Ubuntu Baba

"Analysis paralysis is way worse than taking a risk and failing, which is actually learning."

Becoming My Own First Customer and Growing to $20K per Month:
https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/becoming-my-own-first-customer-and-growing-to-20k-per-month-4c2cfd2280

As I created the product for myself initially, I was really my first customer! And I was fussy and a perfectionist. Eventually I realized it was becoming a bit of analysis paralysis and I needed to get some further opinions.

I started wearing the baby carrier out and asking friends to try it out, and from the first day I did that, I had Moms asking to place their orders from me. I decided to make and give away about 10 baby carriers so I could get some honest feedback on my product.

After a few minor changes to the design I was then happy to start selling. In one day, I setup a simple Woocommerce Wordpress website, Facebook page and Instagram profile for the business and just started posting. To start it was just friends and friends of friends making the purchases, but then eventually we got our first 'real' customer - a stranger that had never heard of our business before, and lived in another city, and paid via credit card!

That was the most exciting moment for me and I think it's the moment I started taking my business really seriously. It placed a whole lot more real world pressure onto me - this was now REAL and I had to deliver, the product, the instructions, the quality, the promise we made to them when they gave us their money.

I think word of mouth has still been our biggest momentum and sale maker to date.

In December 2018 I found out that one of the biggest retail giants in South Africa had shamelessly copied the complete design and concept of the baby carrier that I had put my heart and soul into for the last 4 years of my life. Full blog post here.

Long story short, after trying to get in contact with them numerous times and not making any head way, I decided to take it to social media and within minutes it went viral. The support we got from the South African public was intense and within 24 hours of the blog post being published, they had removed the product from their shelves.

Following the blog post there was a crazy media storm that hit national and international news headlines and we were thrown into the spotlight. It was a very stressful time of my life, but in hindsight, we could never have paid for that amount of free PR.

After much up and down between myself and them, we managed to reach a settlement agreement and my business was compensated. The full joint media statement is available here.

I learnt many lessons through this experience about the importance of intellectual property and with help from my attorney we wrote a really useful blog post about that here.

The first 12 weeks of motherhood were seriously challenging for me. If my baby wasn’t in my arms constantly, there were tears and an equal amount of those tears were my own. I couldn’t believe that THIS was Motherhood and I desperately needed to find a way to make my baby stop crying all day long and find a way to make him sleep for longer than 45 minutes at a time.

A freelance web designer at the time, I discovered 'babywearing' through a friend and it changed my life! The only problem was there were limitations to the baby carriers on the market at that time, and so I saw a gap and the idea for Ubuntu Baba came to life.

My goal was to create an easy to use, breathable and comfortable carrier that could be used from the newborn days onwards. After many different prototypes and assuring my design team time and time again that; “okay, I swear this is the one!” – I finally managed to design my dream baby carrier. With my baby comfortably asleep on my chest, I could finally continue my journey of Motherhood with peace of mind.

This is the first business that I have started without the main goal of the business being: to make money. This time around it was different, I truly NEEDED this product in my life, and I knew that other parents out there did too.