Just completed the weekly Sales Meeting at SkilledUp Life today. We discussed the positive story of one of our customers and how to amplify it. This is almost an ideal customer reference. Hope the team left motivated.
What is China50k or Chinese50k? It’s an audacious plan by me to acquire 50,000 of the 150,000 Chinese Students and Graduates in the UK and provide them with an option to acquire UK experience and skills through SkilledUp Life. Crazy, hah! Perhaps. To achieve this, we need to recruit 30 Chinese UK graduates into SkilledUp Life.
I had the privilege to speak at an Accelerate Me session last Tuesday. Yesterday, I signed a Accelerator Partnership Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with their President, Jasper Lee. Under this Agreement, Accelerate Me cohort members can benefit from 20% discount on SkilledUp Life price plans.
In my effort to be efficient (I’m still a slacker), I seem to have dropped all the niceties. My sentences are straight forward. I still use please but they are more to the point. I don’t write long essays when emailing. I try to keep things compact. I seem to have removed the filters, which means output can be quite row. Sadly, this drove two of my invaluable team members to resign over the weekend. “Yes, we decided to resign because we felt that the working environment at SkilledUp Life was not as supportive or friendly as we had hoped…
Started with just me and my lead developer, we started to bring on SkilledUp Life volunteers at the end of December 2024. Now the team has expanded into: Head of Product – me Product Manager Lead Developer (only full timer) Back-end Developer Lead Designer UI/UX Designers Front-end Developers QA User Tester Next would be to add DevOps. Image credit: ChatGPT
Don’t give up your paid working hours to join SkilledUp Life team I just interviewed a Brit for a leadership role at https://skilledup.life – to my surprise, she was looking to compromise paid hours to join us as a Volunteer. No one needs to do this. SkilledUp Life Volunteer Term is designed to be an add on to daily life. It should not be a replacement. Think of us as – instead of watching TV and relaxing in the evening, spend 13 weeks with us. You can gain amazing experience and skills in a truly international remote team. This might…
The attrition rate at the SkilledUp Life team has reduced to 58.93% which is good. However, this is artificially improved due to the very low recruitment velocity experienced at present. So we should not congratulate ourselves. It’s my belief this could be reduced to 40%. This should be the key focus of the Deputy Head of HR we are currently recruiting.
Don’t waste time focusing on the wrong type of customers. Some customers will love your product. Some might hate it. And there will be plenty of others between love and hate. I’ve learned over the years that you cannot make every customer love your product. It’s better to let those who hate your product go and focus on those who love it. I just heard from a past customer that for him, SkilledUp Life was a waste of time. He had particularly strong views that would not be tolerated in the modern workplace. On the opposite end, we have customers…
We have so many tech startup customers who ought to be paying us the Advanced Plan pricing, yet continue to stay on the Starter Plan. I even heard from one customer that their revenues tripled recently. In one case, other than the founder, 100% of the team members are SkilledUp Lifers. Yet they will continue not to upgrade to reflect their growth. With immediate effect (after giving sufficient notice), we increased pricing. We have also introduced limits which we did not want to impose before. Sadly, as companies do not upgrade to suit their usage and revenue growth, we had…
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…
