My Husband and I Bootstrapped a SaaS Start-up and it Failed. Here is what I learned. (Part 1)
Race to build.
In 2015, while exploring potential business ideas, my husband suggested that we could enter the tech start-up space by identifying a gap in an industry that we could address. My Husband, is a business analyst by trade, with a successful background delivering ERP solutions with technology teams for big companies. So he knew a thing or two about MVP’s and SDLC. Although I was digitally savvy and had an MBA from a reputable UK university, up until then I still struggled to explain to anyone what my husband did for work. Even after he had explained it to me multiple times, my response to anyone who asked was - he works in IT.
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.
