SkillPages

» see skillpages.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

skillpages wanted to be a place where you looked people up by what they could do rather than who they knew. i never signed up. by the time it existed i was an engineer with the work i needed, and an irish startup pitching a global directory of tradespeople and freelancers was solving a problem i did not have. it belonged to the same wave as every other early-2010s network trying to slice off a piece of what linkedin already owned.

it began as weedle in dublin in 2009, rebranded to skillpages in 2011, and for a while the numbers looked like a success story. a million members inside a hundred and fifty days, and eventually more than twenty million people registered across a hundred and sixty countries. it won an irish tech company of the year award and raised over twenty-two million dollars on the strength of that curve.

the curve was the problem, because signups were not revenue. behind twenty million accounts sat a company bleeding money, with accumulated losses that climbed past twenty-four million euro. a provisional liquidator was appointed in december 2014, and in february 2015 a london startup called bark.com bought the assets and pointed the skillpages address at its own site. the directory of everyone's skills could not find a way to pay for itself.

~ the case file ~

~ the slide ~

the gap between registered users and paying customers is where a lot of social startups of that era died, and skillpages fell straight into it. getting people to make a profile is easy when the pitch is find work and get found. getting them to come back, or to pay, is the part nobody had solved for a general skills marketplace. the headline number kept rising while the thing underneath it stayed hollow.

~ what got buried with it ~

what bark.com actually wanted was the users and the domain, not the vision. bark ran a narrower and more honest model, matching customers to local professionals who paid for the leads, and it kept going where skillpages could not. the twenty-million-member social network became a redirect. the idea of finding anyone by their skill survived, just stripped of the ambition to be a network about it.

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