This weekend I attended Seattle Startup Weekend, which I blogged about earlier. What a rush! It’s really amazing how much a group of people can get done when they are motivated.
The weekend started off a little choppy. Friday evening, we spent the time deciding on what we’d do. Keep in mind that when you’re doing a years worth of work in around 52 hours, each hour equates to a week spent developing the business. So Friday was Jan – Mar. At then end of March we had researched our idea enough to realize that it wasn’t feasible. Too much competition, and not enough opportunities for revenue. So, we scrapped it.
We decided on a different idea. One that was not beaten to death already and had great potential for revenue. It would be a tool to help organizations catalog the skills and talents of their employees called “skillbit“. Here’s the pitch from our genius marketing team:
Small businesses, project teams, and DnD weenies are missing out. They have incredible skill and talent among their members, but the team leaders simply don’t know what resources they have access to within their own group. Money is wasted on consultants, bloated knowledge management software, and simple inefficiencies of communication. Of course, the team members are missing out, too. They have coaches, assistants, mentors, and friends sitting next to them and they don’t even know it.
What if a tool were created to help these teams of people build up a database of team skills? Searchable, lean, flexible, and powerful: You know your employees but with skillbit, you can also know what they know.
The design team did a wonderful job on the skillbit logo. For me, that was like seeing a newborn baby for the first time, except cleaner. Skillbit will be a valuable tool for medium to large companies since it is often hard to know all about the employees.
The beauty of skillbit that sets it apart from so many other options is that it is so flexible. For example, many software packages ask canned questions that get a slice of skills that a company could use. Those skills may not be a good fit for all companies. Another package might leave it up to the users to list all the skills they have in a big empty box. Skillbit on the other hand, allows the users to ask questions for the rest of the group to respond to, allowing the collected data to grow and mold itself to the companies specific needs. If you’ve never done business internationally but are growing quickly and one day you get a call from a potential client who speaks French, they may need to know if they’ll be able to communicate easily with your company. You could say ‘of course’ and then scramble to bring on a consultant who speaks french to help with the sale, spending large amounts of money in hopes that it will satisfy the need, OR you could use skillbit to create a poll asking if anyone speaks French, if so, how well? As employees respond, you find that there are a couple of employees that lived in France and speak it fluently as well as some who took french class in high school and still remember some of it. Now you don’t have to bring anyone else on board, and the french company feels confident knowing you have people on staff that know your product as well as have the ability to answer their questions when needed, in their native tongue.
That’s the beauty of skillbit. Sign up for the waiting list to be notified when it’s ready to take customers. The more you use it, the more you’ll know.
Skillbit was created through a process that was found to have some potential legal challenges. As a result, the company has been dissolved.