Unfortunately that was not to be. It was clear that they would benefit greatly from a cohesive bookings management across their sites. We tried so much to onboard them, but it almost seemed like they were too comfortable with the status quo. Organizational transformation especially digital transformation projects are not easy mainly because human beings do not like change and would resist a change even if it will make things better for them.

GA was open to be used in any location. Braider, black hair stylist, make up artists for dark complexions, these skills were hard to find in Europe. A few makeup artist in London signed up and used the platform. Eventually, after exhausting all available options to us, we made the final decision to sunset GlamAfric appointment booking platform. The day it went offline was surreal. Everything we had poured into it tears, blood, money, sleepless nights. was gone. We underestimated how working with each other would be a different type of relationship from our marriage.

Although our businesses were not successful, we definitely learnt a lot in the 8 years that we spent building multiple platforms. Our mistakes are pretty common with people who venture into business.

Here are some of the mistakes we made;

1. We rented a co working space and later realised it was highly unnecessary and could have used that money towards our marketing spend.

2. Scope creep. I am pretty sure when you look up the phrase scope creep, that it would have our pictures right beside it. Adding new features and services too fast was simply not sustainable. Simply put, we did too much.

3. Market research, maybe a proper market research would have highlighted that a business model like childminder.ng could never work in a society like Nigeria.

4. We were over committed. Our time and resources were spread too thin.

5. Fragmented platform: We launched the GlamAfric booking platform across web, iOS, and Android. In hindsight, we could have started with a single Progressive Web App, which would have sufficiently met our needs for a long time.

This experience thought me that some good ideas fail not because it was not done right, but because it did not reach the right people. Therefore, having a solid strategy to reach the right people is part of the work that needs to be done in addition to building the core business offering.

I know GA Beauty Shop solved a real problem for small and medium beauty brands or sellers who wanted to sell online, but could not afford an independent ecommerce presence. Here is what it offered;

On glamafricbeautyshop.com customers and beauty enthusiasts can easily find and purchase skincare, makeup, fragrance and haircare products from Nigerian brands rather than scrolling through Instagram to find them. We provided secure online payment by Flutterwave, reducing bank transfer to fake Instagram sellers.

By selling on glamafricbeautyshop.com beauty and cosmetics brands can;

• Reach new customers and create brand awareness. Even if they already had a website.

• Sell to customers 24/7 without having to exchange messages with them. (Eliminate or reduce Instagram & WhatsApp DM enquiries)

• Direct their customers on Instagram and WhatsApp to their store to see available products.

• Get a free online store with the tools to manage your sales. (Easy store setup, absolutely no tech skills required).

• Get a store front with unique url to share with customers. A store provided sellers with the following tools;

  • Simple stock management tool. Manage stock quantity easily.

  • Easy order management. View and manage your orders easily in one place. Have visibility of all orders and improve your customer satisfaction.

  • Sales reporting tool. See your best selling products easily.

  • Secure online payment, and remittance by Flutterwave (no more bank transfers)

Small and medium beauty brands striving for an online ecommerce presence, usually built one with shopify. Unfortunately, they were quickly hit with the harsh reality of building and maintaining an website. I noticed how some of those sites had issues. GA Beauty Shop was not a UX and UI marvel, but it was more than functional. It was an ecommerce tool that a beauty brand could use to grow its online presence and sales before venturing into developing an independent ecommerce space.

Sadly either we did not pitch our offering well or GA Beauty Shop was not a s great as we thought it was. By mid-2021, income from both job boards had plateaued, it was earning in a lower currency, and the site maintenance was paid for in pounds sterling, so, to quote the kids “the maths was not mathing”.

We had to make the heart wrenching decision to sunset both job boards and shortly after that GA Beauty Shop.

By now you must have noticed the trend in our story. Spin up a brand new product if enough ‘potential’ customers asked for it. We briefed this new idea to our tech partners and asked them to tell us the cheapest way they could build an ebay-like marketplace for us. They came back with a WordPress solution. WordPress had a marketplace them that could be customised to fit what we wanted.

