5 things I learned by pivoting my startup: from Fixme to Uelz

Pivoting a startup: Fixme's journey to Uelz

María Luque, co-founder of the startup Uelz, shares her entrepreneurial experience pivoting her startup from Fixme, when she went through the Startup School, to the present day:

Our entrepreneurial adventure started between 2017 and 2018 with Fixme, a marketplace for booking wellness appointments (physiotherapy, massage and personal training). We grew in Spain and Latin America, mainly Colombia. Late 2019 and 2020, prepandemia was our best moment in the life of the Startup, and that's as far as Fixme's growth went.

Covid19 made us have to stop all our operations and assume large costs in order to maintain our structure (teams in Colombia, Mexico and Spain), which reduced our growth 100%. Growing a digital product is a huge challenge, no matter how you look at it, but if that product also has a high operational dependence and other factors that make business development complex, the challenge becomes extremely complicated.

"The excuse was perfect, Covid19 has killed us, but inside we knew we could still keep fighting."

I would like to add a brief explanation about the difficulty of a marketplace like ours. We were selling services that generated infrequent purchases (2.5 services per user per month) and also those services happened in person. When a service happens in person, every time you open a new marketplace you need to invest to find supply and demand, since neither the supply nor the demand that you acquire in other marketplaces is useful in the new marketplaces. With infrequent purchases of small tickets (50€ per service on average), balancing unit economics was impossible for us, and even more so post-quarantine with the restrictions and uncertainty that had been generated.

The operational inefficiency we were suffering made it clear to us that it was not going to be possible to continue growing Fixme the way we had been doing it, so like the good entrepreneurs that we are, we began to turn our hypotheses around with the objective of moving forward, at that moment the threat of the company's death was enormous.

At that point, the easiest thing would have been to close, the excuse was perfect, Covid19 has killed us, but inside we knew that we could still keep fighting, we have that entrepreneurial character in our blood. We talked to different people in the ecosystem, with people who were dedicated to wellness and we detected several issues that we could begin to address with the intention of moving forward with our company and that was how our pivot began.

Pivoting from Fixme to Uelz

Executing the change: from Fixme to Uelz

We had to leave things behind, people who at the time had contributed a lot of value to Fixme but there was no other way to continue, we took courage and began to execute the change. We started as Fixme Connect, basically helping entrepreneur friends from non-digital sectors to digitize their collections. We quickly saw that we were helping them radically reduce their operational costs and non-payments so we got to work with this new product. In May 2021 we launched the first version of Fixme Connect and by October 2021 we had over 500 active users on our platform. Between October 2021 and December 2021, we did a lot of rebranding work, as the old branding was really hindering us when it came to attracting clients from sectors other than wellness. Right now we are focused on a radical redesign and technology change of our Uelz product, which we have just launched, at the end of April 2022 .

We have learned a lot along the way, but if I had to highlight 5, this is what I would tell you.

1- Even if it hurts, in order to move forward you have to get rid of what is no longer useful or will not be useful in the future, the sooner the better.

2- Without execution there are no options, actions are what lead you to change things.

3- A good team is essential, surround yourself only with people who contribute, the rest are unnecessary.

4- Make things very simple, this is the only way to go very fast.

5- Don't invest in growth before your time, money is spent before you know it.

María Luque and Xandra Etxabe, Uelz founders

Author: María Luque (CEO and Founder of Uelz)

María Luque and Xandra Etxabe went through the 16th edition of the Startup School and since then they are an active part of the Tetuan Valley community. They support different entrepreneurs as mentors and accompany us in different programs providing their entrepreneurial experience, skills and knowledge.