Stutern: An inside story of how we did in 2016

2016 started before 2016, we spent the Christmas of 2015 sending emails, making phone calls and setting up meetings, all in a bid to ensure that Stutern didn’t die with 2015. BTW: that’s the thing with early stage startups. Their early stage, are usually the days they beg to see JUST one more day, nothing more. We have an endless desire to have 48 hours in a day. It’s not fair.

On the 15th of January 2016, we marked our first year anniversary. At the time, we had moved from a team of two to a team of four and then back to two again. By February 2016, we had a working model that was picking up and meeting requests.

Funto made it as the first hire for 2016 (of course we hired her on www.stutern.com). Like everyone who has ever been on the team, she was awesome and enthusiastic. Come November 2016, she had to leave for her youth service (a one year long post-academic service to the country) in Northern Nigeria. Over the course of the year, we placed 30 to 35 candidates per month. Simply put, we placed a candidate every day in the year 2016. Awesome.

Stutern bosses hired by Spar, Max, Wecyclers, BeatFM and Drinks.ng

As time went on, we needed to put someone in charge of coming up with content for our blog. Lade came on to manage blog.stutern.com, working remotely from dorm room at the University of Lagos where she studies. We’ve always been open to remote hires at Stutern, but Lade was confirmatory proof that one can deliver from any location. She fully owned our blog and brought it to life, needing little or no supervision. She still churns out amazing articles for Stutern from that dorm room.

Lade owning her thing

Stutern of the week/month

Benjamin was God sent. He reached out to Stutern at a time when we desperately needed someone to work on skilling up the interns on our site. Benji managed the Stutern’s SkillUp program flawlessly. Later on, he, Funto and Lade became instrumental to our biggest off line success of the year; the Nigeria Internship Fair. The event had a footfall of well over 3,200 registered attendees.

Offline is the new online, we had some trainings and the bosses ended up at Hotels.ng, Drinks.ng and more

Tech Tour at Hotels.ng, Jumia Nigeria. And Lilian(recently joined Stutern) with some Stutern bosses at Meltwater

Oh, Benjamin also gave birth to our Fred Donga skit, and every skit was hardly planned. Pure serendipity.

Later into the year, we began to lose control of updating our app. A good friend, Rex, came to the rescue and ended up joining our small team. We handed over the app to him in quite a state and within a couple of months, our cumulative deployment count read 1,681. The result of these multiple commits was a lighter, scalable, and much more beautiful/useful version of the app.

The new look on the site

Throughout 2016, our key metric remained the number of candidates we were placing into internship roles. We’ve christened that metric ‘The Placement Rate”, and every month we get a ton of shit done to make the number rise. Revenue was second on the list and while comparing what we made in 2015 to what we made in 2016, it turns out that we’ve 10X the previous years result. Amazing, right??? We didn’t realize this until Henry, the accountant from Rovedana sent us our accounting books for the year. We made an insignificant amount of profit, a very small margin, but we were super impressed that we made any profit at all!

User growth was a metric we didn’t give a lot of priority to in 2016. We were more focused on place candidates in companies and making enough money to get by. That has just about set the wheel rolling for 2017. We are looking at larger companies to sign recruitment contracts with us as well government bodies(if you can help, please send an email to the company email address). We are also looking at running a Stutern ambassador program in tertiary institutions as well.

The journey hasn’t been easy. We are not quite where we want to be yet, but we are definitely far from where we used to be. A grateful heart is a thankful heart.

We take time for fun as well. That’s Keny at Benjamin’s graduation, and the whole time out for a movie night (with Rex, Church and Lilian)

So, dear reader, if you ever hear anyone talk about hiring young folks, interns or fresh graduate, or anything at all, push them to Stutern. Elp us spread the word, abeg, biko, ejo. From all of us at Stutern, Kehinde and I, we thank you for all you did last year and for 2017 let us make a dent together.

We wish you the best this year.

Lessons Learned

1. Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly.

2. Early stage startups should have a single metric, not a vanity one.

3. You are not alone, if you need help, ask. Good people will help.

4. Time, is everything.

One last thing…

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