We agreed on this and they set to work, building glamafricbeautyshop.com.

I must admit that GA Beauty Shop was my favourite of all our endeavours. I saw the solution it provided to both seller/brands and consumer/buyer. We poured our hearts into building beauty shop. Due to the share volume of work we had to do we employed remote workers in Lagos, who helped with business development, social media management, client onboarding, customer success etc.

Beauty shop was our most successful brand, we managed to build it with our income from our 9-5 jobs. I got a job as a software tester as our business ventures had not started generating income we could live on.

Eventually, GA Beauty Shop stalled at the same level where the job boards had stalled. My theory is that we simply did not reached the right user demographic. The most frustrating thing for us was that some beauty brands/sellers who seemed desperate to sell online, did not want to do the work to setup their store front. Setting up a store front involved, inputting store details, bank details, and uploading product information. This all seemed too much for some of them. In addition to this, a lack of a marketing budget meant we could not grow the brand.

Eventually, we concluded that the job boards had run their course and agreed to shut them down so as to free up some bandwidth to run GlamAfric appointment booking platform and GlamAfric Beauty Shop.

A couple of months while later, I came across a video on YouTube about the F.I.R.E movement - Financial Independence Retire Early! It is a lifestyle and financial strategy where people aggressively save and invest 50% to 75% of their income. The goal is to accumulate enough wealth to quit traditional 9-to-5 jobs and live off investment returns decades earlier than the standard retirement.

One video led to another and soon the algorithm flooded my timeline with videos of individuals and couples who were on the F.I.R.E journey. It sparked an interest in us and, we considered the feasibility for us. Could we realistically invest a large portion of our income in the hopes of retiring early on dividends? Considering that we had just started out on our start up journey, (check out my series on My Husband and I Bootstrapped a SaaS Start-up and it Failed. Here is what I learned) where we poured all of our monies, going down the F.I.R.E journey was not possible at all.

Although we were not able to join the F.I.R.E journey, watching those YouTube videos, I learnt how to self invest on DIY (Do-It-Yourself) investment platforms, as they allowed individuals to build and manage their own portfolios without a financial advisor. Two main YouTube channels that I followed and watched their videos consistently to learn how the stock market worked, different products and how to invest were Our Rich Journey by Aman & Christina and The Humble Penny by Ken & Mary. These channels were run by couples who had figured out how to escape the rat race and shared most of their knowledge freely on YouTube. Both couples also have exclusive paid programs for further mentoring and teaching.

However, for where I was in my life, I learnt a whole lot just from their YouTube videos and went on to implement what I had learnt by opening individual investment accounts for myself, my husband and our kids. Couple of years on, I only wish I had started sooner. Compounding is really your best friend in the investment game. Personally, I would like to embark on the F.I.R.E journey, but the way our lives are set up now, it’s almost impossible to put away a large chunk of your income when you have teenagers. I think it’s easier to get on the F.I.R.E journey as a single person with no child, or young couple without children or with very young children. Which is actually what both couples did, they started on their F.I.R.E journey when their children were still really young.

So, how would it look like for a couple like us with teenage kids? Teenagers are expensive as most people have come to learn. The only way I see is by significantly increasing our earnings and investing all of the additional income sensibly into medium to high yield funds. This means we have to avoid lifestyle creep, which most people tend to fall into as their income increases.

We contacted people we knew in the hair and beauty space both in the UK and in Nigeria and pitched our platform to them, asking them to try it out and provide us with a honest constructive feedback. It was like pulling teeth. What they say is really true, strangers will support your endeavours before your family and friends.

Glamafric.com was supposed to be an appointment booking platform for businesses in the beauty space, such as salons, spas, makeup artists etc. As our marketing efforts progressed, similarly to what happened with childminder.ng, we had Nigerian beauty businesses asking us for staffing and if they could sell their items on our platform.

