Our numbers are down and I am gutted about it – SkilledUp Life

Irrespective of the good work our team has done, we have performed very poorly over the last several months. Let’s take a look at reality vs spin.

Volunteer Acquisition

We achieved our 1st-year target of adding 1,000 volunteers with 24 hours to spare. We achieved our 2nd-year target of adding 10,000 Volunteers 7 days after the deadline. The 3rd year target is to add 100,000. And we are nowhere on target to achieve it. In fact, we have performed so poorly since July 2022. We may talk the big game but if results are not there to back the hype, we will never truly be able to make a significant difference.

Monthly Volunteer acquisition results

Customer Acquisition

Customer acquisition which I am responsible for is even worse. We have significant churn due to a number of reasons, some of which are:

• Unprofessionalism and early abandonment of Volunteers.
• Founders lack knowledge on how to build and maintain volunteer teams.
• Founders’ inability to pay monthly or annual subscriptions due to cashflow issues.

The latter is a major issue as we target the very earliest stage of tech startups, sometimes just at the idea stage. The solution to addressing this is to target slightly more functional tech startups which already have a functioning team. But my vision of SkilledUp Life is to help the neediest tech founder realise his dream instead of helping the better-financed tech founders. I will try to hold on to this as long as possible and not ignore the neediest.

I will share the graph later on.

The missing metrics

We ought to track more metrics, but have not started to look at them for multiple reasons, e.g:

• The number of Tech Startups that grew as a result of SkilledUp Life. Growth here ought to be revenues, but that may be hard to measure at this stage.
• The number of Tech Startups that grew large enough to create jobs as a result of the help they received from Volunteers.
• The number of Volunteers who secured employment (including career transition) as a result of volunteering.
• The number of Volunteers who completed a Volunteer Term successfully.
• The number of Volunteers who secured a Volunteer Term.
• The number of Volunteers who abandoned a Volunteer Term.
• The number of Volunteers who were terminated due to lack of positive contribution.
• Number of Opportunities applied for.
• The number of Opportunities live as well as the total to date.
• Monthly Active Users/Volunteers/Customers (MAU) as well as Daily Active Users/Volunteers/Customers (DAU) – in reality, DAU is too advanced for the stage we are in.

We also need to do a better job with our community. We need to bring on board a few Volunteers to help us with this specific task.