"People say all students are slackers but that's not our experience." Jeremy Elster and Josh Magidson certainly haven't conformed to the student stereotype, using their spare time at Nottingham University to set up eatstudent.com, an ingeniously simple website that has captured the attention and appetites of their peers and, they hope, will soon spread to campuses across the country.

The entrepeneurial English students, both 21 and in their second year at university, struck up a friendship in their very first lecture and soon started brainstorming business ideas. After a few false starts - "Jeremy wanted to do something with wristbands because he'd seen some leather ones he liked in Topman" - they focused on two traits common to the average student; they're lazy, and they like takeaways. This led them to the idea of a website providing instant access to menus and phone numbers for a number of local takeaway restaurants.

"In freshers' week you're given so many different leaflets and menus for takeaway places," says Jeremy. "We realised it would be easier if they were all in one place."

Josh adds: "There are some websites that offer a similar service but they just put the menus up as they are, so there are all these different colours and styles. We list them all in the eatstudent style which makes it simpler to use. That's how we're different."

But the idea itself was only the beginning, and the boys had to persuade takeaway outlets to sign up. "It was quite hard to convince some of the restaurants that we were doing them a favour by offering to put them on our website for free," says Jeremy. "In one Chinese restaurant the owner didn't speak any English and the girl on the till had to translate. Her vocabulary was also rather basic and he thought we were trying to get money out of him. We ended up being kicked out."

Undeterred though, Jeremy and Josh had soon managed to persuade ten restaurants to enter into a trial period and started promoting their website around campus.

"The idea was to get rid of all the bits of paper that students are given, so we didn't want to do loads of leafleting. We mainly worked by word of mouth but it was when we came up with the name eatstudent that it really took off. People love the name, and they remember it."

So who thought of it? "I did," says Jeremy. Josh looks surprised. "Did you?" He's unconvinced but graciously concedes: "I'll let you have that one." Luckily, Jeremy is big enough to admit that Josh had the next great idea.

"He called me during the summer holidays and said he thought we should start charging restaurants to put their menus on the site. I wasn't sure, as we had planned to make money through advertising. But he was right."

The trial period ended up being so successful that takeaway businesses were willing to pay to put their menus on the site, especially as spaces were limited to five in each of the three categories: Chinese, Indian and pizza.

The website now gets about 200 hits a day and Jeremy and Josh are planning to extend eatstudent to other university towns. They're looking at Bristol and Newscastle as the next places to crack. Josh says, "I think we'll go there ourselves to approach restaurants, but then we'd want to find local students to run it, with some help from us."

Eatstudent hasn't made them millionaires yet, but it earns them each about £200 a month, a nice bit of "pocket money" as they put it. However, they both see the business as more than just a money-spinner; they're really enthusiastic about the fact that they've created something from nothing.

Josh says: "The most exciting moment was when I typed eatstudent into google and it came up with this discussion board where people were talking about how great the website is."

Jeremy agrees: "We want every student in Nottingham to know about eatstudent, like Facebook, which everyone uses. We've put a lot of ourselves into it and it would be great if we could hand it on in some way when we leave in two years. Then we could look back and think, 'we started that'."

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