This is more of a historical note to myself.
Early Success
I hacked WordPress (Version 1) and went live in 3 days. This was an awesome result as I did everything myself from the end of July 2020 to November 2020.
I wanted to reach £10k MRR before we ditched the WordPress hack. We never achieved this. I tried hard but without product innovation it became impossible.
I thought it would be harder to replace Version 1 by replacing it with our own coded solution. This is where I went wrong.
Version 2 with WordPress
I searched for a better WordPress solution and paid for several themes including data migration plugins. I got my trusted developer from Techcelerate/Deal Lite seconded to SkilledUp Life. We wasted a long time and scarce resources.
Version 2 with Laravel, Inertia, Vue and Tailwind
Then I finally called it a day and decided to code our solution. Again I made mistakes by trying to shortcut by choosing PHP scripts, templates, etc. A lot of time and resources were wasted.
Version 2 Team
Then eventually we started moving in the right direction. We finally started to leverage some of the 52,000 skilled volunteers on SkilledUp Life.
We recruited 2 UI/UX designers, 2 product/business analysts and 1 QA. The 2 UI/UX designers from China have been brilliant. QA from Sri Lanka is well experienced. One of the product/business analysts abandoned us. The remaining product/business analyst is yet to deliver value.
The first developer volunteer who joined abandoned us. Since last week, we added 2 more UI/UX Designers and 4 Developers.
Current Volunteer Vacancies
To complete the team, we need a competent product manager volunteer.
The loss time
Loss time can never be recovered. SkilledUp Life is 4 years and 3+ months old. If I had made the right decision, we could have gone live with Version 2:
- Aggressive approach: Started 18 months after going live.
- Ideal approach: Started 24 months after going live.
- Worst case: Started 36 months of going live – in fact, this was the Version 2 WordPress attempt.
There is no point in regretting the past – the challenge now is to complete building V2.0 as quickly as possible and start iterating the product fast.
It’s inexcusable for me to run SkilledUp Life with zero product innovation. This is a costly lesson I learned.
Advice
Be brave! Even if you have not hit the metrics and know what you have built has legs, go for V2 quickly. No code and low code are ok for V1 but never for V2 onwards, even if everyone else says it’s fine.
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