Nurseryjobs.ng was till very much in full throttle and we figured we could duplicate the WordPress recruitment template NurseryJobs was built on, and simply change the colour theme and name for a new job board for beauty industry in Nigeria. We did exactly that and BeautyJobs.ng was born. Simultaneously I ran both job boards while Chika focused on building the appointment booking platform.

As we approached the end of the build of the MVP for GlamAfric (GA), some businesses had signed up to use the platform to take bookings for their business and most excitingly we got into conversations with a big player in the Nigerian makeup and cosmetics space who was looking for a way to manage bookings across their multiple stores. Realising we did not have the right feature to sign them up, we refined the next iteration of GA, and added the relevant features that would allow a spa or beauty salon manage bookings across multiple sites.

In addition to our marketing efforts, in the first year, we signed up for beauty in Africa exhibitions, which didn’t provide the ROI that we hoped. By mid 2018, we had run through our money and really needed GA to start generating income. At $10 USD per month, we knew that beauty businesses who were serious about creating structure could afford to pay that amount monthly. Unfortunately we were severely constrained by a non-existent marketing budget and so could not reach them.

Chika applied to multiple accelerators, incubators and VC’s which was not successful, except for an African venture capital focused on funding for women. We were invited to pitch GA to them and since it was funding for women start-up, it made sense that I made the pitch. The pitch was to be made over a video call. It was the most never racking thing I’d ever done, pitching our fledgling start-up to two strangers and desperately praying that they would give me some money. They did not give us the money!

Somewhere in the middle of building GA web platform, we thought it was a good idea to create a webapp for the GA on our very limited budget and over stretched bandwidth, IOS and android apps.

I was fully focused on running nurseryjobs.ng. which was a full time endeavour. As it was already making us some money which was desperately needed, the next step was to scale and grow it. A glaring issue with investing time and energy into NurseryJobs recruitment website was that it earned in naira, a weaker currency than the sterling. It made it difficult to justify investment we were making into it.

After much deliberation we decided that the only way to justify running that platform was if we could automate it, so that it could run on its own without needing my manual input. That way it could be a source of passive income. This meant that the user journey for the employers who were looking to list their job vacancies had to be seamless, to encourage self service and remove reliance on me to get get their vacancies posted.

It’s very hard for a business to change customer behaviour because people prefer to stick with what they know, especially when trying something new feels like more effort. I began the challenge of encouraging the schools that regularly used our services to start listing their vacancies on our recruitment website themselves. They did not like this added administrative task. I offered to teach their HR staff how to use the website, some were happy with this, others were not happy.

Gradually more and more schools started self-publishing their vacancies which freed up some of my time to figure out how to grow the website. At this point our clients were predominantly in Lagos and Abuja. I wanted grow more in these locations as well as expand into other states. The options available to me then for advertising were digital ads (Facebook, Instagram, Google Adwords) or influencers. Influencer marketing had a better chance of reaching more people faster, if I used the right person. Sadly the rate cards for most of them was unaffordable for us. Remember we were financially stretched thing at this point.

Whilst running this business, a recurrent theme kept coming up with most of the schools I interacted with in terms of how they recruited, onboarded, retained and rewarded their staff. There was a very high staff turnover and schools with a good number of staff did not seem to have a proper HR procedures. This led me to create the course - Fundamentals of Human Resources Management which is available on Udemy.

This aim of that course was to introduce people to the core concepts of HR – (employee life cycle) and the role HR plays at each stage. It is for business owners or managers wanting to set up a HR process or department. The course covers Attraction & Recruitment, On-boarding and Development, Performance and Reward, Employee Engagement and Retention and Separation & Succession Planning. Some schools signed up for the course to help them understand what was missing in their structure.

It is a well known fact that finding decent hair braiders in the UK is difficult, especially if you do not live in London. We did not live in London so finding good hair stylist tricky for me. At this point I had natural hair and hadn’t relaxed my hair in over 3 year. I had painstakingly grown and cared for my hair myself and it thrived beautifully.

