How SkilledUp Life CEO Manoj Ranaweera grew SkilledUp Life to $26.9K revenue and 30 customers in 2024.

scaledup.live launched in 2020 doing a thousand dollars a month in Revenue today helping volunteers connect with tech companies to get experience again a two-sided Marketplace model is tough but they do have 30 customers today building a V2 they're bootstrapped with a team of five hey folks my guest today is Manoj ranawira he is a building he's been building Tech startup since 2004 has plenty of failures but also two exits so far currently building three different Ventures the main focus though is skilled up dot life giving a leg up to Tech Founders you're ready to take it to the top sounds good yep all right so let's just to be clear you're You're Building to accelerate uh deal light and skilled up life skilled up life is the largest in terms of Revenue no it's it's not in terms of the revenue but in terms of the global opportunity it's probably the the biggest one which of the three does the most Revenue today um so we are small in in terms of so tax rate is is a community of tech founders um Delight is a tracking what happened in the UK Tech investment market so probably tax rate is probably the biggest but it's a local opportunity whereas skilled up life is a global opportunity so tell us more about skilled up life is this a SAS player how do you make money so we had a two-sided Marketplace and we are only monetizing one side through subscription plans uh what we try to do is to help the early stage Tech Founders as you very well know uh probably about one percent of tech tech companies get investment quite a number of the rest of the 99 you know quite a large number of them we then die over time and the main reason for that is you know it's hard to build a tech company by yourself you need to have a team if you don't have Capital to hire people then you are struggling so I've seen this happening all over since I started in 2004 I suffered from the same problem someone else just to be clear you launched the company in 2004 no no this company was launched in August 2020 2020 2020 and again you've got a two-sided Marketplace demand Supply there's tech companies and you're connecting them with free Talent volunteers which site are you monetizing today companies and what do they pay on average per month so they paid from 30 pounds a month to about um uh 200 pounds plus but we are at the very early stages so we are monetizing you know we are on tier one and tier two customers so when you say early stages how many customers today so we have roughly about thousand sorry roughly about 30 customers we are we're still at revenue-wise we're still very early we are hovering around 1000 um pounds a monthly recurring Revenue so very early in our journey we like early there's no problem with that walk me through how many volunteers have you placed at these 30 customers Year to you know all time um so we don't have a figure at the moment but we have um 27 000 volunteers on our platform now what good is it though to have them on your platform if you're not helping deliver and connect them with the companies and why do you not know that number um so at the moment we are still running a very very early stage version of the product so we are unable to extract that because the workflow in terms of what we are doing with the the initial product is to bring the two parties together but in terms of the actual the recruitment part happens outside so we have no real visibility of the real numbers at the moment oh how many though you just told me your main objective is to connect the volunteers to tech companies so how many of the 27 000 volunteers have you connected to a tech company that's what I'm saying so we have companies sometimes have about 30 individuals and sometimes about five uh and the volunteers come in at three months batches so it's very hard because the the actual the recruitment side because it's happening outside so it's very difficult for us to track right now so the next version We Want to Build That workflow in then we can actually share the numbers so I don't want to give you a false number just uh well no no it's fine I mean but isn't that a major problem you're telling me the number one thing you care about is connecting these but then when I say how many of you connected you don't know we don't know yeah I mean it sounds stupid but we can't actually tell you that figures so that's why I mean so how do you know if it's working uh we know we are working with the companies we understand that uh you know they're taking on um you know the volunteers from our site but in terms of um how they're you know in in terms of numbers we don't have oversight that's what I'm saying oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed around 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview how did you get 27 000 volunteers signed up um you obviously you know they're gonna say well why do you want me to sign up there's only 30 companies on your platform today uh yes so what we've tried to do is we try to do the supply side first and then we are building the the demand side second so as you know you know building a two-sided Marketplace is always tricky you have to focus on one side first um so we have a team dedicated to building the the the volunteer side and then we haven't actually you know we are starting to build the team for acquiring customers right now uh we are you know we ourselves have about five employees and about 80 volunteers helping ourselves sorry the question specifically is how have you signed up 27 000 volunteers right how have you done that how have you recruited them how have you emailed cold email call them door knocking how are you coming to sign up on the platform when you only have 30 companies on the demand side yes so we have a whole team uh dedicated to uh Aqua volunteers so we use a number of different strategies we use social media uh we are continually building our brand we are running events I know we have Partnerships with education providers so through all these different channels we acquire volunteers how do you define a volunteer as being acquired is it a very simple email sign up or something else um sign up and then if you have the next process where obviously they have to come and build their profile because without building a profile uh it is very hard for companies to access their suitability so since 2020 you've gotten 27 000 potential volunteers to give you their email and you consider that a sign up uh yes they have created account on our platform yes well what does my audience doesn't know what your platform does so they don't know what create an account means it means specifically from what I understand they've given you their your email their email um no they have come on on the website they have created a Prof you know they have sign up as a volunteer and they end up then they will go on to create their profile you know what are the fields what are Fields they have to upload...