Looking back at the last 6 operational years, we never had the right foundation. A foundation for me includes:
- A product that can continuously innovate
- A marketing engine that can evolve
- A team that fits with the stage the business is in.
- A revenue engine.
- Capital to support the business.
Of the five, we now have the first two foundations. In February 2026, we went live with Version 2 of SkilledUp Life, built by our own volunteers.
This week, we went live with an overhauled marketing website that I built from the ground up. Adding web pages or updating existing ones is no longer difficult. While I continue to use WordPress, everything now is hard-coded, i.e. HTML and CSS on a barebones Elementor theme.
What is needed more than anything is to ensure we can continue the momentum with these two. And that can only be fixed by the third. While getting 1st and 2nd done, I neglected the 3rd, resulting in a reduction in our Volunteer team size. This is now having a significant impact on us moving forward.
Tayyaba Mazhar joined us this week as a Web Development Volunteer, exclusively focused on the marketing website, helping me directly.
The product team is now a skeleton of what it was. We need to quickly rebuild it. If you want to be part of it, check out the open Volunteer Opportunities:
- Product Manager Volunteer.
- UI/UX Designer Volunteers.
- Vue.js Front-end Developer Volunteers.
- PHP Laravel Back-End Developer Volunteers.
- QA Testing and Automations Volunteers.
- Penetration Testing and Cybersecurity Volunteers.
The marketing engine also requires a new team, which we are building from the ground up.
- Head of Marketing
- Sub Team Leader Content Creation
- Sub Team Leader Content Distribution, Social Media and Engagement
Once the above two teams are in place, I will shift my focus to the revenue engine.
Image credits: Gemini (Google)
