MuchSkills started as a colour-coded Google Sheet.
Not a pitch deck. Not a funding round. A spreadsheet that Noel Braganza, my co-founder and my husband, built years before he and I started working together, to solve a problem inside his own team. He was running a creative studio and kept watching people hire outside help for work that someone three desks away had already done. Nobody could see the skills they already had. So he built a sheet to make them visible. It worked, and he kept improving it.
Today MuchSkills is used by more than 100,000 professionals, has won a Red Dot Design Award, and counts Accenture and Red Hat among its customers. People sometimes assume there was a master plan connecting those two points. There was not. There was a real problem, a decision to bet our own money on it, and a great deal of unglamorous listening. Here is what actually happened, and what I would tell another founder.
We funded it ourselves, for about five years
When Noel and I co-founded Up Strategy Lab and started running B2B engagements together, we kept meeting the same problem in client after client. Nobody could see what their own people could do. We decided to turn Noel's sheet into a real product.
We did not raise money for it. We funded MuchSkills out of our own consulting revenue, and we did that for about five years. Every euro of it was earned somewhere else and put back in. Today the product stands on its own and is profitable, which after that long is genuinely astonishing to me.
That choice shaped everything. When it is your own money, you cannot hide behind a runway. You qualify the idea harder. You ship to real users faster, because you need to know quickly whether you are right.
We put an early version on Product Hunt. It did well, more than two hundred upvotes, and a wave of people in the community telling us they loved it and found it genuinely interesting. That kind of validation is a small thing and a large thing at once. It told us we were not imagining the problem, and it gave us the conviction to keep investing.
The moment that explains the whole product
If you want to understand what MuchSkills actually does for people, here is a scene from an installation we did in Australia.
We synced the skills of every employee in the organisation, and alongside them, each person's current availability, the projects they were already on. Then we showed the client the result.
Their reaction was immediate. "We have never been able to see this before."
That is the whole thing in one sentence. This is the visibility problem at its most immediate — before, every salesperson, planner and resource manager was guessing about who could do what and who was free. Now they could see all of it, the full picture of capability and availability across the company, and search it in seconds, with simple search, advanced search, and AI search. The wow was not a feature. It was sight.
What customers actually buy
Customers do not buy MuchSkills because it is clever software. They buy it because, when they switch it on, they can finally see the team they already had.
That is true of most good B2B products. Nobody wants the software. They want the outcome the software makes possible. The companies that win are the ones honest enough to sell the outcome, not the machine.
What 534 hours of listening taught me
In one year I spent 534 hours in direct customer conversations. Not surveys. Not research run by somebody else. Me, on calls, listening.
It is the least scalable thing a chief executive can do, and it changed the product more than anything on the roadmap.
The clearest example is compliance. Client after client kept raising the same quiet, difficult need. We have to track our certifications. We have to prove competence. We have to be ready for an audit. It had not been our focus. But hearing it that many times made it impossible to ignore, so we invested heavily in certification and compliance tracking.
It turned out to be one of the wisest decisions we made. The clients who need it are now some of our happiest, because it solves something they had wrestled with for years in spreadsheets and last-minute panic. None of that came from a strategy offsite. It came from listening long enough to hear a problem sitting right next to the one we thought we were solving, and being willing to let it reshape our priorities, our product, and the way we talk about what we do.
On design, honestly
We won a Red Dot Design Award for MuchSkills. I will be honest about what that did and did not do.
Commercially, it changed almost nothing. No buyer has ever told me they chose us because of an award. So if you are building something and chasing trophies for the sales value, I would not bother.
What the award represents, though, is the thing customers cite over and over. A product that is easy to use, easy to understand, and genuinely pleasant to be in. That is not decoration. In a category as unfamiliar as skills intelligence, clarity is what lets a buyer grasp the value before they lose patience. Customers mention the experience constantly. The award is just an external marker of a discipline that pays off in trust.
And it shows up in results. When we ran a project with the government of Nigeria, we collected the skills of more than 55,000 people, around five million individual skills in total. That is the real proof. Not a plaque on a wall, but a product doing exactly what it was designed to do, at a scale most software never has to survive.
The low point
It has not all been wow moments. Here is one that still stings.
We landed our first large enterprise client, and I was enormously proud. It felt like crossing a threshold. We were deploying, solving problems, making it work, and it was going well.
Then the company reorganised. We lost our champion, the person who believed in it. We were handed two new contacts who did not care about it the way she had. At the same time, the business had to downscale. I did everything I could think of to keep the customer active and getting value. It was not enough. Eventually they churned.
That was hard, because it was something I had been so proud of. I had to reframe it. We had won a major enterprise client and kept them for two years, which is no small thing, and it proved we could land and hold accounts at that level. We have many more enterprise customers now. But losing one is always tough, because the thing I love most in this work is helping people, and a churn feels like the moment you could not.
What I would tell another founder
Build the product right, especially if the category is new and the buyer has to learn something before they can want what you sell.
Fund it yourself if you possibly can. Nothing focuses a founder like the knowledge that the runway is their own bank account.
Listen to customers far past the point of comfort, and let what you hear change your plan.
And sell the outcome, not the software. People do not want the tool. They want to see the team they already had.
MuchSkills came out of Up Strategy Lab, the studio Noel and I run together. The studio came first. The product is the proof that the method works, and it is the part I am proudest of.
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Frequently asked questions
What is MuchSkills?
MuchSkills is a skills intelligence platform that gives an organisation a live, visual picture of the skills, certifications and availability inside its workforce. It is used for workforce planning, internal mobility, team composition and compliance tracking, by more than 100,000 professionals.
How did MuchSkills start?
It began as a colour-coded Google Sheet that co-founder Noel Braganza built to track the skills inside his own team. After he and Daniel Nilsson co-founded Up Strategy Lab and saw the same skills-visibility problem in client after client, they turned the idea into a product, funded from their own consulting revenue.
Is MuchSkills venture funded?
No. MuchSkills was bootstrapped, built over about five years with revenue from Up Strategy Lab's consulting work rather than outside investment. It now stands on its own and is profitable. That constraint shaped the product, forcing harder qualification of the idea and faster shipping to real users.
What do customers use MuchSkills for?
To see what their people can actually do, and who is available, in one place. Teams use it to find the right person fast, plan the workforce, support internal mobility, and track certifications for compliance and audit readiness. The core value customers describe is visibility: finally seeing the capability they already had.