My Husband and I Bootstrapped a SaaS Start-up and it Failed. Here is what I learned. (Part 9)
Sunsetting GlamAfric Appointment Booking Platform.
With the distraction of all other platforms gone, we decided to give GA one more push. We redesigned the web platform and mobile apps, added features that would allow multi-site businesses centrally manage their bookings. We’d hoped that this would eventually close the deal with the big player in the Nigerian beauty space I alluded to earlier. We were even willing for them to try out the enterprise feature for free for a whole year, as that would validate our our offering.
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;
We rented a co working space and later realised it was highly unnecessary and could have used that money towards our marketing spend.
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.
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.
We were over committed. Our time and resources were spread too thin.
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.
