Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by SkilledUp 1449 days ago
Let me share my recent story

It took me 176 days to sign up 100 people to https://skilledup.life as Volunteers, which will help them to gain real Experience to improve their career prospects.

I started SkilledUp Life all by myself and went live on 1st Aug 2020. Then hired Mithun in Nov, when I really struggled to get traction.

I was only spending few hours per day on SkilledUp Life back then. Even with a full time employee, we could not get the numbers. Then we started to use our own Volunteers and started to build a team.

We had a simple goal of convincing 1000 people to sign up in the first 12 months. We achieved this task with great difficulty with 24 hours to go. We could not have achieved this without our volunteers. From month 10 to 12, we had a team of about 7 to 8 Volunteers if I recall, from Brazil to Philippines.

Today, we have 7,555 Volunteers from 85 countries. You can subscribe to https://skilledup.life for £30/month. Once subscribed, all talent is free.

You can then build a user acquisition team that could approach your target customers/users one to one to get the 100. Whilst they are working on this, you can add more volunteers to improve your website, write content, SEO, social media marketing, etc.

Your founder journey no longer needs to be as hard as mine was. All the best.

2 comments

Damn! I thought I blogged about the first 100 volunteers. Seems I only started with 250 https://www.skilledup.life/skilledup-life-signs-up-250th-vol...
You never actually explained getting the 100 people. Just that eventually you hired a user acquisition team
I have a very large network, so I thought I could acquire the first 100 within days. But the truth was different. No one wanted to be a Volunteer. They didn't understand it. I had lot of critics. But slowly we gained. Then we started tapping into our Volunteers, once we worked out the details.
Hard graft I will wager and almost always.
Hey Colin, didn't know you hang out here as well. Sounds like I'm in good company.
how did it go?
We just went past 8,000th Volunteer today