Skillco, The university-sponsored startup that made college worth it
Date: 2023-3-19
Building Skillco changed the course of my life. I was ready to drop out in my second year into a Computer Science degree in Utah Valley University. Classes felt like busy work and most of the extracurricular programs were inactive because of Covid. But then I met Steve Lochkart and had a meaningful project that I could challenge myself with.
Spring 2022
I first heard about what would later become Skillco from my a friend named Chris Wilkinson. We were friends in the Cyber Security club at UVU and he had happened to bring up that his friend Steve was looking for a technical person he could build a startup with.
Back then, Steve's startup was called MySkllz and it consisted of a landing page with an animated video created on Fiverr. The idea being pitched in this video was a blockchain powered skill set. Users would be able to prove that they had particular skills and target users would be in industries like construction and plumbing. This sounded like a practical application of blockchain idea to me since it actually used web3 in a way that made sense.
2022 was an interesting year to in the web3, crypto and blockchain sphere. From my perspective, this technology came about as activism gaining digital and monetary control as individuals. But then generally it turned into a get rich quick investment market that involved a lot of scams. www.web3isgoinggreat.com/ was a product if this era.
In contrast to most other web3 startups, Skillco seemed like it could do real good and be profitable. So I told Chris that I would be interested in collaborating and the first meeting was setup March 7, 2022 in the UVU library.
This meeting was exhilarating! We explored what could be and debated the what a company could look like. Chris, Steve and I met often and explored what kind of business we could build around verifying learned experience. A few weeks later and after many more meetings, I was ready to contribute a serous amount of time to getting this startup off the ground.
I remember thinking that the startup idea seemed to have a decent chance at succeeding. But what made me join and was Steve. Steve is a lobbyist at the Utah State level and really knows how to connect with people and pitch ideas.
The earliest picture of Steve and I is when we ran a Half Marathon. Steve is on the left and I am on the right
Steve and I officially decided start the MySkllz so I got to work building a website and Steve registered an LLC and got to work on branding. Chris was went back to focusing on his Computer Science degree so I started building the tech solo.
By this point, I had $10k in savings and was ready to take a risk. After negotiating equity with Steve, we had a signed contract. So I quit my UVU IT security job and started working on Skillco fulltime.
Summer 2022
This is the first design I made in Figma on what Skillco could look like.
And based off feedback from that design, I started programming a static profile page.
Taking a break from the profile, I started working on a landing page and here is the first version accessible on the internet.
We also changed the branding from Myskllz to Skillco. Steve came up with the name Skillco while thinking about Costco.
Gabriel (right) joined us as a cyber security specialist. At this point, we were all paying for our own expenses and had not signed an equity agreement.
When the end of the summer rolled around, Steve setup meetings with UVU to validate the idea that we could sell the site to UVU as a service. Steve had initially pitched UVU on the idea that Skillco had blockchain and fancy new technology but by this point, we lost those features in an effort to build our MVP faster.
This pitch included a few visuals like Steve's transcript but it was mostly a meeting to see how we could build Skillco into something they would be interested in buying.
This initial meeting with UVU was discouraging. We had pivoted Skillco into a tool that would connect to UVU student records and offer tools for students to complete their degrees. The lead person over UVU's data was part of the group that met with us and listed off the mny requirements needed for us to integrate with UVU's databases. One requirement was the HECVAT. This effectively requires a PCI audit and that requires thousands of dollars and time that we did not have. Everyone at UVU was optimistic about what Skillco could become but they did a good job at setting our expectations about getting student record data.
Steve had arranged another meeting and this time we met with the Associate Provost of Student Success and Retention and the Associate Provost of Academic Innovation. They were much more optimistic with how Skillco might become viable! They eventually gave us a list of features Skillco needed to have before the university would buy our software. We were also introduced to the director of the Innovation and Excellence Imitative (e2i). This program gave funding in the form of student development time which we later took part in.
Steve and I felt amazing walking out of that meeting. We practically got a verbal commitment that UVU would buy Skillco's software once we finished building it. And somehow, they managed to help us with the problem of having only one developer.
