SkilledUp Life

SkilledUp Life continues to attract individuals who want to improve their career by gaining real experience and skills by volunteering for early stage tech startups. Our community includes: youngsters with barely any experience, those in 30s and 40s looking for career transition and those in early retirement wanting to give back. Once subscribed, you can now build concept validation, product development, marketing, user acquisition, user conversion, customer support, HR, revenue analytics and many different teams as you wish.

We have grown slowly and in the process have helped 116 tech startups. We continue to be our best customer. We simplified pricing recently from 4 plans to 2; Starter Plan (self serviced) and Advanced Plan (fully supported). 2023 started well but the second half was a disastrous period. Jan 2024 so far has been promising. Do check us out https://skilledup.life

Today, 20,000th SkilledUp Lifer (Volunteer) signed up. Our community stretches to 104 countries. Our own team now includes about 70 SkilledUp Lifers. We operate on a matrix structure with functional and regional split, e.g. Cecilia is Head of HR as well as Head of Kenya.

Starting to build a South American team to serve the customers in American time zone.

As soon as we could afford it, we gave jobs to three Volunteers who have helped us tremendously. This had made a significant difference to the operational capability of the company as well as my own efforts. As we grow, we will be offering jobs to our best SkilledUp Lifers.

When I realised that I was struggling to find time to focus, I decided to hire our first employee.

At this point, we had very little traction. Days go by without a single new volunteer signing up to our service.

I thought it would be easy to sign up our first 100 volunteers. It wasn't.

On 30th October 2021, I announced that we will get to £10k MRR in 12 months.

This started the development of our Demand Side. We had 5 customers at the time with £133 MRR.

A long way to go from where we were. We started with targeting the smallest tech companies we could find.

It took 176 days to sign up our first 100 Volunteers. We knew the two of us could not get to the 1000 volunteer mark.

This led us to add Volunteers to our team. With their help, we reached 1,000 Volunteer sign ups with 24 hours to spare.

Marathon had to be turned to a sprint on last few days. All decks on hand and we achieved it.

Built on top of a CMS - literally, no-code web app.

Team size is just me. All done by me - concept to going live.

Going to focus on building the Supply Side first.

Demand Side is made available free to Techcelerate Member Companies (https://techcelerate.ventures/members), which removes the need for me to satisfy the demand side.