An Inside View of Stutern — The early beginnings till now
A self-reflective piece usually comes at the height of success or a terrible low. This story doesn’t fit into either situation. Rather, it’s a reflection born out of a request to share the Stutern story, a company my twin brother and I founded a few years ago.
Dr. Aaron, my pastor during grad school, and someone I deeply respect, recently asked me to share the story of how we started Stutern, as he was looking to start something similar in his home country. I realized I could make my story public, so you too might learn from it.
Stutern’s Humble Beginnings
Taiwo and I first had the idea for Stutern during the 21-day NYSC orientation camp of our service year. The National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) is a one-year obligatory service observed by every Nigerian graduate. It’s usually preceded by a 21-day orientation in each of the 36 states in Nigeria.
While at camp in Ogun State, my brother and I wondered how we, alongside thousands of Nigerian youth, could make the best use of our time at camp, the entire NYSC year, as well as prepare for careers in our chosen fields. After camp, Taiwo and I returned home and spent all night brainstorming on how to help recent grads and students get internships. We wanted to build a company that would prepare Nigerian youth for the workplace and also help companies hire and onboard the best talent. That night we gave our newly formed company a name ‘Stutern’ and we wrote it down on our iPads. That night, four years ago, Stutern was born.
The next morning, we went to an internet café to secure the domain name for Stutern and two other names on our list. While I can’t remember what one of the other two ideas was about, we decided on Stutern because we could see it resonating with our target audience. For us, Stutern was a way to address some of the career preparation and work-readiness issues affecting Nigerian youth. We hoped Stutern could help young Nigerian professionals upgrade their skillset in order to find employment opportunities with the best-earning potential and advancement opportunities.
On the other side of the coin was the employer market. We didn’t fully understand the extent to which companies ( the demand side) were facing the critical problem of finding the best talent. We reached out for help from Tunde Success, an HR professional at MTN. We first met Tunde during our undergrad days, when he came to our university for a speaking engagement.
We had kept in touch with Tunde, so this time we reached out for help on this particular idea. He agreed to meet with us and we ran into his office in our NYSC khaki. He offered some tips; and we figured out that during NYSC was the best time to work on Stutern. If things failed, we would know that we needed proper jobs after the service year.
Three months down the line, Stutern wasn’t making much progress except legal registration, basic mockups of what the website was going to look like, and an iPad filled with PDFs of references and articles we could relate to. We decided to hire a friend to build the Stutern website, since Taiwo and I couldn’t code. We gathered our NYSC pay for three months and paid him for his services. At this point, we were working at our Place of Primary Assignment (PPA) and also took up internships in our chosen fields, all in a bid to make the best use of our time.
Halfway through our internship and NYSC year, we had to return to the UK for our graduation. We would be away for two weeks. After our graduation, we thought about the progress of Stutern and realized that at the pace we were working, we would not be able to achieve anything significant since the developer wasn’t delivering on the website development.
We decided to take a closer look at our options:
A. Get a new developer, but where was the money?
B. Learn how to code, but where would we start from?
C. Forget about the idea and get a proper job.
We went with option B and jumped online for resources to learn, using Codecademy, CodeSchool and other similar learning platforms. We learned the necessary syntax, but still couldn’t build a product. We took it a step further by finding a classroom training center called General Assembly where we could learn all we would need to build the web platform for Stutern. It was very expensive so we jumped on the phone with them to discuss our goals.
They advised one of us to take the back-end course while the other will take the front-end course. Taiwo was very clear who will take each. He went for back-end based on his strength and I went for front-end which was where I was stronger. We still had a problem. How were we going to pay for this course? Our parents were able to help with the down payment. Starting the course meant we were going to be kicked out of NYSC. Our two weeks’ vacation extended to 10 weeks and then to 20 weeks.
We dropped out of General Assembly halfway as we could no longer afford the payment.
I can say, by God’s grace we bumped into a guy, Tommy, at a tech event in Shoreditch. He was open to teaching everything we needed to know. Tommy had been coding since he was a kid, and he loved our idea. Every weekday, Monday — Friday, we resumed with Tommy at Google Campus in London.
We’d stop working at 5 pm, explore the city and resume at a restaurant, Pret A Manger till they closed at 9 pm. After work, we’d get on the next train home, rest and then repeat the process all over again. That was part of the hustle.
After a soft launch of Stutern, which involved on-boarding our first set of users and connecting the first employer to talent, it was time to return back home. When we got back to Nigeria, we were broke and our NYSC was already cancelled. It was a solemn, distrusting, and confusing time because we weren’t sure what the next step was.
We freelanced for a while and then one fateful day, we got a mail from CcHub in response to an application we submitted before our graduation. We were invited for an interview. They liked the progress we had made and sent us an offer in less than 24 hours. An offer that included an office space and funding. We weren’t sure if accepting it was the right thing to do, so we decided to cold email top entrepreneurs via Facebook. Mark Essien was the only one who responded. We explained the terms of the offer and asked for advice. He said “If it’s your only offer, take it. Better than nothing.”
We accepted the offer towards Christmas Eve, 2014. We now had a sure plan for Stutern come January 2015. The future wasn’t looking bad. The journey ahead was long and riddled with uncertainties, but we took a deep breath and had blast with the family at Christmas. Mum wasn’t excited. She didn’t like the idea of not concluding our NYSC. Dad was calm, and together, they supported our dreams for Stutern. We still needed to complete our NYSC while building Stutern, in Yaba.