Watching how Steve approached these pitches was really interesting from the perspective of someone who has never sold anything before. Steve showed up with the attitude that we had something valuable to offer and we just had to learn a little more about UVU's needs before we offered it. It was also amazing to see Steve's pitch change depending on what the audience was interested in.
Based on the feedback we got back from UVU, we decided to build a place for students to focus on the skills they were learning in their degree.
The branch/tree idea in the image above did not work so the next picture is me experimenting with what displaying skills on a website could look like.
Fall 2022
It was nice focusing on building Skillco and taking a break from classes for the summer. But my savings were starting to get low so I needed to figure out how to earn enough money to keep living on my own. Luckily, the UVU IT office I had worked for previously was hiring for a part time position so I applied and started working nights part time.
I also switched majors from Computer Science to Integrated Studies. Comp Sci classes were frustrating because professors expected you to do things a particular way as opposed to the real world of having open ended solutions with tradeoffs. I don't regret this decision. I know where to look if I want to learn more about programming or Comp Sci theory. Integrated Studies satisfied my intellectual/academic interests that I did not know that I had. It also gave me a lot of electives so I was able to take fascinating classes on Russian history and explore entrepreneurship and economics at a deeper level. I'll make another post on my college experience at some point.
We were accepted into UVU's e2i program mentioned above! At this point in history, they offered funding for a project and would help find students to work on this project 10-20 hours a week. Our team grew to 5 developers and 1 project manager as of September 9.
Being a UVU e2i project gave us an in with selling to the university. This is where Steve's hard work came in. He had at least 100 meetings with UVU faculty and staff. Most of this was pitching Skillco and getting feedback.
I only took 2 classes (IS 2000 and MATH 1090) this semester so I had plenty of time to build more of the site:
With a re-designed Learn Dashboard:
And new functionality like the ability for students to see what jobs students could apply for with different skills.
Up until this point, the only way students could add courses and use Skillco was for them to email transcripts to us. Steve had the burden of adding these records to the database. And with such a high barrier of entry to use Skillco, nearly everyone that made an account stopped there.
I had spent a lot of time exploring more seamless methods for students to give us their transcripts. Steve and I had around 10 meetings with UVU and false hopes about an API integration being a way to get this data. Luckily, Jordan Perry, one of our student developers proposed the idea that we could use a browser extension to automate the collection of getting transcripts. Having students download an extension to use Skillco is still a lot of friction but it is much better than having students download transcripts manually!
Over the break, I built a proof of concept that later became the extension. We were able to publish the extension to the Chrome Web Store a few days after!
Spring 2023
Even though we had a big development team, I made 80% of the code contributions the previous semester. Most of our developer's time was spent setting up their development environment and learning Python and Django. And I was going to be taking 15 credits and still be working part time for UVU IT. So I put everything into doing what I could to make our team as productive as possible.
I refactored and migrated the Django project to a much cleaner structure and made lots of documentation. At the first sprint meeting of the semester, I handed out this breakdown of our codebase:
With help from Jordan, we had a command that populated the local development database with fake data to build with.
And more documentation went into our usage of GitHub Flow for a branching structure:
3 months into the semester, our team had changed and we got a UI/UX designer named Josh. (He is the 3rd from the right)
And and in an effort to get users to return to the site, we started building social features. This one is like LinkedIn's connect feature. We wanted to implement direct messages but I did not have enough time.
The next big goal coming up was e2i's Innovation Day. This is where all of the e2i projects and other UVU organizations setup booths to showcase to students. Our goal was to get students to signup and start using the site. We are the first people to the left of the bounce house.
Here is an updated career map. It now has recommended courses and Josh's first design contributions.
We also competed in the RevRoad startup competition twice and made it to the semi-finalis!
And unfortunately, we burned through e2i's alloted student developer budget so we no longer had a development team at the end of the semester.
This semester was rough. I worked on Skillco, UVU IT, and took 15 credits. At this point, I was tired and ready to leave Skillco and just focus on finishing my degree. But there's no way to leave a SaaS company when you are the only technical person. So I stayed on for the summer and started working with Steve to make my departure as painless as possible.
