The beginning

During the first year of furloughed life in the UK (2020), people needed ways to vent out their frustrations.

When we launched Furloughed Life on 7th April 2020 after the idea came to my head on 1st April 2020, several people in Manchester including who I considered as friends took to social media to shut down our efforts.

With the support of the Techcelerate community, I persevered during this dark time. Eventually, we made circa net £400 and donated it to NHS Charities.

Birth of SkilledUp Life

I shut down Furloughed Life in July 2020 and went live with SkilledUp Life in August 2020 as a one-man operation – I built, acquired volunteers and customers, serviced them and operated it all by myself (just like most solo founders do – nothing special here)

From time to time, we still used to get harassed online – IP addresses always pointed to Manchester. We didn’t have success stories to back us up. Now we do and can easily defend ourselves.

I built SkilledUp Life with the UK in mind. Sadly most in the UK are only interested in immediate monetary value and not medium-term benefits.

As the international community started to flock to SkilledUp Life, we started to focus on those markets instead of the UK.

Partnerships for growth

Every time I explored an opportunity in the UK, we only got a No.

We continued to sign partnerships across the world. Today, we have a community of 43,743 volunteers from 136 countries and more than 40 partnerships with education providers and accelerators.

Today, for the first time, we signed a partnership with a UK education provider. I’ll share the details later. Perhaps Sisanda Madiya, our graphics design volunteer and Content Creation Team Leader can create a lovely graphic to tell the story. 😁

Perhaps the timing is right to give attention to the UK.

It’s just another story but felt worth sharing as it is somewhat personal to me.

Here’s our first blog post.

Thank you.