My Husband and I Bootstrapped a SaaS Start-up and it Failed. Here is what I learned. (Part 6)
Building GlamAfric
After much negotiations, our development partner in India began building glamafric.com. As the first features became available for testing, we launched digital ad campaigns and set up a marketing funnel to capture the details of interested users. It was interesting learning how Google analytics and Facebook analytics worked.
We contacted people we knew in the hair and beauty space both in the UK and in Nigeria and pitched our platform to them, asking them to try it out and provide us with a honest constructive feedback. It was like pulling teeth. What they say is really true, strangers will support your endeavours before your family and friends.
Glamafric.com was supposed to be an appointment booking platform for businesses in the beauty space, such as salons, spas, makeup artists etc. As our marketing efforts progressed, similarly to what happened with childminder.ng, we had Nigerian beauty businesses asking us for staffing and if they could sell their items on our platform.
Nurseryjobs.ng was till very much in full throttle and we figured we could duplicate the WordPress recruitment template NurseryJobs was built on, and simply change the colour theme and name for a new job board for beauty industry in Nigeria. We did exactly that and BeautyJobs.ng was born. Simultaneously I ran both job boards while Chika focused on building the appointment booking platform.
As we approached the end of the build of the MVP for GlamAfric (GA), some businesses had signed up to use the platform to take bookings for their business and most excitingly we got into conversations with a big player in the Nigerian makeup and cosmetics space who was looking for a way to manage bookings across their multiple stores. Realising we did not have the right feature to sign them up, we refined the next iteration of GA, and added the relevant features that would allow a spa or beauty salon manage bookings across multiple sites.
In addition to our marketing efforts, in the first year, we signed up for beauty in Africa exhibitions, which didn’t provide the ROI that we hoped. By mid 2018, we had run through our money and really needed GA to start generating income. At $10 USD per month, we knew that beauty businesses who were serious about creating structure could afford to pay that amount monthly. Unfortunately we were severely constrained by a non-existent marketing budget and so could not reach them.
Chika applied to multiple accelerators, incubators and VC’s which was not successful, except for an African venture capital focused on funding for women. We were invited to pitch GA to them and since it was funding for women start-up, it made sense that I made the pitch. The pitch was to be made over a video call. It was the most never racking thing I’d ever done, pitching our fledgling start-up to two strangers and desperately praying that they would give me some money. They did not give us the money!
Somewhere in the middle of building GA web platform, we thought it was a good idea to create a webapp for the GA on our very limited budget and over stretched bandwidth, IOS and android apps.
