019ll be able to tell us whether they want it in cafes, whether they want to be able to add it to coffee orders, or on the table in sachets like sugar is currently, all those sorts of things.<\/p>\n
I want to make something you can add to your coffee and get at your cafe, as well as offer it wholesale for workplaces and offices wherever it\u2019s wanted.<\/p>\n
What would be your advice to a budding entrepreneur looking to start a business?<\/b><\/p>\n
I think it\u2019s definitely about who you surround yourself with. Find good mentors and good friends in the start-up world who want to support you, because they understand what you\u2019re going through. I don\u2019t know how I would have done it without having people who get the issues that I\u2019m going through.<\/p>\n
Do you have a small business story you want to share? Send your pitches to tom.raynel@nzme.co.nz.<\/b><\/p>\n
Tom Raynel is a multimedia business journalist for the Herald, covering small business, retail and tourism.<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What inspired you to start the business? I thought about starting Piq almost two years ago now, and…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":383506,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[194,156553,31472,64,12088,6997,15713,392,11806,9729,44800,4691,607,3553,167507,37106,3861,58284,1815,183269,44759,9548,183270,46750,183266,183273,183268,71625,183267,10612,183271,41345,819,49716,7572,25852,33078,4817,447,67,132,183272,68,42060,1917,64497],"class_list":{"0":"post-383505","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entrepreneurship","8":"tag-about","9":"tag-aims","10":"tag-amber","11":"tag-business","12":"tag-campaign","13":"tag-change","14":"tag-coffee","15":"tag-culture","16":"tag-daily","17":"tag-drink","18":"tag-each","19":"tag-editorial","20":"tag-entrepreneurship","21":"tag-feature","22":"tag-feels","23":"tag-founder","24":"tag-how","25":"tag-inspiration","26":"tag-interview","27":"tag-juggling","28":"tag-kiwis","29":"tag-monday","30":"tag-nzmes","31":"tag-owner","32":"tag-piq","33":"tag-possibilities","34":"tag-raynel","35":"tag-regular","36":"tag-reshape","37":"tag-scott","38":"tag-showcasing","39":"tag-small","40":"tag-startup","41":"tag-stories","42":"tag-study","43":"tag-success","44":"tag-talks","45":"tag-their","46":"tag-to","47":"tag-united-states","48":"tag-unitedstates","49":"tag-uplifting","50":"tag-us","51":"tag-which","52":"tag-with","53":"tag-zealands"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115560799916834102","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=383505"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383505\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/383506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=383505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=383505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=383505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}