My Husband and I Bootstrapped a SaaS Start-up and it Failed. Here is what I learned. (Part 3)
Spinoff Product and Growth Strategy
Did I mention that we were fast running out of money? One day we received a cease and desist letter from the lawyers of the biggest childcare marketplace in the UK. They accused us of stealing their idea and threated to squash us like bugs if we did not takedown our website. Little did they know that their stupid little letter was all we needed to dump that sinking ship. The joke is on them.
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.