Summer 2023
This summer, I had a medium workload with 3 classes, Skillco and the part time IT job.
The next big effort at Skillco was to build a system to map a student's progress through their degree. We had previously tried to get this data directly from UVU but they did not have anything truly machine readable.
This is the data structure we were trying to get for degrees:
This was not a fun time. We explored parsing every way these requirements were stored digitally. Each method would seem promising at the beginning but then become impossible to continue with the complicated and inconsistent degree requirements. And of course we would learn that a method was not viable 50 hours into building a scraper for that method.
Here's a list of the formats we tried and failed:
- Web scraping degrees
- UVU's PDF catalog (We tried multiple Python PDF scrapers on this one)
- An Excel export from a tool called CourseLeaf
- An undocumented CourseLeaf API
At least not everything was in vain. We used the web scraper to get info like the title, description, and credits required. (We later used this info to manually enter degrees. More on that next semester)
Some progress to the site was also made. Most notably, a dashboard rebuild with circles:
The above slowly morphed into the image below.
We ran into an interesting new problem with these circles. The design Josh made looked great! But it was not exactly useful.
These proved to be great learning experiences that shaped how we organized our team work. We later added tools like Webflow to make less work for developers to implement designs.
Luckily, this semester was not as hard as it could have been despite how busy I was. I was able to get help giving out development bounties for the scraper and CSS circles. (Thanks for your help Wilkinson and Jordan!)
By the end of the semester, Steve convinced me to stay another 8 months with a contract for paid work. So I once again quit my UVU IT job and focused on Skillco fulltime.
Fall 2023
This semester, we kept our team small. In addition to Steve an I, we had Josh designing and Seth helping with organization and project management.
Unfortunately, we never figured out how to get a machine readable copy of UVU's degrees. So the solution came in the form of this degree editor.
Over the course of a few weeks, Steve powered through the tedious work of adding the manual requirements to all 441 degrees. It required collaboration as he often ran into strange degree requirements I had to program new logic for.
With the degree requirement data, I was able to build a validation layer that could display degree/program completion progress.
We also met with lawyers in SLC to help us get trademarks and a patent. Chris Wilkinson, came and helped us explain the technical details of the patent.
Some big design updates were also made. The largest change was in the profile. And at the same time, Josh had a new design in the works. I started implementing this design with a rebuild at the end of the semester.
Steve got a Wolverine Story and we were mentioned in UVU's Annual Report!
Spring 2024
After taking a break for Christmas, I was ready to get back to work. I tried to get up to a 59 hour work a week but got really sick soon after. So I just took that as a sign that I should not go too crazy with working on one project too much.
As a UVU student, I get $10 of free printing credit every semester. I made the most of this semester's credit by printing fliers we later gave to departments at UVU. The picture below is a bunch of fliers in the printer que for Skillco.
We also got seed funded through a couple of Steve's family/friends!
This gave us the opportunity for us to hire Kaycie and Jane! They each have professional development experience and were able to contribute the codebase by the end of their second day!
The new design/rebuild took much longer than anticipated but that went live March 3rd.
Now that we had a full team of professional developers, we could get so much more done with each sprint!
Sadly, I'll be leaving Skillco April 30. This is the longest job I've had working for just over 2 years. It's been a fun challenge building a startup and I'm really happy I delayed my graduation for it.
I've tried to write why I was leaving so many times. At this point, I'll just make the reasons a bulleted list.
- I'm going to go back and finish my Bachelor's degree since I am only 29 credits away
- The payoff of this startup is too far in the future for me. I don't want to commit another couple years
- This is a great time for me to travel and take more risks because I'm single with low living expenses
- I'm also just ready for something different. There are too many exciting things to explore :D
I'll end by quoting Paul Grahm:
"And though starting a startup can be part of a good life for a lot of ambitious people, age 20 is not the optimal time to do it. Starting a startup is like a brutally fast depth-first search. Most people should still be searching breadth-first at 20." I'm 22.