My Husband and I Bootstrapped a SaaS Start-up and it Failed. Here is what I learned. (Part 5)
Running NurseryJobs
As we fleshed out the MVP for GlamAfric, that familiar excitement returned. By “we” I mean mostly Chika, I chipped in occasionally, for example to design the service menu. The idea of bringing a concept from ideation to launch was very exciting. Chika worked night and day on this, drafting the product idea and requirements for an MVP.
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.