Mid 2018, tapered cut natural hair was all the rage and I wanted in on that hair style, trouble was, it wasn’t something I could do myself. I needed an expert hair stylist. In the black community, there are a lot of people who can do make a decent braid, but actual hair care is a different ball game, you really need to search for those who know what they are doing. I researched and found a decent salon in the town we lived in run by a Caribbean woman. When I called to make an appointment, I explained what I was trying to achieve, she assured me that she was an expert in styling natural afro hair.

On the day of my appointment, I got there on time, it was a lovely space, I was even offered coffee which was much appreciated. The way she handled my hair while washing and blowing drying inspired confidence. When she started cutting my hair, I held my breath praying that she would get it right. Sadly that was not to be, I didn’t get the exact shape I was hoping for, which made it not worth cutting my natural hair that had taken me three whole years to grow. That was the longest my hair had ever been in my whole life.

When I got home and Chika met me at the door, I burst into tears, wailing into his arms that she had ruined my hair. My darling husband comforted me and assured me that my hair was nice. Although not what I may have wanted, but it still looked ok. He asked me who referred the lady to me, I explained that I found her through a google search. He went on to ask if her business listings had reviews and pictures of her work. She had a hand full of google reviews but no pictures that I saw.

A few days later, Chika, breaming with excitement, let me in on the idea that would be our 3rd startup. The idea was simple, an online beauty appointment booking platform for Afro hair, where hair stylists could create a business profile, upload pictures of their work, and set up a calendar so that prospective clients who liked their work could book them. There were similar existing platforms on the market in the UK, sadly at the time, they barely had afro hair specialists on their platform. After much research into the viability of this idea, we were convinced that it would work and with that - glamafric.com was born, a beauty appointment booking platform for the Afro-Caribbean community.

Most of us swapped long form reading for doom scrolling and reading started dwindling. In nearly a decade I have amassed a growing collection of books that I vow to read one day. I would like to show you a picture of my collection, but I’m too embarrassed.

I saw a headline that said that Gen Z are looking to go back to how things used to be for us millennials, i.e. Nokia 3310 and portable CD players. Maybe they will eventually lead the backward change that humanity needs. We need to stop scrolling and pick a book or go outside and just make friends.

This lost art has not just affected leisurely reading. It has affected how people read long emails at work. You send out an email with all the required information that your stakeholders need to have before an important meeting, so that the meeting can run smoothly, yet almost all of them turn up without reading the email, expecting you to narrate what you have written. It is easier for them to digest the information verbally. No one wants to read long, boring emails when they could wait for you to tell them what you have written over a zoom call.

So where do we go from here as a people? I am not particularly an eloquent person, however, I am able to put my thoughts down clearly in written words. A skill that I resort to often when I struggle to communicate my feelings to my husband. I simply write it down and have him read it. It is usually quite a long read. Imagine if he struggled to read and comprehend written text thus forcing me to communicate verbally like people in the work place who refuse to read their emails. That would not have made for a happy marriage.

Challenge yourself to pick up the book that have been promising yourself to read. Let us get back into reading. And no, listening to audio books is not the same. In my opinion, audio books are basically podcasts. You are supposed to settle into a book and get lost in the plot, doing nothing else other than reading. Audio books don’t give you that feeling, you can multitask while listening to an audio book. It’s not quite the same. That being said, if there’s a genre that you could get away with listening to on audio, it would be the biographies of interesting people. I listened to Michelle Obama’s Becoming and Prince Harry’s Spare on Audio book. I loved that they recorded the audio version of their books themselves. In this case it helps draw you into the story that they were telling.

As the job board feature gained traction, I found myself inundated with CVs flooding our inbox. Manually reviewing and shortlisting candidates that way quickly became exhausting and inefficient.

We thought the job board had good potential so we made the sad decision to sunset childminder.ng (also to avoid further financial ruin from the big bad lawyers) and build a functional job board, where users could upload their CV’s and I’d easily screen and shortlist applicants. This gave birth to NurseryJobs.ng.