Growing the Business
January 2015, we worked with Tunji and Damilola as the Director and Program Manager for the pre-incubation. In six months we acquired more users and placed a few talents with employers. We had burnt through $5k and hadn’t made any money. It was at this point we decided to change our business model. Our new plan brought in revenue and we were finally able to pay the bills.
Nonetheless, it was tough for us on a personal level. We ran out of cash for personal use, our car broke down on 3rd mainland bridge, we had to squat with at least 3 friends and family for the next six months. It was a tough time and we needed oxygen as we were about to give up. We had also resumed NYSC at this point, shuttling between Lagos state and Abia state — Imo state. It was a defining moment and we had to decide if this was a hustle we wanted to continue with. We decided to press on. Little did we know that things would get tougher.
Towards January 2016, Taiwo bumped into Ope of Jobberman, we started talking about partnership.
“since we have thousands of users and you, i.e Jobberman seem to have a lot of positions, how can we begin to match our candidates to your positions? We’ve built a platform that screens and tests candidates, we are sure of our candidates.”
This conversation evolved into our second investment and we struck a strategic partnership. Come January 2016, we started the relationship with Jobberman. The buzz went out and we had spikes of new users. It was at this point we began to refine the business. April 2016, we completed our NYSC and the journey with Stutern continued.
2016 was a good year. As we experimented, we increased the team and then decreased the team. We got to a point where growth was steep and we learned some hard lessons. Despite everything, we pulled off our first internship fair successfully.
At the end of 2016, we were still learning about the market. We began to realize that about 10% of our total users were being placed no matter the growth. By December 2016, we were not so sure of where the business was going. Yet, we were able to experiment and learn more lessons, made new mistakes and started asking new questions.
By 2017, we repeated few of the things that worked, and we shut down some products that didn’t do well or were not scalable. By doubling down on the product that worked, we began to gain deeper insights into this new focus. Towards the end of 2017, we ventured into a part of our business that boosted our revenue. We performed poorly by the Q4 of 2017, but we forecasted Q1 of 2018 was going to be pivotal and it was. Now the journey continues.
It’s not easy, there are new grounds to break and there are new mistakes to make. My twin and I are a year older on the 4th of April. Funny how time flies. Cheers to the new age! 🍻
Lessons Learnt
1. The Idea
2. The Market
3. The Team
There’s a famous argument by Andreessen Horowitz of a16z about what’s more important in a startup: the people, the idea or the market? I’ll leave you to answer that because it’s a good exercise. Ed Catmull of Pixar Animation also spoke about this from another perspective in chapter 7 (Feeding the Beast) of his book, Creativity Inc.
1.The Idea: What we’ve learnt about the idea is that — we are tackling a critical problem. Nonetheless, we should not be so attached to it. If an idea is struggling to make money to thrive, we have to crack it or move onto something else. The idea might be great but if it’s not great enough to attract customers how then would it attract investors? Again, Africa is different from North America, especially Silicon Valley where you can raise pre-product. For many reasons, that’s not the case here in Africa. For the idea to survive, the strategy of making money or getting x number of active/paying users (depending on your North Star) must be clear and aggressively executed. The end goal is to build a business that’s a money-making-machine where you put in $10 and you get back about $100. That means you are solving a problem someone is willing to pay for. The idea might be naked from the very beginning, it’s the executor’s job to patiently cloth it.
2. The Market: We will touch base on the customers here. When we realized that a part of our customers were willing to pay more — more in the sense of — covering our expenditure, we had to figure out how we could invest more resources to build that aspect of our business. Also, we launched a product early 2016. The slides, sheets and projections were nice, but after the execution, we saw it wasn’t going anywhere. We had to shut it down in less than two weeks.
The market is very critical. I think a great part of our work as African founders will be to see how we can expand across and beyond Africa — globalization. The market is where we talk about the demand and supply. It’s where we pay attention to the unit economics, margin and distribution techniques. Finally, it’s where we are learning to pay attention to quality service and scalability.
3. The People: One thing I could remember Dr. Aaron told me about 5 years ago was, just see how you can pass the baton to the next generation. People, in this instance refers to the team that makes the idea happen. You need an army. With enough money, you can recruit the best talent. If you’re short on cash, you’ll need to bootstrap, with members of your team wearing multiple hats. At some point, the team might lose faith, that’s when the leadership comes in to reinforce the vision and carry members of your team along.
Growing Stutern has taught us life skills and forced us to answer some important life questions .
In conclusion, we don’t know what’s going to happen this time next year, but we’re confident and hopeful about the future. The future is for those who are willing to get their hands dirty. The reward won’t be instant.
Know this, we all have different race to run. Find your race and go all in to win it. If it’s not working, try something else — join a company, go for further studies, start a new company, etc. Try to answer the question “what do I want from life?” Learn from your mistakes and build upon those lessons. A year from now, you’ll be able to connect the dots. Hindsight is 20/20.
The Future of Stutern
We are powering the next generation of people that would support the middle class. By helping the youth get jobs, we are creating the wealth of the nation — continent. Wealth includes all assets, which means human capital (the value of earnings over a person’s lifetime), natural capital, produced capital, and net foreign assets.
Our goal this year is to train 400 UI/UX Designers and Front End Developers. We’ve trained close to 50 so far, so we have a huge task ahead as we begin Q2 of 2018. If you are looking to hire or partner, please leave a message. Also, if you have any questions or observations, use the comment section to share your thoughts/questions.
Where is this all going? I have realized this is a question that will always evolve. Nonetheless…it is well :) If you liked this, click the 💚 below so other people will see this here on Medium.
