Read Part 1 here
Co-founder 2 had been having issues that he wasn't voicing. To date, I've never understood what the issues were. We'd set up a meeting; myself and co-founder 3 would drive to the agreed location only for him to not show up, or he'd give a flimsy excuse. It happened several times. It did not come entirely as a surprise when the website wasn't functioning at the very time we needed it most. He was the sole custodian of the C-panel access, while we only needed the content-editing rights - we didn't see the need to all have full access.
It stayed down for around three weeks, which meant the only customers that we delivered to were a few regulars who'd gotten used to ordering via phone. Myself and co-founder 3, with the help of the friends whose apartment we were crashing at, found a developer, who set up a Prestashop e-commerce template in like a day. It was a lot better than the earlier one; responded well and was also a lot more aesthetically appealing. We hosted it under a revised url(Initially it was Boozit, we renamed it Boozeit ) since it was taking too long to get a hold of co-founder 2 (and the credentials for the earlier domain). I spent the next half day re-uploading the catalogue, redesigning banners, and updating information. Co-founder 3 was busy working on delivery logistics; of course the hiatus we'd had meant we could no longer guarantee enough orders to keep the delivery company we'd been using.
Restarting from scratch was anything but easy. Early adopters are not a group you want to lose; they're the first people willing to try out your product(s)/service(s) and if the experience is great for them, then you can count on their word-of-mouth to bolster your marketing effort. If they're happy, the second group(which waits for feedback from early adopters) which is larger will also try it out, and you have a domino effect of larger groups trying it out and subsequently rising user numbers. If they're unhappy, well that domino-train won't be carrying very good news about your product/service and you'll spend a lot of time looking for the proverbial needle-in-a-haystack user.
Which is what we did for the next 8 or so months- working the hay - with like a needle for every ten truckloads of hay. We were broke, which meant actualising the scattered deliveries was almost impossible. Sometimes we'd borrow a car and do the deliveries ourselves, but most times we had to tell the customers we couldn't deliver, or that the product was out of stock, or any of a myriad of excuses. Morale was low, tension high. We were struggling to both run a startup and to survive - food and shelter. This was tinder waiting for the smallest spark to turn into flames, which happened often with constant disagreements.
A little recap: sometime before our scattered launch, we'd added a member to the team, who had proved very useful. Afterwards we decided to add him as a partner, I'll refer to him as co-founder 4. After an arduous 8 months, countless of calls, emails and reaching out to people for investment, a friend to co-founder 4 agreed to invest, not in lumpsome but he'd take care of bills and other needs like marketing on a rolling basis. By this time, co-founder 3 had opted out to focus on other interests. I was also seriously considering starting something else at this point, but with co-founder 4's nudging decided to give Boozeit one last shot. I'd also remained in close contact with the developer who set us up with the Prestashop. (He later joined us and became our CTO. I'll refer to him as CTO from this point).
Around this time, we got a BBC appearance which drove massive traffic to our website. Well, the traffic was mostly from elsewhere around the world so it didn't exactly convert to orders. The website hadn't ever experienced such a spike and so it started malfunctioning. The CTO got it up and running within no time and it's at this point that I formerly asked him to join the team. It was August 2016. He'd been building a laundry-on-demand service called Oshatap with two other guys. He would help us with the technical aspects of Boozeit and we'd help them with the marketing and operational parts of Oshatap. Co-founder 4 had a problem with this arrangement though, and after a short while we reverted to our original teams. However, CTO remained our CTO. He built an android app as well which was super useful for mobile orders. An error was made during listing on playstore though, which meant when we needed to replace it(which should have been an upgrade), we couldn't and had to start getting downloads from scratch again. And then the same thing happened when we switched to gen 3 platform eight months later.
So we were now a full team. With the little angel investment we'd secured, we rented an apartment which was both the living space and office(the money was enough for just about rent, internet, to keep the lights on and some operations). We refocused our energy onto Boozeit, and made some serious traction for the second time, partnering with various brands and getting a lot of visibility(interviews, events... ). We were still having massive delivery cost problems though; by this time we were working with a different liquor store, who was also a wholesaler so we could get some competitive prices that meant we'd make some money with large orders. The majority of orders weren't large though - they averaged Ksh. 2000.
One time when our model was tested to the limits is when we partnered with Ocharge, a then new startup that offered reward points to it's users that they could redeem for say booze at half the price on Boozeit. For us this was a chance for massive publicity since they had a huge marketing spend with billboards all over town and regular interviews in top Tv and Radio stations. At the peak of it, myself and co-founder 4 would do some route deliveries by matatu as our 4 bodaboda partners handled the rest, to save on cost.
It was at this point that I declared it urgent to switch the biz model to the marketplace I'd envisioned from the onset. Being a deliveries startup meant we could only serve a small radius while working with one store. A marketplace model, on the other hand, would enable us partner with as many stores as necessary, meaning the delivery distances would be shorter and customers would be able to pay as low as Ksh. 200 for deliveries, as opposed to the Ksh. 500 - 1000 it was costing us to make deliveries(Customers still payed a flat Ksh. 200, and we topped up for the longer deliveries). A marketplace model would also offload the deliveries part from ourselves to liquorstores, which would allow us to focus on the platform, marketing, seeking and working with partners. It would also be easier to scale. This was a cause for constant disagreement between myself and co-founder 4, who was of the opinion we improve on the delivery model by buying delivery bikes. This would also have meant hiring full-time customer service staff to coordinate the deliveries, and we'd be confined to a service radius not exceeding 5km, if we were ever to make money. This stalemate affected team spirit and cohesion.
As it were, we were losing customers again due to the delivery bottlenecks. Deliveries were either taking too long, or they got last-minute cancellations. At around the same time(November 2016), CTO participated in a pitch competition for building a health app and won the first round of it. This meant he needed to get ready for the next step which included a trip to Germany for the next pitch, scheduled for February 2017. This meant the new generation Boozeit platform, whose design we were discussing, had to wait as co-founder 4 joined the pitch team to help.
For every day we were running as a delivery service, we were losing customers. It took another half-year before we had the marketplace and its apps ready, by which time deliveries were almost grinding to a halt. The relationships amongst us were also at their worst. We embarked on signing up liquor stores, and had a liquor store for every 5km in Nairobi in a few weeks. We had built stores their own order management apps and they'd use riders within their areas to ensure deliveries happened.
It was too little too late; already, more deep-pocketed players like Jumia and Diageo(EABL) had taken note of the online drinks trend and were running Jumia Party and DrinksDelivery respectively. About a dozen drinks delivery apps had also cropped up with some liquor stores already running their own delivery services. At this point, the only thing that would have saved us was a huge amount of capital, to build the best experience possible and for marketing and operations. Well, we were still relying on our angel investor who was quickly becoming impatient.
We continued for a few more months, with trickling orders that didn't motivate our partner stores to take us seriously. Not that we had much motivation remaining among us either. By around March 2018, it had become apparent we couldn't keep operating. We soon closed down, with extremely strained relationships. It was a sad thing to let Boozeit go, but it was my best startup masterclass. Sometimes I think I made every mistake a founder could make.