My Husband and I Bootstrapped a SaaS Start-up and it Failed. Here is what I learned. (Part 7)
Another spinoff platform. Sunsetting the job boards.
By 2019, we were constantly being asked by some Nigerian beauty brands, if it was possible to sell their products on GA. We were initially worried that our marketing campaigns may not have landed well with the recipients as GA was an appointment booking platform and not an online marketplace to sell beauty products. Due to multiple requests and the difficulty get GA early adopters, in 2019, we decided to create an online beauty marketplace, where Nigerian beauty brands and retailers could setup a store front and sell their products, similar to Etsy, eBay and Amazon.
By now you must have noticed the trend in our story. Spin up a brand new product if enough ‘potential’ customers asked for it. We briefed this new idea to our tech partners and asked them to tell us the cheapest way they could build an ebay-like marketplace for us. They came back with a WordPress solution. WordPress had a marketplace them that could be customised to fit what we wanted.
We agreed on this and they set to work, building glamafricbeautyshop.com.
“GlamAfric Beauty Shop was an online marketplace for beauty and cosmetics products by Nigerian brands and sellers. It was founded to provide a platform for Nigerian beauty and cosmetics brands to sell their products directly to customers who are looking for those products and are ready to buy.”
I must admit that GA Beauty Shop was my favourite of all our endeavours. I saw the solution it provided to both seller/brands and consumer/buyer. We poured our hearts into building beauty shop. Due to the share volume of work we had to do we employed remote workers in Lagos, who helped with business development, social media management, client onboarding, customer success etc.
Beauty shop was our most successful brand, we managed to build it with our income from our 9-5 jobs. I got a job as a software tester as our business ventures had not started generating income we could live on.
Eventually, GA Beauty Shop stalled at the same level where the job boards had stalled. My theory is that we simply did not reached the right user demographic. The most frustrating thing for us was that some beauty brands/sellers who seemed desperate to sell online, did not want to do the work to setup their store front. Setting up a store front involved, inputting store details, bank details, and uploading product information. This all seemed too much for some of them. In addition to this, a lack of a marketing budget meant we could not grow the brand.
Eventually, we concluded that the job boards had run their course and agreed to shut them down so as to free up some bandwidth to run GlamAfric appointment booking platform and GlamAfric Beauty Shop.
