Tutubi, Personal Services At Home

Story

In early 2021, I connected with Aswien, my new co-founder, on LinkedIn. Aswien, an investor with success in the early crypto days, had a vision to build a platform for personal services at home. With the freelancer economy booming, we joined forces, and Tutubi was born.

What was Tutubi (later NextQuest)

You can think of Tutubi in the Netherlands as similar to UrbanCompany in India/Asia or TaskRabbit in the USA. It’s a platform where users can book personal services at home, ranging from beauty for everyone to personal care for the elderly. As a user, you could find services and select the best provider based on reviews, pricing, and availability. We offered a complete end-to-end solution for both consumers and service providers.

User flow

• Find the services you need in the app.
• Choose from providers or freelancers based on reviews and availability.
• Book the service, enjoy, leave a review, and repeat.

Outcome

• We couldn’t find Product-Market Fit (PMF).
• We saw bookings after COVID, but they faded. It became a seasonal product.
• We pivoted to a B2B aggregator for the same services and team-building activities. We named it NextQuest. No PMF. Too many operations, very little money.

Highlights

• Managed a remote team of 10+ people, including engineers, designers, and marketing professionals across the globe.
• My role was Technical Product Manager, successfully launching the consumer app, partner app, and in-house tools to support operations.

Learnings

• Understand your market. Netherlands consumers weren’t ready for personal services at home; going out is an experience. We realized this very late.
• Tech is only 20% of the game unless your product is purely tech. We underestimated operations and managing freelancers.
• Pivot early. We stretched for 6 months after launch before realizing the need for a change.
• Talk to users early on. We could have validated our hypothesis sooner.
• Avoid the build trap. We developed a world-class product without generating real revenue.
• An unclear vision leads to a misaligned team. We tried too many things, all half-baked.
• Habits are hard to change, and we attempted that without sufficient research and lack of funds required to do so.
• Know your strengths, we did not have skillset to run operational demand-supply business.

Success isn’t just about building a great product—it’s about understanding your market, listening to your users, and knowing when to pivot.