Our tech partner in India built a job board website for us by customising a WordPress job board template. This made everything so much better and streamlined. I felt like I had found something that I was really good at, with my back ground in HR & Recruitment in the UK, I was doing something I understood.

Miraculously most of the jobs posted on the job board were filled by candidates who applied from our platform. It was encouraging and we saw repeat vacancy listing from the schools who had used our services.

One of the benefits of creating a fit for purpose job board was that I no longer had to manually post the jobs like I used to on childminder.ng/nurseryjobs. Users could simply create an account and make payment and post their job adverts. Unfortunately that was not to be. By posting the jobs myself initially on behalf of the schools, I had a created a precedence. They were simply not interested in the administrative task of posting their job adverts themselves.

Posting these jobs and shortlisting candidates took up most of my time. I spent what was left my time figuring out digital marketing and how to reach early years teachers in Nigeria using Google, Facebook and Instagram ads.

I learned how to set up google analytics and AdWords, which was interesting. We had a budget of around $50 a month for adverts, a ridiculously tiny marketing budget, but that was just what we could afford.

We made it was categorically clear that we did not vet these nannies ourselves and advised them to interview any potential candidate face to face as well as carry out police, guarantor and health checks before they hired anyone from our platform. In the same way that they would if the nanny was brought by an agent. Almost all of the parents who signed up did not like the fact that we would not take responsibility for the actions of the nannies. This quickly made us aware that the Nigerian market was not ready for that sort of service and probably never will.

As early adopters signed up on the website in search of childcare, we started receiving requests from users for other types of services apart from domestic childcare. People asked if they could find infant photographers, party planners, cleaners and nursery school teachers. In our effort to drive adoption, we fell into scope creep, gradually adding services and features to the platform that were never part of the original vision.

As you can imagine, this effort took us away from improving the UI and UX part of the platform. The look and feel of the website was not comparable to Facebook and Instagram, however the functionality was great. Pages moved really well and navigation was good (if I may may say so myself) as long as you knew what you were doing.

Very soon it was clear that the original plan for people to find domestic nannies on the website was not going to happen. Interestingly, we started to get requests for preschool and nursery teachers specifically in Lagos and Abuja areas. In response to this we created a new page on the website dedicated to job adverts – childminder.ng/nurseryjobs and charged schools to post their job advert and handle initial screening. This was an unexpected pivot and we started seeing an increased interest in this service which was generating a much needed revenue. As we were soon running out of money.

Honestly, I was not interested in the idea of being a tech founder at first. At the time, my dream was a career in HR, however I struggled to get a permanent job. A few entry level temporary contract roles here and there ended without extensions. So at the end of 2015, I decided to pay attention to his pitch and I bought into it. At this time we had two toddlers under 3 years old and finding reliable childcare was the bane of our lives. It was the same for our friends who lived back home in Nigeria. In the UK, there were existing online platforms where you could find childcare, but there was no such thing in Nigeria at the time.

We considered what building a platform like that for the Nigerian market which had unique peculiarities would work. We did some “market research” and asked a bunch of people if they would hire a nanny from a website. Our unique selling point was that we were targeting “higher end” nannies. Educated people who wanted to work in childcare for a period of time. It seemed to be an attractive offer for the people that participated in our “market research”. Our main worry was about safety and to mitigate that risk we created a Safety Hiring page that provided guidance to parents on how to interview and carry out background checks on anyone they found on the platform.

As we fleshed out the idea, my husband began writing the requirements for an MVP. Writing requirements is his ‘bread and butter’ as he often smugly said, in a way I found adorable and cute. He taught me what he knew and that was my entry into the digital/tech space. Shortly after, we found an IT agency based in Chandigarh within our budget and officially joined the global sprint to build the next big platform. We genuinely weren’t looking to be the next Zuckerberg. We only hoped to build something valuable that could pay for it self and maybe left us enough to pay our monthly mortgage.

The IT agency assigned us a project manager Vishal, he was young, vibrant and very patient with us which was a God send. Sometime in 2016, we launched the MVP for web platform childminder.ng. It is an incredible feeling to see your idea come to life. I absolutely enjoyed working on that project, often working late into the night.

