My Husband and I Bootstrapped a SaaS Start-up and it Failed. Here is what I learned. (Part 2)
Scope Creep and Adoption Challenge
With childminder.ng now live, the real work began, which was finding early adopters. Social media (Facebook and Instagram) were useful resources as well as nairaland.com a Nigerian forum which was incredibly useful in advertising and getting genuine leads. We started seeing users coming through and registering themselves on the platform in search of nanny jobs. When parents signed up to the platform, they received an email that explained what service we were providing.
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.
