I bumped up against this as well. What you need to do is wrap the tag inside of a with an ID, and then call the joyride start command against that.
For example, the markup might look like this:
<div id="joyrideDiv">
<ol class="joyride-list" data-joyride>
<li data-id="joyridedElement"><p>Here's the explanation</p></li>
</ol>
</div>
And then you can start just that joyride by calling foundation (this is key) against that div only. The call would look like this:
$("#joyrideDiv").foundation('joyride', 'start');
Note that you're passing the ID of the wrapper div, not the ID of the element. I had to poke around in the source to figure that out.