As a founder/cofounder you wear all the hats. You are product designer, tester, digital marketer, social media manager, business development manager, growth strategist, adoption champion and most importantly, financier. I taught myself a whole load of skills. My least favourite was figuring out Google analytics and Facebook advertising. Looking back I think it’s because it cost us money to spread the word of our new and shiny platform.

Even now in their teenage years, we occasionally create new boundaries. Luckily they now understand the concept of boundaries and that it is for their benefit. Occasionally they ask for stuff and we either outrightly say no, or we tell them when we could get it for them.

This is a typical parent child relationship. All things being equal the child doesn’t disown his parents simply because they said no to him or asked him to wait. I was listening to a clip of a Christian podcast and the speaker said, (I am paraphrasing) if you get disappointed with God or turn away from Him when he doesn’t give you what you want or even disciplines you, you cannot call Him Father, because fathers get to discipline and set boundaries for their child. That hit me like ton of bricks.

In my walk and relationship with Jesus Christ, I proclaim him as my Father, especially since my earthly father, Benjamin died over 19 years ago. My earthly father loved me, he raised me right as much as he could, taught me to follow Christ. He also disciplined me well. I was a stubborn kid, his first child, so he did not spare the rod on a few occasions when his words had fallen on my selective deaf ears. On those occasions it never occurred to me rebel against him or run away from home. Ok, I thought about running away from home a few times but I knew there was no place on earth where I would be loved as much as I was loved at home.

So when I heard those words from the podcast, it occurred to me that I had never thought about God as a parent in the same way Benjamin was my father. This has helped reframe my feelings about my unanswered prayers. As my Father, he has either said No, which is a full sentence. Or he has said not yet, which means I just gotta wait because He said so, or I have to eat a figurative spinach & broccoli before I can have my desert.

Life happened, marriage, kids, raising kids, so far so good, but now, I find myself having with a familiar feeling of unrest. What have I done with myself, what positive contribution have I made to humanity, asides adding to the population growth. There is a deep need we have as humans to walk in our purpose. Those who find that early, may be spared this horrid feeling. Or maybe not. I don’t know.

I saw a video on Instagram and he poster was talking about how people always worry about what their purpose is and even pray asking God to show or tell them what God’s will or purpose is for their life. The speaker referred to the book of Romans 12:2 where Paul was advising the early Christians “do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is, his good, pleasing and perfect will”. The speaker explained that basically, we are free to choose any career path or job, however, whatever we do must be filtered through the will of God. If you have read the scriptures, you’ll know that Jesus’s life on earth is the exemplary life that we should emulate. So if you’re a carpenter, (Jesus’s actual career before his 3 year ministry took off), a pilot, or software engineer, our life’s purpose is to be like Jesus.

Now I have come to the realization that Christians who go through existential crisis may not have come to this full knowledge. I do not know if I will be the next tech billionaire founder or president of my country, or just a regular mum who retires at 60 after a 9-5 job. What I do know now is that I was created to glorify God with my life and in everything I do, share His love to all and proclaim the Gospel of Christ. That is just me, how about you?

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Why this, why now

16 years ago, I was an almost carefree young woman, navigating “the” social media and digital world almost gracefully trying to figure out where I fit in. One thing was clear to me, I liked writing and sharing my thoughts and opinions, and being part of a community of positive people who engage and learn from each other. But, somewhere along the line I completely censored myself on my social media feeds, and decided that blogging (I used Google’s blogger platform) was no longer a good idea. So this is me trying to go back to that young lady who thought the world was her oyster.

What kind of community are you looking to build here

I hope my writings will bring some sort of reassurance to people who read it, that we are not much different and we all go through the same things, maybe in different ways. I’m hoping I find a community that understands my sense of humour because i’m often told - its’ out there. I’m praying to connect with amazing people who will rub off on me in a positive way.

How often would you post

I hope to post once a week - so help me God. Baby steps until I get back to that young lady I used to be.