Ed Moyse is fizzing with ideas. Still only 25, he already has a track record for creating business startups with a twist. Last year Moyse and his business partner, Harry Huang, won the Varsity Pitch award with Wyre, a mobile app that enables users to pay merchants using the internet currency bitcoin. But that wasn’t his first – or his last – eye-catching business idea.

When Moyse and his friend Ross Harper graduated from Cambridge in 2011, neither could face what Moyse describes as the “conveyor belt of being shipped off from Cambridge into the City”. They thought it would be fun to instead create a business with no funding whatsoever that would bring in enough money to support them for a year. “We didn’t take a gap year before university, so we saw it as a chance to take one after university,” says Moyse.

Winning press coverage



The business they came up with was BuyMyFace, which Moyse describes as “the craziest idea we could think of”. It entailed selling advertising space on their own faces for a year – each day, for a fee, they would paint a different brand logo on their faces and upload the picture to the BuyMyFace website, including a link to the brand’s website.



Media interest in the story was huge, and they attracted advertising spend from big names such as Paddy Power and Pipers Crisps. “We made enough to pay off our student debts and had a really fun year as well,” says Moyse. “The company paid for us to go travelling, skiing and skydiving – it was great.”

Serial entrepreneur



At the end of the year, the pair decided to try a new venture. At the time, mobile games were “serious business” and by now they knew they were good at PR, so they set up a mobile game development company. This didn’t work out, however: “Things slowly went pear-shaped because neither of us could code anything, so we had to hire a whole development team to code it for us, and sadly it never got released.”



Moyse moved back in with his parents and taught himself to code. He successfully launched some mobile games, made money and moved out again. It was then that he decided to work on a bigger project. He was interested in bitcoin, an electronic currency used for making payments on the internet, but difficult to use in the real world. Moyse got in touch with Harry Huang, a Cambridge friend working for Goldman Sachs as a software developer, and together they developed Wyre. Merchants who downloaded the app would be able to accept bitcoin payments from customers and their business would appear on a virtual map showing potential customers which businesses took bitcoin.

Facing the competition



After some early success, the pair entered Varsity Pitch, a competition run by the National Association of College & University Entrepreneurs (Nacue) inviting students and recent graduates to submit a video pitch for their business. Moyse says the experience of entering was valuable – he and Huang are still friends with some of the entrepreneurs they were pitted against – and both the publicity and the £10,000 prize money came in useful for developing the business further.

Moyse thinks one of the reasons Wyre won was that their pitch put a strong focus on finance. They received good mentoring from BIPB, the sponsors for their category: “They told us the first draft of our financial plan was shockingly bad and we went back to the drawing board.”

But although Wyre was doing well, Moyse and Huang have put it aside – at least for the time being. While trying to find technology journalists interested in writing about the business, they hit on another idea.



They developed a software tool to search the TechCrunch news website to identify those journalists who wrote about bitcoin, and then added another 20 publications. Realising that the software would prove useful to small businesses or PR firms wanting to identify journalists interested in particular areas, they put the search engine, now called Hey Press, on to Product Hunt, a site for showcasing and sharing new products. The response was so good they developed it further. Now PR firms can take out an annual subscription to the service.

Hey Press was followed with JournoRequests. Journalists posting requests for experts or case studies on Twitter use the hashtag #journorequest, but it can be difficult for PR professionals to keep track of the requests, particularly as many are irrelevant. Moyse and Huang created a software script that delivers Twitter requests using the #journorequest hashtag to the PR professional’s inbox, filtering out requests of little interest. A PR firm interested only in business and finance alerts, only receives requests relating to those areas.

JournoRequests has already developed a subscriber base in the UK, and Moyse sees opportunities to expand to the US. By the end of the year they expect to have a turnover of £40k – not bad for a business just a few months old.

The beauty of both Hey Press and JournoRequests is that very little infrastructure is required to support them – Moyse and Huang have turned down offers of investment. There is no fixed office: Moyse lives and works in Dorset, while Huang is based in China. Wyre, meanwhile, is on the backburner because of worries about the potential security issues relating to storing large sums in bitcoin – though Moyse thinks it’s possible they’ll revisit the idea in future.

Meanwhile, they are delighted with the way their business is working out: “For the time being our focus has to be on Hey Press and JournoRequests. It’s working, it’s growing, loads of people are using it and we’re really happy with it.”

This year’s Nacue Varsity Pitch is now open for entries. The deadline for entries is 21 October

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