How Project Kooda Found Product-Market Fit During Lockdown
By: Joshua Minsk
Tags: Startup, South Africa, Business, Product Market Fit, Covid

Quick background

We spent the first few months of 2020 running a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for our company, Project Kooda. We’d just developed a platform designed to use an AI-people mix to match high-skill freelancers up with companies that needed them on a contract basis.

Project Kooda Companies page

After releasing this successful MVP, companies were lining up, ready and committed to using our product. We also had freelance-professionals signing up left, right, and centre.

But just two weeks into our public launch in South Africa, a national lockdown was announced, followed by the issuing of a National State of Disaster due to the outbreak of Covid-19.

The breath was totally knocked out of our business. All the verbal commitments we had fell by the wayside. We were left wondering what we should do next. We couldn’t help but think that our business prospects had ended before we’d even had a chance to begin to build something great.

But as all good entrepreneurs do, we chose to find the opportunity present in the crisis before us. We found that the protracted lockdown had a severe impact on the local economy, and many firms responded with waves of retrenchments. This meant two things:

Many highly skilled people were suddenly looking for freelance jobs; and, Many companies had just started looking for ways to keep their businesses operational, despite the gaps left by the retrenchments they had just made.

We soon realised that our product was perfectly suited and adapted to solve the problems firms were facing as a result of the lockdown. We figured that if we simply kept pushing, we’d be soaring once the initial scare of the lockdown died down. It was only set to last a few weeks, after all…

“We need this yesterday!..call us back in 6 months’ time”

A few weeks into the national lockdown, and after spending countless hours meeting with corporates across the country, we did not feel like we were making any significant progress. We were trying to convince businesses that hiring freelancers would not only keep them operational at a fraction of the cost, but it would also provide much-needed relief to the recently unemployed. Most businesses felt the same way we did, and could see the value of our product — but were still unable to commit to it.

But why was this the case?

“decision fatigue refers to the deteriorating quality of decisions made by an individual after a long session of decision making. It is now understood as one of the causes of irrational trade-offs in decision making.”

- Roy Baumeister, in The Psychology of Irrationality

Roy seems to sum up their reasoning perfectly. Nose-diving sales, retrenchments, restructuring, and salary cuts left decision-makers at companies exhausted and unable to commit to anything — even a product perfectly suited to their situation.

Fair enough, but we knew that we needed to see an uptick in user adoption soon. If we didn’t, the writing would be on the wall for our business.

In an effort to solve our problem, we started listening more intently to our prospective clients. We tried to pay attention to the ‘meta’ of what they were saying. Our thought process was that when a client says, for example, “we’re just too busy”, that shouldn’t be taken as a sign to come back later — it should be taken as a signal that your product is being perceived as something time consuming and complex.

Anybody that has worked in operations knows full-well of the pains of new process creation and rollout. Documentation, training, meetings…nightmare.

Project Kooda regularly cuts lead-times in half, but only after companies have completed their onboarding and received training to use the service. It became clear that the barrier to entry was just too high for teams that were already under capacity and stretched to their limits.

Back to the drawing board

After a sneaky, curfew-breaking emergency meeting at one of our co-founders’ homes, we began workshopping. We decided that we needed to build a new tool that would address all of the issues that we’d picked up on. We resolved that the tool needed to:

Be accessible to small businesses. Lockdown seemed to impact SME’s the worst, our product needed to be financially attainable to them. Have an ultra-low barrier to entry. No more lengthy onboarding processes or long-term commitment. Immediately demonstrate value. Whatever we developed, we wanted to deliver bite-sized value at the point of entry. Keep freelancer experience at the center of our design. How could we claim to have the best freelance experts in SA without treating them as such?

After a grueling two-week sprint, we designed and built Kooda Connect — a subdivision of Project Kooda.

The product allows anyone to instantly book a call with an industry leader to chat about a problem they are facing. Tax, Legal, B-BBEE, Cyber Security, Marketing, and Cloud experts at the fingertips of anybody who needs them, at a fraction of the normal costs associated with that degree of consultancy.

The best part? No sign-up required. Simply find an expert in the field you’re looking for help with, book time in their built-in calendar (which integrates directly with their personal calendar, so you can trust the timeslots), and pay right on the spot via our integrated payment gateway.

So what happens if your session extends beyond advice and requires work to be done? Well, Project Kooda has readily built-in tools to help you manage that full project lifecycle, all in one place, without skipping a beat.

Kooda Connect

With a handful of top local and international freelancers, we launched our product.

Traction

Right after we started talking to companies about Kooda Connect, we realised that we had created something that resonated with them. Bookings started flowing in, and so did the feedback that would help us improve our offering. Companies have reported that our service halves the price of their current consultancy providers and delivers results within days, rather than months. We also saw a massive uptick in the number of freelance contracts being created and managed via Project Kooda, almost all of which started off with a consultancy session on Kooda Connect. Our product finally began to generate revenue and more importantly, deliver on our promise to help freelancers access more reliable work.

On the freelancer side, we wanted to create an experience that was 10 times better than anything available, anywhere else. After speaking to hundreds of Freelancers, we identified that their number one frustration was the need to spend most of their time finding work, with very little time doing the actual work that they enjoy. We couldn’t agree more - and we used this insight to further shape our product design. Validation came when many of our beta freelancers started asking for links to their profiles to send on to prospective clients. Their feedback was that they found it far easier than managing bookings and payments manually. Their time is taken more seriously because we charge for it, which makes them more comfortable with adding value right out the gates (improving the client experience in the process).

Key takeaways

So what were our learnings over the past few months? Since lockdown is more or less over, we’ve removed the tips for dealing with working from home during load-shedding, as well as how to cope with people that aren’t aware that their camera is on during Zoom meetings. I’ve summarised our core learnings below:

Listen to your users’ problems, not their solutions. We’ve all heard it before — ‘it’d be great if it could do this..’ or ‘it’d be SO cool if it could do that…’. We went down the rabbit hole of thinking that if we simply built what companies had asked for, we’d be in the green. This proved to be wrong time and again, and cost us many precious hours at the start of lockdown. The simple truth is, it is your customers’ job to tell you about their problem, and your job to create the solution. Hold your problem and customers tightly, hold on to your solution loosely. We knew the problem existed, and that our solution had faults, but the prospect of re-building was so scary that we had initially considered moving our service to at other markets as a fix. We ultimately decided that we had set out to solve a problem and were damn well going to solve it, and we are very glad that we did. Project Kooda (our original product) is starting to look like a fantastic success. The reason it didn’t work initially was because new concepts require iteration and innovation. That came to us in the form of rethinking the path of entry for companies. Your solution needs to be 10 times better than the original. The source of Kooda’s traction was not our relationships with companies — it came from our top freelancers loving the product so much that they wanted to funnel all of their work through it. A product that changes the game is never just a little bit better than the competition. It has to make people wince at the idea of ever returning to the old way of doing things. Can you imagine going back to sending letters by post now that we’ve got instant messaging and email?

Looking forward

South Africa has a lot of rebuilding to do post-lockdown. We’re working hard to get sustainable work for as many talented freelancers as possible, and to help companies rise back up into stronger, more lean entities. We believe that the best way to take on the challenge ahead is by helping high-skill individuals transition into freelance consulting work, and to help companies form and implement strategies to incorporate freelancers into their workspace.

We’d love to hear about your learnings during lockdown. Please submit them as an email to info@projectkooda.com